The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now warns that Iran has enough nuclear material to make several atomic bombs. Iran is the only non-nuclear weapon state to enrich uranium to near full weapons-grade levels. Iran continues to deny inspectors access to its facilities to verify that Iran is, as it claims, complying with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)—to which it acceded under Iran’s last Shah, Reza Pahlavi.

In 2012 I published a scenario titled The Day America Died. Set in April 2013, it had Iran destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa (intentionally), and render all Jerusalem uninhabitable (unintentionally; it only wanted to destroy West Jerusalem). Israel launches a retaliatory nuclear strike. The first-ever nuclear war sets off mass panic in Western capitals, causing a global economic crash, disintegration of our alliances, and spurring rapid nuclear proliferation. The likely effects of such an attack are supported by this summary of the radii of various kinds of destruction generated by detonations of atomic (A-bomb) and thermonuclear (H-bomb) weapons.

I intended my scenario as a warning to anyone who might think that the U.S. would survive the destruction of Israel largely intact, showing in graphic detail how America would be irremediably devastated. Recent events show that the risk of an Iran nuclear strike against Israel are growing, with no effective action being taken by the Biden administration.

Consider:

(1) Team Biden undermines an Israeli prime minister it detests, whilst making no effort to bring down the Iranian clerical fascist regime;

(2) Team Obama hailed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as blocking all of Iran’s four paths to a nuclear weapon;

(3) After U.S intelligence discovered Iran’s violations of the JCPOA, President Trump withdrew from the deal;

(4) The belief that a nuclear-armed Iran can be deterred is highly dubious;

(5) Israel’s small size and population—its consequent lack of geostrategic depth—means it cannot survive as a functioning country after even a small number of nuclear detonations on or over its major cities;

(6) Iran’s threat to Israel is real and growing (see my recent TAS article), and thus Iranian leaders may vastly underestimate the devastation they would face after a nuclear attack on Israel, tempting them to strike;

(7) It is hardly coincidental that Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment in November 2020, after Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

No American leader will say, openly, that America would survive the destruction of Israel. But allowing Iran to arrive at the cusp of nuclear weapons status, given the fallibility of assessments as to clandestine advances in nuclear weapons development, recklessly risks America’s future as a free, prosperous, society. If our country seems divided now, after a nuclear Holocaust in Israel our country will be torn asunder.

Let Israeli prime minister Netanyahu have the last word—which should be taken as a final warning:

Our fight is your fight.. . . part of the larger struggle between the pro-American forces in the Middle East and the anti-American terror axis led by Iran. [If Iran gets nuclear weapons], every American will be held hostage to an ideological enemy with an implacable hatred for America. If we lose, you lose. If we win, you win.

Bottom Line. It increasingly appears that the administration intends to pursue its twin Mideast obsessions: making a deal with Iran, and forcing Israel to accept a West Bank + Gaza Palestinian state, run by the Palestine Authority or its successors. Two terrorist statelets and Iran’s longtime proxy, Hezbollah, effectively controlling Lebanon will collectively surround Israel. It will fatally undermine America’s security position in the Mideast, and hand Iran an unearned spectacular triumph. This will end any serious efforts to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, and possibly lead to the full horror detailed in my 2012 scenario. If such comes to pass, America will never recover its position as leader of the free world. Hell will break loose globally, with sauve qui peut the emergent disorder of the day.

John Wohlstetter is author of Sleepwalking With the Bomb (Discovery Institute Press, 2d. ed. 2014)

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La farsa antifascista ya no funciona)

In the German state of Saxony, the new parliament and government will be voted on in September. Current polls give figures that keep the federal government and the German and European Union social-democratic elites from sleeping. Because, according to all of them, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would win 35% of the vote and keeps growing.

Meanwhile the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz would get 6% and falling.

Faced with such a situation, the best idea that occurs to a part of the SPD and to the shrewd analysts of the “progressive” media — which since the era of Angela Merkel are already 98% of all the country’s media, with a uniformity that recalls terrible times — is that the party 36% of voters want to vote for must be banned, in order to prevent the disappearance of the one that has 6% and that perhaps is already at 3% today and without parliamentary representation.

