The great Prussian general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz once described war as “the realm of uncertainty” where “chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the course of events.” Wars invariably bring unintended and unexpected consequences. The U.S. and the Soviet Union emerged from the ashes of the Second World War as global superpowers. Just a few decades later, Leonid Brezhnev’s fateful decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan represented one of the last nails in the Soviet Union’s coffin. And so it is for KGB operative-turned-President Vladimir Putin, whose barbaric and unprovoked war on Ukraine has created a seismic shift in the balance of power between the world’s democracies and dictatorships. The Kremlin is now deeply aligned with and dependent on a troika of dictatorships ― China, Iran and North Korea ― that are all hostile to the U.S. and our allies. The Russian war machine is in desperate need of drones from Iran, artillery shells from North Korea and buyers from China for its oil and natural gas reserves. Mr. Putin’s shaky hold on power, more precarious than ever because of his failed gamble in Ukraine, has handed China, Iran and North Korea new leverage to demand more concessions from the Kremlin in exchange for their support. “Free cheese,” as the Russians are fond of saying, “can only be found in a mousetrap.” Last month, Russia did Iran’s bidding by extending diplomatic status to Hamas senior leader Mousa Abu Marzouk, who joined a delegation headed by Iran’s deputy foreign minister for a state visit to Moscow.

In April 2007, Meir Dagan, director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, traveled to Washington and briefed national security adviser Steve Hadley and Vice President Dick Cheney about Israel’s detection of Al Kibar and North Korea’s assistance in the construction of this nuclear reactor, with photos of the official in charge of North Korea’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon standing next to the leader of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. This clearly was a case of North Korea providing technical and material support to Syria for the construction of a nuclear reactor for one purpose: nuclear weapons. North Korea’s assistance to Syria for this nuclear reactor, however, reportedly started years earlier, at a time when North Korea was engaged with the U.S. and others (China, South Korea, Japan and Russia) in Six-Party Talks negotiations. Indeed, in September 2005, a joint statement committed North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons and nuclear programs in exchange for economic development assistance, security assurances, a discussion of civil nuclear energy assistance and a path to normalization of relations. The irony, however, was that North Korea was prepared to put that progress in jeopardy to assist Syria with the construction of a nuclear reactor for nuclear weapons. The current situation is starkly different. North Korea ceased negotiating with the U.S. and South Korea a few years ago. Indeed, North Korea has been in a race to build more sophisticated nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them, while refusing to talk to the U.S. or South Korea, whom they view as the principal enemies. Moreover, North Korea is more closely aligned with Russia, China and Iran.

As tension in the Middle East increases, with the likelihood that Iran will strike out at Israel for killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, a more widespread war in the region has become more likely. Iran aligned with North Korea, a proliferator of missile and nuclear technologies. Iran looked to North Korea for conventional weapons assistance during its war with Iraq in the 1980s. In the 1990s, North Korea provided Iran with ballistic missile assistance for Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles. Iran is a threshold nuclear weapons state. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran is enriching uranium at the 60% purity level while denying IAEA monitors access to suspected nuclear weapons sites in Iran. Indeed, if there is an imperative for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, knowing the IAEA and the international community are watching their nuclear weapons-related activities closely, having an ally in a nuclear North Korea is a good default option. Clearly, that means Iran could acquire nuclear weapons or the fissile material for a dirty bomb directly from North Korea for its use against Israel or any other adversary. Or Iran can pass the nuclear weapon or fissile material to one of its proxies - Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis - for use against Israel or another enemy. Under the cover of darkness, in the early hours of Sept. 6, 2007, Israeli F-15s entered Syrian airspace and bombed a nuclear reactor at Al Kibar, Syria. Silence followed for a few months, until the U.S. government and the IAEA confirmed that the Al Kibar site was a nuclear reactor, a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated nuclear reactor like North Korea’s nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, North Korea.

