And the result is indeed encouraging.

The work, published by the America First Policy Institute, is particularly perspicacious about global affairs given the authority of its authors. Trump has reportedly discussed various foreign policy issues with Fleitz and his fellow contributors, including Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, national security adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence. The Financial Times places Fleitz at the table in the “Trump Machine,” the inner circle preparing for a second term. Likewise, the Trump campaign has identified Kellogg as a policy adviser who could take a role in his next administration.

Kellogg, in his chapter, argues that our great nation finds itself hovering at “a pivotal moment.” With the election less than six months away, Kellogg poses a choice between “the failed foreign policy of a Biden Administration or a Trump policy of America First.” The latter, Kellogg posits, has “a record of success” and “offers us a proven pathway forward today.”

What does “America First” mean? For Kellogg, the term suggests the country “will work with our allies to advance American interests.” More specifically, he says, the nation would “leverage international organizations when they offer clear ways to secure U.S. interests, but America will never be subordinate or beholden to any international institution in which the ‘consent of the governed’ is replaced with the rule by unelected elites or when these institutions pursue objectives contrary to American interests and constitutional rights.”

Waltz, in his contribution on the use of force, calls for America to “focus its military power at deterring the peer threat of China.” That power, argues the congressman, who served over 26 years in the Army and was decorated with four Bronze Stars, comes with caveats. The last three decades’ lessons, coupled with the evolution in warfighting, compel a realism about America’s “ability to change foreign cultures, the need to use the maximum possible resources against the most vital collection of goals, and a need to use the full spectrum of United States political, economic, and military power to buttress the core military challenge of balancing a conventional peer adversary.”

Along similar lines, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie makes plain the Biden administration’s missteps in military management and provides an urgent call for a course correction. His critique underscores the imperative of maintaining military morale while picking our way past the pitfalls of woke ideology.

“The Biden Administration’s incompetent management of the military has caused the most severe military crisis since Richard Nixon and General Creighton Abrams gave America the all-volunteer force in 1973,” Wilkie writes. It is that crisis that Wilkie’s take on an America First approach would seek to defuse.

Looking inward, well-regarded former Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and former senior policy adviser and chief of policy at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Robert Law delve into homeland security, stressing the critical importance of securing the border to safeguard national sovereignty. In particular, Wolf and Law suggest persuasively that “to control the U.S. border and prevent exploitation by bad actors, we must reduce the flow of illegal aliens trying to enter the United States.” They contend that the most effective way to do this is to resume the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, aka the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which they follow by recommending that America “promptly resume construction of the border wall system to serve as a physical deterrent to unlawful crossings.” From their mouths to God’s ears, one hopes, as today, people increasingly find themselves falling back on a besieged Second Amendment to secure their own homelands. 

Peering across the Pacific, Stephen Yates, former White House deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs, and Adam Savit, AFPI China Policy Initiative director, dissect the complexities of U.S.-China relations, urging a robust strategy to counter the self-dubbed Middle Kingdom’s malign influence. Yates and Savit’s analysis calls for a comprehensive approach that leverages American economic and military power to mitigate threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Moving the focus from the Far East to the Middle East, Ellie Cohanim, State Department deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, underscores the significance of strengthening alliances and supporting regional allies like Israel. The brilliant Cohanim’s insights emphasize the strategic imperative of a secure and stable Middle East in advancing America’s broader security objectives. Perhaps never before has this been closer to home than in an America where violent riots rock college campuses with calls for genocide and an end to Israel, driven by an alliance of pro-Hamas protestors and far-left “progressives.”

On alliances, former State Department spokeswoman and Naval Reserve officer Morgan Ortagus highlights the importance of engagement through strong partnerships while advancing American interests. On the trade front, former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer advocates an approach that safeguards American wealth and technology from adversaries. In Lighthizer’s view, “the best thing we can do for our own national security and for that of our allies is to not only have the finest military in the world but also to have the strongest economy powered by the most advanced technology.”

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In their analysis of energy security, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and his then-senior adviser on international relations, Sam Buchan, point out that energy security “not only ensures robust economic growth, but it also empowers the United States to advance its security interests and support America’s allies and partners abroad — unimpeded by foreign dependencies.”

