It’s worth reminding ourselves that just two years ago, the U.S. and its NATO allies expected Kyiv to fall in a matter of days after Russia launched its brutal invasion. Courageously defending their homeland, Ukraine’s soldiers defied the odds and are still in the fight. Having already caused tens of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars worth of damage in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long list of war crimes includes kidnapping children, the massacre of civilians at Bucha. Despite what you may have heard, Mr. Putin is losing this war. Ukraine has made Russia’s invading army pay a steep price already, with hundreds of thousands of casualties and thousands of destroyed tanks. Kyiv and some 80% of Ukrainian territory remain firmly in Ukraine’s control. And U.S. support for Ukraine, which amounts to less than 5% of the Pentagon’s budget, is turbo-boosting America’s own defense industrial base, just when we need it most to deter other adversaries such as China and Iran. The Ukraine invasion awakened NATO from its post-Cold War slumber. European NATO members are finally increasing their military spending to meet alliance targets. Finland and Sweden join the alliance in direct reaction to Russian aggression. NATO today is stronger and more cohesive than ever before. That’s winning. By contrast, Russia is weaker now than ever before during Mr. Putin’s reign. The Russian president would like us to believe the fiction that he can carry on his horrific war indefinitely, but his own security services, military and population understand the devastation he has caused and the meager returns the war has brought.

The military junta in Myanmar continues its scorched earth approach to wiping out all the ethnic groups opposed to the military coup. Ayatollah Khomeini brooks no opposition in a defiant Iran that commands and supports Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies and the Israeli war in Gaza against Hamas continues to displace innocent Palestinians in need of food and shelter. These are a few of the international conflicts covered by the media, although the focus has been on Ukraine and Israel’s war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Although aid to Ukraine to defeat Russia and ensure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza while defeating Hamas and enhancing efforts to better protect the innocent civilians in Gaza are concerns of the U.S. and its allies and partners, unfortunate developments in North Korea aren’t getting the attention it deserves. For many who follow North Korea, there is a sense that war can break out quickly and unexpectedly on the Korean Peninsula, with the potential to affect stability throughout Northeast Asia. The situation in the South China Sea, Taiwan, the Red Sea, and nuclear proliferation are getting the attention they deserve. Indeed, these all are issues requiring even greater immediate attention. When you consider these major geopolitical issues, and others in Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, the logical assumption is that the United Nations is responsible for helping to prevent and resolve these ? and other ? issues. But unfortunately, the United Nations and other international organizations have not been able to live up to this expectation. This reality argues for the United States, the European Union and potentially China to assume this role and responsibility.

In the 1990s, over one million North Koreans died of starvation. People in North Korea were eating grass and the bark of trees due to extreme food scarcity. The United Nations recently reported that some people in Gaza are eating grass also due to extreme food scarcity. Over the past three decades, the situation has worsened in these and other countries, as the United Nations and other international organizations have been unable to prevent and eventually resolve wars and power grabs and have been unable to provide the food, water, and fuel for the 700 million people living in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank. Over 40% of the population in North Korea is malnourished, with annual reports of food scarcity, inadequate pharmaceuticals and a weak health care system. This is even though North Korea has a sizeable arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, capable of delivering nuclear weapons to targets as far as 15,000 kilometers. North Korea’s recent embrace of Russia and support of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, providing them with artillery shells and ballistic missiles, has further alienated Pyongyang from many in the international community sympathetic to the plight of the North Korean people. The situation for the people in Gaza is bleak as the Israeli Defense Forces continue their campaign in Gaza, with Palestinians risking their lives to find food, water, and other necessities. Russia continues with its brutal invasion of Ukraine, threatening to use nuclear weapons; North Korea continues building more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles while embracing a revanchist Russia and neglecting the humanitarian needs of its own people.