Last month’s killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader targeted in an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse in Tehran, could lead to a larger regional war. The Haniyeh killing enabled Israel to eliminate a key enemy and to collect a debt of honor from Iran for the Iranian missile and drone attack in April. Unlike the “retaliation equation” between Israel and Hezbollah, the “humiliation equation” cannot be predicted. Humiliation may cause the Iranians not to “think properly.” For Iran, this disaster raises important questions: To what extent has the IRGC been penetrated by Israel, and was this bomb a one-off, or are other bombs planted in Iran? As Iran’s leaders plan their retaliation on Israel, they will try to answer these questions, as they will determine how Israel and possibly the U.S. respond. Ali Younis, Iran’s former intelligence minister, expressed concern that “all the officials of the Islamic Republic should be worried about their lives.” This negligence to Mossad has allowed it to strike and threaten the Islamic Republic. If the IRGC is infiltrated with Israeli agents, then the regime may be vulnerable to being overthrown. Clearly, Iran has been humiliated by the Haniyeh killing and feels compelled to retaliate against Israel. When and how are still questions. How Israel would respond to any action is also in question. There is also the additional factor that has been added to the equation ― humiliation ― which has been called the single most underappreciated force in international relations. Israel knows that in the face of humiliation, rational considerations tend to melt away.

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif identifies as a woman, but the claim is disputed. The International Boxing Association says a DNA test revealed XY chromosomes, which would mean the women’s welterweight finalist is biologically a man. A second questionable Olympic bout involved Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, who also failed the IBA’s chromosome test and defeated a woman. People can watch the footage and judge for themselves. But that hasn’t stopped the promoters of radical gender ideology from denying there is any reason for concern. They blast the IBA because its leadership has ties to Russia, and it is an article of modern liberal faith that anything Russian is bad. The IOC abandoned objective sex-verification tests in 1999, and it has a track record of corruption of its own. French police raided Olympic organizer offices over bribery allegations just last year. The left is all too happy to turn a blind eye to the inherent unfairness of allowing biological males to dominate girls’ and women’s sports. It’s a reckless policy that raises serious safety issues. In 2022, former high school volleyball player Payton McNabb was severely injured by a ball spiked in her face at an estimated 70 mph by a biological male player on the other team. A new Rasmussen poll found nearly three-quarters of voters think it’s wrong to allow males who pretend to be female to compete in girls’ and women’s athletics. “There will be no men playing in women’s sports when we’re elected,” Donald Trump vowed after learning of Miss Carini’s forfeit. This madness must stop before someone gets hurt.

Aluminum is a potent neurotoxin. One result for some people, after long-term exposure, can be dementia. Scientists haven’t yet solved a chicken-and-egg argument about aluminum: Does it cause dementia, or does dementia create the conditions that draw aluminum away from the bloodstream and into our heads? Aluminum also reacts easily with citric acid and other acids found in just about every juice, soda and beer. Those reactions can pull away bits of aluminum and mix them with the canned liquids. The beverage industry’s solution is to line every can with a particularly dangerous kind of epoxy. At kickthecan.org, you can see a photo of the can liner that’s left over after you dissolve the metal. The liner contains Bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA. Science shows that enough exposure can contribute to learning disabilities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, early puberty in girls, erectile dysfunction in men and metabolic disorders that can lead to prediabetes and obesity. BPA also scrambles the hormones that regulate sleeping and waking cycles, bone and muscle health, heart function, and responses to stress. Beverage companies use BPA because the only alternatives can be too porous, too expensive to apply and too rigid to avoid cracking when cans expand and contract as temperatures in warehouses and delivery trucks swing up and down. We still use this metal for everything from kitchen foil to car batteries because it’s cheap and light and has a seemingly harmless profile.

Imane Khelif of Algeria is a man. He’s so manly, in fact, that in 2023, sporting officials with the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi dubbed him a man and wouldn’t let him fight in the women’s matches because he’s a man. But that was 2023. Now it’s 2024 and according to Olympic powers-who-be, he’s not a man but a woman. And as such, he’s been allowed to box in the Paris Olympics women’s competition ― though “box” is a relative term. Woman-beating is the more truthful one. Khelif defeated his female opponent, Angela Carini of Italy, in 46 seconds when he peppered her with such forceful blows she fell to her knees and quit, in tears, in insufferable pain from a punch to the nose. Given Khelif is a man and Carini is a woman ― congratulations, International Olympic Committee. You have just made woman-beating an Olympic sport. The LGBTQ insanity has been allowed to progress from the viewpoint that discrimination is unfair ― that LGBTQs shouldn’t be physically assaulted, for instance, simply because they choose to identify as someone they’re not ― to the argument that boys pretending to be girls should be allowed in female dressing rooms and bathrooms. And once that case was made, the floodgates were opened for all kinds of chaos with genders: males in prisons were put with females; breastfeeding became chest-feeding ― so as to allow men masquerading as women the chance to further their delusions and pretend to nourish newborns from their bodies; women’s sports became infiltrated by males pretending to be females ― no doubt because they couldn’t compete with their fellow males.