When in the presence of prophecy, Revelation 1:3 urges, “Blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.” Analogously, if less eternally, it’s worthwhile to take to heart this volume. Given that Trump leads Biden in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, the time may indeed be near.

Christopher C. Hull, Ph.D., is president of Issues Management Inc., a public affairs firm that does grassroots and advocacy work including on national security. He was previously chief of staff to a member of the House of Representatives.

“We have blackouts in Kyiv, so I’m sitting in the darkness right now,” Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the foreign affairs committee, told the Washington Examiner. “Winter hasn’t started here, but we’re already having these blackouts. And it doesn’t bode well for the coming winter.”

Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure since 2022, when the initial failure of the invading Russian columns forced Russian strategists to seek new ways to enervate the Ukrainian defense. An influx of Western air defense systems enabled Ukrainian forces to mitigate that threat, but delivery delays in the United States and Europe left Ukraine’s power grid vulnerable to several severe shocks.

“Russia, they have this plan — they have a plan to destroy us, economically, and they specifically target, now, our infrastructure, especially power grid,” Merezhko said. “They want to create humanitarian catastrophe during the winter, or even before the winter. And so they bet on trying to bomb us into the caves, as they say.”

That effort has found some success in recent months, as Ukrainian energy authorities acknowledged while announcing the latest blackout schedule.

“The reason for the restrictions is the increase in electricity consumption during cold weather,” Ukraine’s state-owned energy company announced, according to an unofficial translation. “The capacity of Ukrainian power plants is not enough due to the consequences of five rocket-drone attacks carried out by Russia on the Ukrainian energy system since March 22.”

President Joe Biden received the authority to provide additional military assistance to Ukraine in April when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) advanced a supplemental funding package over the objections of a hard-right faction of the Republican conference. That maneuver ended a protracted lapse in major shipments of U.S. aid long after Ukrainian forces began to feel the effects of a shortage of artillery and air defense interceptors.

“It’s [because of] all of us,” a senior European official said. “The Patriots are the most capable ones, which are able to take ballistic missiles down. So, if [Ukraine] is running out of them, they can take down cruise missiles, but ballistics and Kinzhals will hit the target and do the damage.”

The shortages are being felt most acutely in the area around Kharkiv, a major Ukrainian city near the country’s northeastern border. The scene of a major battle in the first months of the full-scale conflict, Russian forces have pressed into the area in an effort that private U.S. analysts suggest is intended to create a buffer zone on the border. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday that the defending forces have “partially stabilized” the lines in the area, but NATO’s top general demurred when asked about the status of the Russian offensive.

“Whether an offensive is stopped or not, you know, takes a little bit of time to figure out … In war, you never count things out until you’re sure,” four-star U.S. Army Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the NATO supreme allied commander, said Thursday at a press conference in Brussels. 

“[Ukrainian forces are] being shipped vast amounts of ammunition, vast amounts of short-range air defense systems, and significant amounts of armored vehicles right now,” Cavoli said.

Zelensky suggested this week that “Russia will not be able to occupy Kharkiv” if Ukrainian forces are given “two Patriot systems,” but those missile batteries are in short supply in U.S. arsenals, and the other countries that own them tend to hesitate to hand over the prized system.

“There is a lot of discussion ongoing on…creative solutions, in terms that nations trying now to work together to find a complete system,” Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, the chairman of the NATO military committee, told reporters on Thursday. “So if one [country] has the sensor, and another one has the shooter, and the third one has the ammunition, that together they make something they come up with a solution for Ukraine.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced in April that he would send German-owned Patriot battery to Ukraine. That battery, the third of its kind sent from German arsenals, “is extremely important for the defense of Ukraine,” Bauer said before adding an arch remark about the lag between announcement and delivery.

“It is important, though … that nations not only promise to deliver certain things, but that they also announce for Ukraine … within how much time they actually are going to be able to deliver it,” he said. “So it’s not just the promise, but, it is also in the end, of course, the ammunition and the systems that the Ukrainians need. So, I think that is something that has to improve.”

Those improvements could come too late for at least some aspects of Ukraine’s power grid. DTEK, a private operator of thermal power plants, announced in March that the company had “temporarily lost around half its available generation capacity.” In recent weeks, a representative of DTEK’s parent company told an American audience that “probably 80[%] to 85% of their capacity was offline,” a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine told the Washington Examiner. 