Historically, biological reality included the existence of two immutable sexes. Today, this reality is exchanged for trans-sex. Basic understanding of fundamental scientific truths has been thrown back to well before the Middle Ages. How did so many seemingly rational 21st-century people end up denying reality? Part of the denial can be attributed to the strong influences of ideology and politics. Leftists who identify challenges to their beliefs as “science denial” simultaneously claim to “follow the science” and boldly broadcast “science is real.” Yet the “science” these leftists follow ― including claims of trans-sex ― is not authentic science and rather brazenly proclaims that “biological science is not real.” Leftist science appears to be just a cover for leftist ideology and politics. The exact impending doom proffered by conflicting climate models leaves the urgent decisions for operational solutions to protect society in the lurch. Political activists can readily politicize science matters like our ever-changing climate because climate change ― often conflated with catastrophic but typical weather events ― is ripe for hyperbole. The modern view of a warming planet ― caused in part by human activity ― is posed as indisputably disastrous for the masses. The unfortunate solution by today’s aristocracy is to return human beings to premedieval living conditions. If we can no longer agree on facts like one unique sex plus another unique sex equals two unique sexes, then solutions to complex challenges such as climate change will likely continue to elude us.

A political cartoon in The Washington Post shows Joe Biden pasting up several executive orders to cover up the word BIGOTRY. The orders include lifting the military’s ban on transgender behavior and forcing schools to allow opposite-sex students into restrooms, locker rooms and sports teams. “Science” in action. Like the term “racist,” the charge of “bigotry” ends all discussion. It implies that an opponent’s views are not only wrong but that anyone who holds them must be silenced. Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist theorist from the Frankfurt School, called this “repressive tolerance.” It’s what the Big Tech companies are now doing every day to conservatives. It’s also the stance taken by the “science” crowd that insists, against all evidence, that babies in the womb aren’t human and can be “terminated” at any developmental stage up to birth. Anyone who says otherwise hates women. Because scientific proof of the uniqueness of each human being from conception is so overwhelming, new terms were deployed to distort the truth. Killing became “abortion care,” “reproductive health” or “choice.” Similarly, the clearly revealed sex of babies via ultrasound must be ignored to facilitate the lie that gender’s not natural but rather “assigned at birth” and subject to change. So, now we’re at a point where basic biology is verboten. But it could get worse if we don’t see a major pushback. The Biden administration is considering the formation of a “cross-agency” Truth Commission, run by a “reality czar.” The purpose would be to stamp out a free exchange of views and impose their version of “the truth,” which apparently will involve fake science.

Like anything else of consequence, much of science has been hijacked and repurposed to suit progressive agendas. As such, it’s no longer real science but selectively publicized “studies,” enforced by guilds like the American Psychological Association or the climate Chicken Littles. How else to explain the ruling elites’ insistence that “men” can have babies and that “women” who shave, have male musculature and male DNA are objectively female? And that this is “scientific?” The people most often appalled by this blatant dishonesty are religious conservatives. Like the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” they’re baffled that so many people can ignore their own eyes and common sense. The war on science is a war on truth and conscience. For too long, religious folks have struck a defensive posture, that is, slow surrender. Underneath the repeated assaults by the LGBTQ lobby on norms of any kind is the assumption that the Bible is invalid, nature is what you make of it and truth is irrelevant. When cultures no longer believe that truth is important or even attainable, they devolve into “might makes right” authoritarianism. That’s what the church, and anyone of sound mind, is facing now. Resorting only to abstract claims of civil rights instead of battling dangerous, meritless assumptions paves the way for marginalization at best, and persecution at worst. The Big Lie now is that people with traditional beliefs about sex, gender, marriage or even American exceptionalism are bigots. That is, they’re haters who need to be legally suppressed.

The U.S. has scored significant tactical wins in the struggle against Tehran. But Washington has never managed to fully deter Iran. Iran has never altered its strategy of avoiding a direct war with the U.S., while creating strategic depth by funding and arming its proxy terrorist allies in the Gaza Strip, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Iran is enabling Russian aggression. Iran is also moving ever closer to obtaining its own nuclear bomb, with a large stockpile of enriched uranium and an extensive ballistic missile program. Amid the war in Gaza, Iran has used its proxies to raise the cost of international trade and to pressure its Sunni adversaries in the Persian Gulf, whose populations are pro-Palestinian but whose governments covet good relations with Washington. Failure to deter Iran undermines America’s ability to conduct counterterrorism operations with our allies and ensure freedom of navigation in the Middle East’s strategic waterways. There is no appeasing a state sponsor of terrorism. Instead, the U.S. should aggressively target Iran’s economy, internal instability and regional allies. Iranian protesters who braved government repression have been heard shouting “no money to Hezbollah, no Palestine.” The U.S. should employ our considerable soft power to aid anti-regime forces and target the Iranian regime’s fear of freedom and democracy. The U.S. should not take anything off the table in this fight, including strikes on IRGC leadership and targets in Iran. The U.S. should also cut IRGC logistical ties to Iran’s proxy groups as well.