It is true that in the AfD there are far-right elements. In some regions more than in others. Although, as a member of parliament from this party told me last week, “the radicalization is not taking place within the AfD but throughout German society.”

It is the betrayed voters of the big parties, both the CDU and the SPD, who increasingly join a party that has neither a leadership nor a very developed program but that defends the exact opposite of what the traditional parties are doing.

That is enough for more and more Germans. Because the massive impositions, restrictions and regulations of the social engineering advocated by the social-democratic majority of the two-party system of Berlin and Brussels has definitively led to the rupture of the consensus that, for better or worse, German society had maintained since the postwar period.

The sacrifices demanded of the population and the destruction that immigration, eco-climatic fanaticism and the consequent social, business and economic degradation have caused have already broken that basic agreement of the federal republic. “In Germany anything can now happen.”

That is why the political and media class and the big corporations that had adhered to the ideological drift imposed by parties initially in the minority on the two big ones, CDU and SPD, are in panic. And with the entire left in free fall, they pull out of their sleeve the option of a ban.

Fortunately there are still judges in Germany, as was said long ago after the Reichstag trial. There are also still jurists who are something more than the Bolaños gang that has invented cuddly terrorism.

They have already warned the public and political powers of the CDU/SPD/FDP and Green social-democratic consensus that trying to outlaw the AfD is going to cause them many more problems than it supposedly solves.

In the AfD there are ultra-rightists, but there are no terrorists, nor do they carry murderers on their lists, nor do they have convicted and pardoned coup-plotters, nor embezzlers, nor defendants accused of wanting to destroy the federal republic with the Kremlin’s help.

The German basic law has many defects, as has been seen in Germany itself and in all the countries that have gone on copying it, such as Spain.

As a principle it is inadvisable to copy the laws of defeated countries that are still partially or totally occupied, because they may have little respect for voters. And that is what happens with the party state, in which the guardians of the parties are protected from the opinions, options and real will of the people.

Those who ruled Germany when that text was drafted did not trust the German people much. The truth is that outlawing a party is difficult if it has not committed proven and serious crimes as an entity.

And although the German secret services devote themselves with relish to searching for such offenses on the government’s orders, the truth is that when they want to stir up sentiment, with the help of the media, against the AfD, they have to invent, exaggerate and manipulate some very peculiar stories. Whereby they demonstrate how weak their arguments are beyond the artificial “anti-fascist” hysteria that, through governmental channels, journalism is tasked with generating.

As has been the case with last weekend’s demonstrations, called by parties and media against the supposed “monstrous” conspiracy meeting of some “ultra-rightists,” among them two members of the AfD, who near Berlin were talking about the deportation of immigrants.

The meeting, which an obscure outlet — now known to live on official funding and to have fed on material from the intelligence services — has tried to present as “the secret Wannsee meeting,” when it was not at Wannsee and was private, not secret, in an obscene evocation of the Wannsee Conference at which in 1942 the Nazi leadership decided “the final solution,” the extermination of European Jews.

The truth is that while the media had tried to hide or minimize the massive farmers’ demonstrations for a whole week in an unprecedented mobilization, the pro-government demonstrations against the AfD were modest and did not exceed the usual left-wing ones.

And the AfD has kept rising, and a spectacular increase in memberships is being recorded of people who support the AfD out of rejection of the other parties and of everything Olaf Scholz’s three-party government does.

And Olaf Scholz’s government is a sleepwalking body that has neither objectives nor plans, nor agreements nor cohesion nor scarcely any hope of finishing the legislature. And European elections are coming in which, for the first time in history, a broad majority to the right of the socialist party is being forecast. In a parliament in which the European People’s Party will no longer have the pretext of having no alternative but to always vote with the left.

In the last Strasbourg plenary the People’s Party and the socialists went together in 94% of the votes. From June 9 on, the members of the EPP will have their existential dilemma open: whether they are going to vote with a broad right with the ECR groups (European Conservatives and Reformists) and ID (Identity and Democracy) or go definitively over to social democracy and accept the loss of parties and voters who do not want to follow them on that adventure.