“This is gonna be big, and he said they’re really preparing, trying to get through to the winter,” retired Ambassador Bill Taylor, who led the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on two different diplomatic tours, said. “And the parts are harder to come by because they’re long lead-time items. A lot of the equipment is old Soviet [stuff]. The Russians know all the details of their grid. Yeah, I think energy is gonna be a problem.”

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To mitigate the damage, DTEK is “investing heavily in distributed power systems such as wind turbines,” the company announced in March amid a wider government effort to make the Ukrainian power grid more resilient.

“They’re trying to find creative ways to have more protected [power sources] — maybe underground, maybe dispersed,” Merezhko said. “And this is [part of] the kind of competition or rivalry, in terms of creativity, and we managed to outsmart Russians. So far, at least, it’s been the case.”

The Biden administration plans to award one eligible organization an estimated $250,000 to lead the initiative, which is run through the Department of State’s Bureau of African Affairs, according to funding documents. The grant announcement, which was quietly made on Friday, comes as the broader agency faces a flurry of lawsuits and congressional investigations for similar programs the GOP says are promoting censorship of conservative voices online.

“Of all the things the Biden State Department could be doing with American tax dollars, exporting their censorship regime to developing countries is both the least helpful and, sadly, the most unsurprising,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told the Washington Examiner. “Leftist bureaucrats telling people what to think will be as poorly received overseas as they are here at home.”

According to the funding documents, the recipient of the federal funds will plan a series of workshops on “understanding and identifying misinformation/disinformation” and its impact, “fact-checking, online/offline content verification methods,” and how artificial intelligence fits into identifying alleged falsehoods. The project will last six months and “consist of online presentations and dialogues between American experts and African audiences, discussing theories and case studies, and sharing best practices, strategies, and resources,” the Biden administration said.

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, the State Department pushed back on the idea that it engages in censorship of speech.

“The best tool to fight disinformation is more information that empowers audiences to understand the true source and intention behind the information they are consuming — this way they can make the best decisions for themselves and their communities,” an agency spokesperson said. “That is the intention of this program.”

But to Republicans in Congress, who helped pass a law banning the Pentagon from funding certain groups accused of censorship and have overseen investigations into the Global Disinformation Index and other entities, the State Department perpetually props up GDI and other censorious activist hubs that unfairly target conservatives.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, a foreign-focused office formed during the Obama administration, is notably facing a lawsuit from conservative media outlets for funding GDI and a New York-based company rating news outlets called NewsGuard. The plaintiffs say the Global Engagement Center funded an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” to “covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” citing reporting from the Washington Examiner on GDI secretly blacklisting right-of-center websites from advertising dollars.

Therefore, Republicans say they don’t trust the agency’s determinations on what constitutes disinformation or misinformation, including overseas.

“It appears many of the awards have been given inappropriately to entities that are acting outside of Congress’ intent,” said Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, which is investigating the State Department over “government censorship and revenue interference of American small businesses by proxy.”

The Africa-focused grant “is a prime example of something this administration is funding abroad that doesn’t benefit America,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) told the Washington Examiner.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who, like Mast, sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the new program “a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.” The GOP-led panel recently investigated the Biden administration for funding GDI.

The State Department said in the funding documents that the Africa-focused program aims to thwart “false narratives” that “have directly incited violent conflicts, supported political turmoil, intimidated members of civil society into silence, and obscured acts of corruption and exploitation.” Moreover, there is a “clear correlation” between “disinformation and societal unrest,” the U.S. government said in the documents.

“There are certainly issues in Africa we should be addressing, like the U.S. pulling our troops out of Niger and scam callers in places like South Africa ripping off American seniors,” Burchett said. “But Americans’ hard-earned money should not be used to combat disinformation and cyberbullying against journalists on another continent.”

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), another GOP lawmaker who has long accused the government of censoring disfavored speech, is also concerned about the program.

“Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars should never be wasted on unelected bureaucrats’ censorship efforts to combat ‘disinformation’ — here or abroad,” Clyde told the Washington Examiner.

“This concerning use of federal funds should certainly be up on the chopping block as we craft fiscal year 2025 appropriations bills,” Clyde said. “Given our unsustainable economic outlook, Congress must get our nation’s fiscal house in order by significantly cutting spending – starting with ridiculously wasteful and unnecessary programs like this one.”

