As he tries to recreate the Russian empire, Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great. On Aug. 8, 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, claiming it was a peace enforcement operation. It ended later that month with a cease-fire. On Feb. 20, 2014, Russia invaded and then annexed the Crimean Peninsula. And on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, thinking it would be a cakewalk. Mr. Putin and his security services were wrong: Ukraine could be a replay of the Soviet Union’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan. The war in Ukraine just entered its third year. As Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues, memories of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 - and the stark images of the thousands of body bags returned to grieving parents, were revived. By all accounts, Mr. Putin should be concerned about his credibility and the support of the Russian people and elites. His reckless decision to invade Ukraine and the recent sham election that added six more years to his 24-year reign of power and now the security failure with the ISIS-K terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall concert hall in Krasnogorsk, should be cause for concern for Mr. Putin. It appears, however, that Mr. Putin, the former KGB expert at “active measures” - political warfare to influence world events and weaken the U.S. - is confident that he will prevail, domestically and internationally. Mr. Putin’s embrace of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the North’s military support of Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine is part of Mr. Putin’s strategy to put a permanent wedge between the U.S. and North Korea, ensuring that North Korea views and treats the U.S. - and South Korea - as the enemy.

U.S. Congress would force ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, to divest within six months. ByteDance has signaled that it may refuse to sell TikTok, which tells you that the issue here is control, which is vital to the Chinese government. If TikTok is not sold, it would be banned in the U.S. But if it is bought by a company, not under the thumb of a hostile government, it would operate freely. No dance videos would be endangered. An FDD report on TikTok notes that ByteDance is “not just a tech company; it is a cog in China’s vast military machinery,” and “Chinese law requires ByteDance to adhere to CCP ideology.” ByteDance’s close collaboration with Sugon, a company contributing to China’s nuclear weapons program, underscores the alarming symbiosis between ByteDance and the state’s defense and surveillance sectors. That should make clear why TikTok is not a First Amendment issue. U.S. law already restricts foreign ownership of broadcast stations. Moreover, during the Cold War, would Washington have allowed Moscow to buy The Associated Press? President Biden has said he will sign the divestment bill if it passes in the Senate. But that’s no slam-dunk. ByteDance’s lobbying juggernaut is fueled by a nearly bottomless budget. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump warned that the Chinese Communist Party could use the platform to “track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” Russian disinformation never became as sophisticated as the Chinese version.

In the 1920s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union pioneered the art of disinformation. A hundred years later, the Chinese Communist Party has developed disinformation into a high-tech science. You probably know how the Kremlin did propaganda: Thousands of KGB operatives would feed false information to journalists in dozens of countries to advance Moscow’s goals. Increasing anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism were high on the list. Some of those journalists were fellow travelers. Others were what the Soviets called “useful idiots.” Among the bogus stories the Kremlin pushed into both the Western and international press: that the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy, that the U.S. created AIDS, and that rich Americans were adopting Latin American children to harvest their organs. But not in their wildest dreams could the Soviets have imagined what Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping would achieve with TikTok, the video-hosting service that has become the dominant media platform in the United States with 170 million subscribers. TikTok has spread disinformation on COVID-19, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Hamas’ war on Israel. It has pushed Osama bin Laden’s worldview to ill-educated Gen Z “influencers” and proliferated videos on how to cross the U.S. border illegally. Meanwhile, news about Beijing’s persecution of Uyghurs and Tibetans, its elimination of rights that had been guaranteed to Hong Kong, and its threats to Taiwan are suppressed. Divisions and discord in the United States ? of which we have no shortage ? are exacerbated by TikTok algorithms. TikTok also collects an unprecedented amount of data on Americans that can be crunched for nefarious purposes.