Recently, the U.S. reportedly detected an Iranian plot to assassinate former President Donald Trump, which should be met with a full-court press by NATO to collect follow-on intelligence. Germany recently stopped a Russian plot to assassinate the CEO of an arms manufacturer. We need to continue to detect and preempt those Russian hybrid operations. Second, the U.S. needs to rebuild its defense industrial base so that we can once again be the “arsenal for democracy” in support of our NATO allies. Heading off threats with effective deterrence, along the lines of President Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” approach, is the best way to avoid ruinous wars in the long run. Third, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are testing our vulnerabilities and are poised to launch military action whenever and wherever they believe they can succeed. NATO’s Article 5, requiring member states to come to the assistance of any member state subjected to an armed attack, has been invoked only once ? after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on American soil. We have had no need to invoke Article 5 at any other time in NATO’s 75-year history precisely because strong bipartisan support for NATO has made it clear to our adversaries that they would pay too high a price for testing our resolve. Reagan’s proclamation 40 years ago that the NATO alliance represents “a living commitment of the nations of the West to the defense of democracy and individual liberty” should continue to be the blueprint for U.S. policy and public statements.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are proponents of a “multipolar world.” They see alliances such as NATO as an adversarial bloc because they know that, absent collective security, they can take advantage of smaller, weaker nations to impose their will militarily and commercially. That’s why Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Likewise seeking to create a regional sphere of influence, China aggressively seeks control of the South China Sea while threatening to take over Taiwan. Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi have NATO in their crosshairs precisely because it so effectively deters their aggression, unites democracies and demonstrates the superiority of free-market economies. For 75 years, NATO’s collective security system has maintained peace in Europe, a matter of critical importance to U.S. national security. The United States and Europe engage in over $1 trillion in annual trade. U.S. direct foreign investment in the European Union is $3 trillion, and Europe has invested over $2 trillion in the U.S. Our economies, intertwined to our great mutual benefit, would suffer mightily in the event of another destructive land war in Europe. With the U.S. facing several complex national security threats, there is no time like the present to bolster strong bipartisan commitment to NATO along three lines of operation. First, the U.S. and our NATO allies need to continue to engage in a robust exchange of intelligence, a force multiplier for protecting our nations. Adversaries often target NATO members simultaneously, with planning and financing occurring in multiple countries.

At their summit last month, President Biden and the assembled leaders of NATO countries pledged over $40 billion in military assistance to Ukraine next year and agreed the Western military alliance would assume responsibility from the U.S. for coordinating the provision of military equipment and training. NATO also issued a declaration calling out China as the “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war in Ukraine, a role that puts the rest of Europe at risk. The NATO leaders gathered in Washington also took aim at Iran and North Korea, criticizing them for providing the Kremlin with military support for its unjust war in Ukraine. The summit thus marked the first time the alliance had so publicly and explicitly confronted the new “axis of tyranny” ― the deepening collaboration between Russia, North Korea, China and Iran that seeks to overthrow the U.S.-led liberal international order. Helping Ukraine continue its existential defense against Russia’s unprovoked invasion, NATO members have provided over $100 billion in financial, military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. The U.S. has, by comparison, spent roughly the same amount, a sizable portion of which has come back to bolster America’s own industrial base by funding domestic defense manufacturing. Twenty of the 32 NATO members are now spending more than 2% of their gross domestic product on national defense, the benchmark target. Poland now spends over 4%, which is greater even than the percentage spent by the U.S. If there’s a silver lining to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s the revitalization of NATO, for which we can thank President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the brave Ukrainians who are defending their country from the Kremlin’s onslaught.