The African program, which aims to target countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Central Africa, and Sierra Leone, is hardly an anomaly when it comes to State Department funding. The agency announced in 2022 it was spending up to $100,000 to fly Africans into the U.S. to train them on how to “combat disinformation and deceptive news,” records show.

That same year, the Biden administration said it was using federal funds to educate youth in Cambodia on disinformation and misinformation, records also show.

The May 2024 grant posting, which is titled “Understanding and Countering Disinformation for African Journalists,” is accepting applications until June. Its existence is also raising concerns among some outside conservative groups.

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“This is just another example of the woke Biden administration misusing American taxpayer funds and putting America last,” said Wade Miller, vice president of Center for Renewing America, a think tank led by ex-top Trump administration official Russell Vought.

“When ‘fighting disinformation amongst journalists in Africa’ is a priority over combating the issues we face in our own country, there is a huge problem,” Miller said.

Lily Greenberg Call, special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, cited her Jewish heritage as the reason for her resignation. In her letter, she related her deep ties to the United States and Israel but expressed deep opposition to Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in Gaza, calling it a “genocide.”

“The President has the power to call for a lasting ceasefire, to stop sending weapons to Israel, and to condition aid. The United States has used nearly no leverage throughout the last eight months to hold Israel accountable; quite the opposite, we have enabled and legitimized Israel’s actions with vetoes of UN resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable,” she wrote. “President Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands.”

Call also accused Biden of using Jews as political pawns and endangering them by supporting Israel.

“The United States has long enabled Israeli war crimes and the status quo of apartheid and occupation. That status quo does not keep Israelis safe, nor Jews around the world,” she continued. “It certainly does not protect Palestinians, who have the right to freedom, safety, self-determination, and dignity, just as much as Jewish people do, and every person does.”

“Any system that requires the subjugation of one group over another is not only unjust, but unsafe. Jewish safety cannot — and will not — come at the expense of Palestinian freedom. Making Jews the face of the American war machine makes us less safe,” Call added.

The day of her resignation, May 15, was purposefully chosen as symbolic. Palestinians commemorate it as the day of the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” a term coined by the Syrian Christian intellectual Constantin Zurayk to describe the expulsion of roughly 750,000 Palestinians following the Arab defeat in the Israeli war of independence.

“I reject the premise that one people’s salvation must come at another’s destruction,” Call said. “I am committed to creating a world where this does not happen — and this cannot be done from within the Biden Administration.”

Call’s position is a minority among American Jews, with the overwhelming majority being strong supporters of Israel and seeing Israel as a central part of being Jewish. An Israel on Campus Coalition December poll found that 81% of American Jews support Israel’s war effort in Gaza, Jewish Insider reported.

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Earlier this week, an Army officer assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency resigned in protest of the U.S.’s continued military support for Israel.

Maj. Harrison Mann said he resigned from the DIA over the “nearly unqualified [U.S.] support” for Israel, “which has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians [in Gaza].” 

“We have not encouraged or enabled strikes outside of Ukraine, but ultimately Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it’s going to conduct this war, a war it’s conducting in defense of its freedom, of its sovereignty, of its territorial integrity,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday in Kyiv.  “And we will continue to back Ukraine with the equipment that it needs to succeed, that it needs to win.”

Blinken visited Ukraine amid a renewed incursion of Russian forces into Ukraine near Kharkiv, a large Ukrainian border city that was the scene of a major battle in the initial months of the full-scale war. The intensity of the attack forced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cancel a trip to Spain and spurred open complaints about U.S. restrictions on the usage of American weapons. 

“We saw their military sitting one or two kilometers from the border inside Russia and there was nothing we could do about that,” senior Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandra Ustinova told Politico this week.  “You’re giving us a stick but you will not let us use it.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan emphasized, after Congress passed supplemental legislation authorizing additional military assistance to Ukraine, that the weapons were for “use inside Ukraine’s sovereign territory.” British Foreign Secretary David Cameron argued in early May that “Ukraine has that right” to use British weapons in Russian territory, given the exigencies of the Russian invasion, but Blinken avoided using either his White House colleague or his British counterpart’s language on Wednesday.