America and its allies will long regret failing to directly confront wanton aggression in Ukraine and the Middle East. The economic costs will be real and substantial. Devoting 1.5% more of GDP to discourage Mr. Putin’s revanchist agenda would shrink Europe’s civilian economies and make the investments necessary to compete with Chinese manufacturing and American technology exponentially more difficult. Iran is financing Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and Houthis in Yemen. The latter’s attacks on shipping are forcing a de facto partial closing of the Suez Canal and greatly increasing freight costs between Asia and Europe. Piracy is rising off the coast of Somalia, the Gulf of Aden and the Malacca Strait. U.S. attacks on terrorist sites do not address the fundamental problem: Iran provides the arms to attack Israel and international shipping. Failing to confront Iran directly makes stable peace in the Middle East impossible. More than half of all seaborne commerce passes through the above-mentioned chokepoints. Hence, endless war and skirmishes in the Middle East make threats to and elevated costs in global commerce more or less permanent. If the United States does not deal directly with Iran ? and remains committed to protecting Israel and combating the piracy Iran finances in the Middle East ? we will need an even larger fleet, given the size and anticipated growth of the Chinese navy. If we don’t see those gains in the GDP statistics or our living standards, in no small measure, it will be because of the necessity of decoupling from China compounded by our failure to deal decisively with Russia and Iran.

More importantly, if the WTO can sanction a wanton act of aggression by an autocratic state and prohibit the United States from maintaining an industrial base to supply its military when not engaged in a hot war, the WTO becomes worse than useless. It becomes destructive. China makes no secret of its intention to build a military with global clout, challenge the security interests of U.S. allies in the Pacific and gain control of Taiwan. And sell its admixture of autocracy and state-directed capitalism to the developing world as an alternative to democratic capitalism. China is building an axis of autocracies by forging trade and investment ties with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Together with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this is inspiring a significant military buildup among NATO, the United States, Australia and Japan. Semiconductors are the new steel, and those militaries require substantial, secure supplies. China is spending $150 billion building a domestic industry with only limited success. To mute this, the United States is organizing a Western embargo on sales of semiconductors to Chinese military suppliers and the machinery necessary to build the most sophisticated semiconductors. Now China is taking the United States to the WTO to stop those efforts. Given how dispute settlement panels have ruled regarding Russia’s blocking Ukrainian trade and the U.S. metal tariffs, it’s easy to see a dispute settlement panel finding Japan, the Netherlands and the United States in violation of Article XI, which severely limits export restraints. If the WTO is beyond reform, the only solution may be plywood and nails.

The World Trade Organization is failing in its mission. Established after World War Ⅱ as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade along with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the United States and its allies created these institutions to promote trade among Western market economies, the convertibility of currencies and investment in developing nations. An underlying objective was to promote economic integration as a deterrence to war and to strengthen national security. Along with the European Union and other WTO-sanctioned regional agreements, it helped expand trade based on comparative advantages and common prosperity. China and Russia were admitted into the WTO in 2001 and 2012, respectively, based on the flawed assumption that membership and rules for tariffs, export and import quotas and domestic policies affecting trade ― such as product standards, intellectual property protection and industrial policies ― would foster their transition to Western-style market economies and democratic governance. That simply hasn’t happened. China has subverted the rules by forcing foreign investors to transfer intellectual property, massively subsidizing domestic industries, such as semiconductors, imposing great harm on Western economies and effectively gaming the dispute settlement process. Consequently, since the Obama administration, the United States has refused to approve new judges for the WTO Appellate Body. In the Trump years, appellate review of dispute settlement panel decisions ceased. The WTO recognizes the right of nations to take actions inconsistent with its rules for the purposes of preserving public morals and safety, and national security.

The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, said China’s military has become significantly more aggressive and dangerous over the past five years. While the U.S. has seemed fixated on China’s growing verbal threats and military maneuvers around Taiwan, Gen. Milley and others, including some in Australia, are concerned that China’s expansionist goals do not end with attempts to take over that free island nation. Among those keeping an eye on China’s activities in Australia is Tom Switzer, executive director of the Center for Independent Studies (CIS), a think tank. Mr. Switzer believes Australian leaders are wrong when they think their policies determine what China does. Mr. Switzer calls what China is doing “wolf warrior diplomacy,” where it uses its growing economic power to coerce or harm weaker states that implement policies not to Beijing’s liking. On its webpage, CIS asserts that China has been waging a global influence campaign across the globe. It is better understood as a strategic use of media technology and government resources allocated by the Chinese Communist Party in seeking to effectively influence media content and industries in targeted countries. It aims at changing global opinions and policy discourses in favour of its development model, patterns of managing inter-state relations, and justification of its prospective hegemonic status worldwide. Eternal vigilance and the opposition to tyranny are the prices free people must pay to maintain their freedom, which is not the natural state of humankind if one looks around the world.