To build a bomb takes far more than just enriched uranium. The engineering of a bomb requires a high level of skill ― but U.S. engineers were able to do it in 1945, and the necessary knowledge has leaked from the seven known nuclear states in the past 80 years. The Iranians have first-rate physicists and engineers, so there is no doubt they can accomplish the task given enough time and resources. A country must not only be able to build bombs but to tailor them for delivery. A crude bomb could perhaps be smuggled into a city center in a small truck. A bomb could be hidden on a ship or submarine. A bomb that can be put into a missile, delivered, and exploded at a precise spot takes considerably more engineering skills ― but not ones that are beyond Iranian skill sets. Given what we think we know, it is possible that the Iranians will have as many as a dozen operative bombs by May. At that point, they may feel comfortable announcing it to the world and, perhaps, set one off underground to prove the point. How many bombs does a country need before it feels protected from an unprovoked attack? Iran and all of the other nuclear powers are making more (or refurbishing ― in the case of the U.S. and Russia) bombs each month as an insurance policy. If both Israel and Iran have the capability with enough bombs to destroy each other, it is possible to envision a situation much like the U.S. and Russia had during the Cold War ― a stalemate based on mutually assured destruction. And perhaps that could eventually lead to peace.

Iran may already have five nuclear bombs and may have as many as a dozen by May. Some intelligence estimates, as early as this past October, asserted that Iran could have enough enriched weapons-grade uranium for one bomb within a week and enough for five nuclear bombs within six weeks. It has been more than three months since those estimates were made. If Iran does have a bomb, why is there little mention of it in the press? The Iranians will probably not want to claim to have the bomb until they have a dozen or so operational ones at diverse locations. It would be foolish to announce one bomb, because the U.S. and Israel would expend considerable effort to find and destroy it ? but more bombs in more locations makes this “destroy” effort increasingly complex, if not almost impossible. The Israelis have pledged not to allow Iran to have the bomb ? for the simple reason that if Iran has many nuclear bombs, it could mean the end of Israel. It had been assumed that Israeli intelligence was good enough to warn about an Iranian bomb before it was completed ? and could be destroyed. Israel and the U.S. had been able to delay the Iranian bomb program in the past by destroying production and research facilities, sabotaging both hardware and software, and assassinating key scientists. The Iranians have certainly learned from these previous losses and taken measures to make sure their earlier vulnerabilities have been mitigated. Nuclear bombs are produced in a number of sizes. A country can build a larger number of less powerful bombs or fewer more powerful bombs, depending on the targets and objectives.

Argentina’s shift from a long-standing alignment with left-wing political forces toward the free-market stance championed by the newly elected president, Javier Milei, has been a source of contention for the Chinese government. Mr. Milei’s explicit rejection of socialism and his opposition to Argentina joining the BRICS pact, a coalition seen as an alternative to Western economic dominance and which China aims to lead, represents a direct challenge to China’s influence. Mr. Messi, as a global icon of Argentine identity, has thus become an unwitting participant in this ideological battle, with his not playing in Hong Kong interpreted as a deliberate act of defiance and a statement against China’s political ambitions. Second, the narrative constructed around Mr. Messi’s club, Inter Miami, further exemplifies the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological paranoia. Chinese state media announced that the Florida-based soccer club is an anti-communist front organization with collaboration with the CIA. The media concluded that “It’s highly unlikely that Messi’s snub to Hong Kong and China was his personal decision. It’s most likely that he acted according to instructions given to him by his bosses (fathered by a CIA agent).” Such claims reflect the Chinese government’s tendency to view world affairs through a lens of ideological confrontation, where every action is seen as part of a larger battle against communism. All in all, the uproar over Lionel Messi’s not playing in a soccer game in Hong Kong encapsulates the communist worldview as the real force that animates China’s political system. It serves as a perfect illustration of the ideological absurdity at the heart of China’s political landscape.