“Again, we are determined that Ukraine win this war and succeed for its people and for its future,” he replied when pressed to clarify his original statement. “We’ve been clear about our own policy, but again, these are decisions that Ukraine has to make, Ukraine will make for itself.  And we’re committed to making sure that Ukraine has the equipment it needs to succeed on the battlefield.”

Blinken’s characterization of the U.S. policy was interpreted in some Ukrainian circles as a change in policy.

“It’s very good news that when he when Secretary was asked about [these] limitations on the use of American weapons, he said that … in the final analysis, it’s up to Ukraine to decide how to use this weaponry,” Ukrainian foreign affairs committee chairman Oleksandr Merezhko told the Washington Examiner. “Maybe Americans here are following the suit of British in this regard.”

Ukrainian forces have “partially stabilize[d] the situation,” nonetheless, Zelensky announced on Wednesday.

“Over the course of the day our Defense and Security Forces of Ukraine — all units involved — have managed to partially stabilize the situation,” Zelensky said in an evening update. “The occupier, who entered the Kharkiv region, is being destroyed with all available means. Artillery, drones, and our infantry are working quite accurately. I thank all those who are in their positions now.”

Blinken offered his visit to Kyiv as a show of solidarity with the Ukrainian government and society, replete with a Tuesday evening appearance on stage at a bar in the capital city, where the top U.S. diplomat — whose love of music is well-known — joined a local rock band in performing Neil Young’s “Rockin in the Free World.”  That performance punctuated two days of more traditional diplomacy, including the unveiling of “a first-of-its-kind defense enterprise fund” backed by $2 billion of foreign military financing. 

“It has three components: One is to provide weapons today, so this will assist Ukraine in acquiring those weapons,” Blinken said. “Two is to focus as well on…investing in Ukraine’s defense industrial base, helping to strengthen even more its capacity to produce what it needs for itself but also to produce for others. And finally, using this fund to help Ukraine purchase military equipment from other countries, not just the United States, for Ukraine’s use.”

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Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba gave Blinken a warm welcome as he acknowledged his U.S. counterpart’s several visits to Ukraine since the earliest weeks of the full-scale invasion, but he also maintained that “there is a perception of the level of corruption and there are facts about the level of corruption,” in an apparent rejoinder to Blinken’s speech on Tuesday. 

“If we were as corrupt as the perception says, they simply wouldn’t be giving us any money; they wouldn’t be opening accession talks with Ukraine to accede the European Union, and the United States wouldn’t have trust in Ukraine,” Kuleba said. “So there are issues which we are addressing together, but I think it will be true to say that since his first day in office, President Zelenskyy — and since the first sessions of the Ukrainian Government and parliament, we’ve been consistently tackling issues of corruption and achieved serious results on this track.”

“And listen, I know this is a really, really difficult time,” Blinken said from the stage of Barman Dictat, where he was surrounded by the members of 19.99, a local Ukrainian rock band. “Your soldiers, your citizens, particularly in the northeast in Kharkiv, are suffering tremendously. But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world, and the free world is with you too.”

Notwithstanding an expression of mild self-doubt — “I don’t know if we can pull this off” — Blinken, playing what appeared to be an Epiphone 335, and the band launched into a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

The top U.S. diplomat, surely the first person in the presidential line of succession to have his own page as a “verified artist” on Spotify, did his part not only on the guitar but as a backup vocalist. He has shown off his musical chops in public at least once before, playing onstage at the State Department last September.

The Kyiv performance put a musical flourish on his message to the war-torn state, hours after unveiling a long-term bilateral security deal with Ukraine and exhorting the embattled society to uproot corruption amid a new Russian offensive.

“The United States has been by your side from Day One,” Blinken said earlier Tuesday in a speech at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. “We’re with you today. And we will stay by your side until Ukraine’s security, its sovereignty, its ability to choose its own path is guaranteed. And we’re far from your only friend. Dozens of countries around the world are not just rooting for Ukraine’s success — they are helping you achieve it.”

The reliability of that support came under question in recent months due to a dispute in Washington that led to a protracted lapse in funding for U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, as Blinken acknowledged. Nonetheless, he cited the passage of a $60 billion aid bill as proof positive of that commitment, despite the delay, and tried to assure his Ukrainian audience that “Ukraine’s bridge to NATO will be bolstered by a series of mutually reinforcing bilateral security agreements” with dozens of individual NATO members.