Hence the German panic is being transferred to other capitals and also to Brussels. We are entering a new era and, of course, the social-democratic elites are not going to save themselves by banning the large majorities that are being generated in most European nations of very dedicated and active resistance against the leftist, eco-climatic hysterical drift of Agenda 2030, of woke fanaticism and anti-Western and anti-national fury.

If they attempt that path, a scenario of extensive civil conflict quickly opens up.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Pseudoperiodismo y pseudodemocracia)

Many scenes are deeply shameful in Spain today. Every day we are served images that look like set-ups designed to humiliate and embarrass Spaniards. Starting with any appearance by the President of the Congress, Francina Armengol. But one that ought to generate, besides shame, a great deal of horror is without doubt one that has been repeated, in which we see in the Parliament’s press room a young journalist ask a question of a government official. Or of that grotesque figure, unfortunately representative of his kind, who is Pachi López. And immediately afterward we see the majority of colleagues get up after hearing the questioned politician hurl some disqualification, insult or impertinence at the journalist who asked the question.

All as one, they obey the dictate of the politician who declares the press conference closed with the act of contempt toward a colleague whom none of the other journalists support or stand by. When the last question, that of the scorned one, being the most uncomfortable, is always the most pertinent of all. Before this scene, and for probably half an hour, one after another the journalists have asked the questions the politician expected and that they brought on assignment, and some will have helped the member of the government to place his message better on his preferred terms.

Now the government “asks for protection” from the Press Associations so that they shield the executive from what it calls “pseudo-media.” To be clear, “pseudo-media” are the ones that have those solitary journalists who ask the questions that are not welcome. There was a time when it was understood that true journalism was to publish what power did not want published. Today the journalism of the majority is to publish what power dictates so that the company can know it will receive its slice of the public-money pie to pay the staff and allow itself some indulgence. But it is also to denounce, accuse and harass the colleagues who still hold that concept of journalism, which is to ask power what it does not want to hear and to expose everything power wants to hide.

Thus official journalism has already gone, after many years of being a flock of parrots repeating what their masters say, to being a gang of informers for power who help it in the repression, in the reprisals and the threats against those journalists who have not sunk as low as they have, and against those political forces that are neither power nor a consented and controlled opposition.

With honor abolished, there are television programs in which people compete to be the most snitching, groveling and villainous in demanding total submission to the government’s messages. If this is always a baseness and an infamy, it is even more so when practiced as informers and accomplices of a coup-plotting government allied with all kinds of forces hostile to democracy and to the nation. The acts of indignity multiply. There are the associations that were created to protect journalists against power, scolding journalists on power’s orders.

The Association of Parliamentary Journalists, which is the Association of Parodists of Journalists of a parliament that, for the rest, no longer exists in its democratic sense, recently gave proof of the abysmal degeneration I am referring to at an event that defines the regime, its parrots and also its lackeys. There they gave an award, for being likable, to a woman who not so long ago used a newspaper to tell the murderers where the shots should go. And the shots went there. But who remembers today the dead that the Pachi-Lopezes buried in the mornings after having been at cozy dinners in farmhouses negotiating peace deals between fish and steaks with those who were killing them?

These gangs, which are more and more the mop-wielding hacks of a government that lives solely and exclusively off and for the lie, the abuse and fiscal plunder, increasingly recall that Association of Soviet Writers that Mikhail Bulgakov so wonderfully described in “The Master and Margarita.” It is not only in Spain that we now have a press turned into cheap servitude, with some exceptions such as this newspaper, which has the independence of its solvency and allows me to publish this reflection.

In Germany, all the national media that once had reputation, dignity and a commitment to the truth are humiliating themselves by turning a pseudo-item from an obscure outlet about a private meeting of right-wing people, including some member of the AfD, an informal gathering to exchange opinions where someone had a somewhat heated comment about how to combat immigration, into a terrifying conspiracy that they compared to nothing less than the Wannsee Conference, no less, at which the Nazi leadership decided the extermination of European Jews. They spoke of deportations, something the French

Macron and German politicians in general have done. But here it is a monstrous conspiracy according to the entire press. This is not merely trivializing monstrosities. It is one more proof that European social democracy, under whatever initials — because in Poland it is under a President Donald Tusk — who belongs to the European PP group, is in full offensive to have the whole press subdued and to close the cracks that might allow alternative messages to emerge. And the truth, which is what they fear most.. And if the media do not submit, they are physically stormed, as happened in Warsaw a few weeks ago.