The United Nations has become a global stage for thugs and terrorists; a de facto enemy of the United States that helps murderous Mexican drug cartels smuggle criminals into our country; a metastatic bureaucracy that demands more money and more power; and a relief staff in the Gaza Strip that willfully cheered and joined Hamas on Oct. 7 in the worst holocaust since the Holocaust. Let’s look at a speech at the U.N. a few months ago, delivered by the foreign minister of Iran, the greatest terror state on Earth. “I say frankly to the American statesmen, that we do not welcome an expansion of the war. But if the genocide in Gaza continues, they will not be spared from this fire,” said Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. He essentially threatened war on the U.S. Still, Iran has and is waging war against us through its proxies. Iran is basically a collection of cowards. It pays oil money to operational foreign terrorists to let them do the actual butchering as the mullahs sip tea in Tehran. In February, the Israel Defense Forces began presenting evidence on how the United Nations participated in the mass murder of Jews. It said that at least a dozen staff members of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, “actively participated” in the killing of over 1,200 innocent Jews. The IDF also showed photo evidence of how a main Hamas tunnel, an intelligence and weapons hub, led directly to a UNRWA school. United Nations Watch, a Swiss nongovernmental organization in Geneva. uncovered a Telegram group chat of 3,000 UNRWA teachers “showing widespread support for Hamas terrorism.”

The folly of such thinking becomes clear if one considers what happens after an imagined nuclear disarmament is realized. The accomplishment would merely be temporary. Consider Indian-Pakistani hostility. Pakistan has lost repeated skirmishes to its rival. It cannot match India’s superior military conventional capabilities. It will immediately recognize that it must reconstitute its nuclear arsenal for the same reason it built it in the first place, which is to deter India. It cannot do so sans a nuclear weapons capability. The same logic for reconstitution also relates to the India-Chinese and Russian-American pairs of rivals. Nuclear weapons disarmament and abolition would counterintuitively weaken global security. In a nuclear weapons-free world, any rogue nation ? think Iran ? could constitute a small nuclear arsenal surreptitiously and emerge as the world’s extortionist nuclear power overnight. Likewise, by imposing nuclear disarmament, we would have jeopardized South Korea’s security. Its citizens could awaken any morning and confront a newly nuclear-rearmed North Korea. This South Korea, however, would have no U.S. nuclear umbrella to protect it. Any cost calculus reveals how inexpensive nuclear weapons are on a relative basis. Since conventional weapons do not convey the military capabilities of a nuclear arsenal, a nuclear-free military for the U.S. will not only be more expensive but will be less effective as well. We would very much like to see worldwide complete nuclear disarmament. We just don’t consider it possible under current circumstances.

The Cold War ushered in a nuclear arms race that was unsustainable ― even at the time, everyone knew it. The solution, many argued, was the abolition of nuclear weapons. That answer was enshrined in the Nonproliferation Treaty(NPT), which required each party to the treaty to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race … and to nuclear disarmament … ” However noble the goal of nuclear weapons abolition might be, it has gone nowhere since the NPT entered into force in 1970. None of the original five NPT nuclear weapons states (the U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R. (now the Russian Federation), France and China) have eliminated their nuclear arsenal, although the U.S. and Russia have made substantial reductions. Moreover, the number of states that possess nuclear weapons has subsequently increased to include Pakistan, India, North Korea, and probably Israel. Iran will probably join this group shortly. That there has been no substantive migration to nuclear abolition is entirely predictable. There is no basis to suppose that verifiable nuclear disarmament is achievable. Under current circumstances the U.S. would never agree to nuclear abolition. The U.S. has and will have for the immediate future, the most lethal, agile, and responsive conventional military capability in history. Other nuclear states with weaker conventional military forces cling to their nuclear capabilities more tightly than we do. Indeed, our vastly superior conventional forces drive our rivals to depend on their nuclear arsenals as a countervailing force. Nuclear arms abolitionists believe a world without nuclear weapons would be a better, safer, more prosperous place. Their beliefs are wrong on all counts.