It is about leaving no opening for the truth, because the unified and seamless message must be that of the struggle against those truly national and conservative forces — not of electoral pretense — which in every European country grow in vitality by the day. And ahead of the June 9 elections, panic is spreading in many capitals and now nothing shames them anymore. In Spain the government asks the press associations to armor-plate its messages against some intrepid journalist eager to know the truth.

In Poland the new government that came to power thanks to the massive interference of Brussels and Berlin and the agitation of the German-owned media, which the naïve members of the previous Polish government failed to combat or counter, is trying to criminalize the conservatives who governed for eight years with much success and little public relations or media skill. And everyone, as in Germany, invents the return of Nazism or fascism, when what they have in front of them are societies fed up with lies, with failures and with an ideology that makes them ever less free and more poor. And it organizes within the national-conservative parties to confront and thwart the plans in Davos that aim to turn Europeans into subjects of a socialist mega-state with the same rights as the Chinese and the same Chinese controls, because it is cheaper and does less harm to the planet.

These plans, which a few years ago they believed were already fully on track and without any opposition, are beginning to crack because of the massive resistance in the nations that are becoming aware of the threat and are willing to make it fail. And for that, the essential thing is to stop listening to the snitch journalists and to attend to the questions of the marginalized.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

The strategic significance of the Red Sea, a crucial conduit for global commerce and connectivity, cannot be overstated. The disruptive impact of Houthi attacks on shipping in this area not only poses a direct threat to regional security but also has ripple effects on international trade and commerce. The U.S. initiative to draft a resolution condemning these assaults is a testament to the collective endeavor to preserve the safety and stability of essential maritime routes. However, Algeria’s decision to abstain from this resolution represents a significant challenge, necessitating a robust U.S. response to uphold the efficacy of this vital initiative.

Algeria’s rationale for its abstention, which revolves around concerns about the situation in Gaza, invites scrutiny regarding the selective approach of its foreign policy. While the global community recognizes the imperative of addressing humanitarian crises, the focus of the Security Council’s resolution was explicitly on the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Algeria’s abstention, citing reasons disconnected from the resolution’s primary aim, suggests a misalignment between the resolution’s objectives and Algeria’s stated rationale.

The significance of addressing global humanitarian issues, including the situation in Gaza, is unquestionable. Nonetheless, the Security Council is a forum designed to tackle a multitude of global challenges, each necessitating dedicated attention. The U.S.-proposed resolution on the Houthi attacks was crafted to confront a distinct security threat. Effective multilateralism mandates that nations address individual issues while collaboratively engaging with broader humanitarian challenges. A decisive U.S. response is imperative to reinforce the principle that peripheral problems should not derail resolutions targeting specific threats.

The ongoing Houthi insurgency in Yemen has extensive implications for regional stability, especially in the strategically pivotal Red Sea. The Security Council’s resolution, aimed at condemning Houthi aggressions, aligns with the overarching objective of maintaining regional peace and security. Algeria’s abstention from this resolution not only undermines these goals but also jeopardizes efforts to ensure unfettered navigation in a critical global waterway. The United States, as a champion of international security, must respond decisively to safeguard the interests of nations dependent on secure maritime transit.

The efficacy of the United Nations Security Council hinges on its members’ commitment to confront distinct challenges with targeted resolutions. Algeria’s abstention, motivated by concerns unrelated to the resolution’s focus, sets a troubling precedent that could weaken the credibility and decision-making efficacy of the Security Council. A forceful U.S. response is crucial to underscore the seriousness of such actions and to uphold the integrity of the Security Council as an essential body for global governance.

In light of Algeria’s abstention from the U.S.-proposed resolution condemning the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, a vigorous response from the United States is warranted. The necessity to counter maritime security threats, preserve regional stability, and maintain the Security Council’s credibility calls for a firm stance. While acknowledging the complexities of regional conflicts and humanitarian crises, the United States must underscore the urgency of targeted resolutions and the importance of collective action in addressing specific challenges, without undermining the broader objectives of international cooperation and security.