“Under our own 10-year agreement, the United States will support Ukraine’s defense and security across a range of essential capabilities, from its air force to its air defense, from drones to demining,” Blinken said. “If Russia or anyone else were to attack Ukraine, we will work with Ukraine immediately, at the highest levels, to coordinate how to help you beat back the threat. Our bilateral security agreement will accelerate our joint efforts to build and build up Ukraine’s defense industrial base so that you can produce artillery, ammunition, air defenses, and other crucial weapons you need here in Ukraine.”

That pledge stopped short of the vision outlined Tuesday in a report by a task force chaired by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The task force, which united former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and 15 other former senior officials from across NATO, argued that Western leaders must abandon their reticence to invite Ukraine into NATO if they want to remain credible and discourage Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions.

“This report concludes that to avoid an open-ended war, NATO leaders must demonstrate their irreversible, collective commitment to Ukraine,” they wrote in the report. “To do so they should invite Ukraine to start accession talks to join NATO. A credible NATO membership perspective is a means to persuade Russia it will not gain from continuing its illegal war. Inviting Ukraine now to start accession talks can pressure Russia to end the war and to give Ukraine a fair chance at winning the peace. Further delaying an invitation would have the opposite effect.”

Blinken, for his part, implied that Ukraine would not be admitted into NATO or the European Union in the absence of continued anti-corruption reforms.

“The choices that you make, the kind of democracy that you build, will determine the strength and the staying power of the coalition by Ukraine’s side,” Blinken said. “Winning on the battlefield will prevent Ukraine from becoming part of Russia. Winning the war against corruption will keep Ukraine from becoming like Russia.”

That statement clanged in the ears of some Ukrainian listeners, given the widespread perception that Ukrainian forces are being battered near Kharkiv due to the lapse in U.S. funding and the demand by President Joe Biden’s team that Ukrainian forces refrain from using American weapons to target Russian troops in Russian territory.

“I understand what he is trying to say, but it also feels a bit out of touch with reality,” Kyiv School of Economics president Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former Ukrainian economy minister, wrote on social media. “Corruption is a critical issue but Ukraine has made major progress in combating it. So, [Blinken] is correct in discussing the importance of success in fighting corruption. Yet, he is speaking at the time when Russia is expanding the front and many Ukrainians are dying. A major reason for the Russia current success and for people dying is the delay in the US aid.”

Mylovanov also noted that Biden’s team “won’t allow [Ukraine] to strike Russia on Russian territory,” a restriction that U.S.-based analysts also have criticized.

“U.S. policy has effectively created a vast sanctuary in which Russia has been able to amass its ground invasion force and from which it is launching glide bombs and other long-range strike systems in support of its renewed invasion,” Institute for the Study of War analyst George Barros wrote Monday in the latest update on the battlefield. “Whatever the merits of this US policy before the Russian assault on Kharkiv Oblast began, it should be modified immediately to reflect the urgent realities of the current situation.”

Blinken ended his speech on an optimistic note.

“For decades, Putin has caused unspeakable grief for the people of Ukraine. He’s inflicted every kind of degradation and harshness,” he said. “The spirit of Ukrainians cannot be destroyed by a bomb or buried in a mass grave. It cannot be bought with a bribe or repressed with a threat. It is pure. It is unbreakable. And it is why Ukraine will succeed.”

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That combination of performances contained a “danger and vulnerability,” Mylovanov suggested, that it could “blow back, and it won’t be good, neither for Ukraine nor the U.S. administration.” In the bar, at least, Blinken pulled it off.

“He played well,” 19.99 frontman Dmitry Temnyi told Reuters.

Tariffs will be raised on steel and aluminum from 0-7.5% to 25%, semiconductors from 25% to 50% by 2025, electric vehicles from 25% to 100%, batteries and critical minerals from 7.5% to 25%, solar panels from 25% to 50%, and medical products from 7.5% to 25% in 2026. 

However, not everyone in the Democratic Party is rallying behind Biden’s new tariffs. 

“This is horrible news for American consumers and a major setback for clean energy,” Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) posted on X. “Tariffs are a direct, regressive tax on Americans and this tax increase will hit every family.”

But Biden explained his administration’s decision by saying China was “driving other manufacturers around the world out of business.”

“China heavily subsidized all these products, pushing Chinese companies to produce far more than the rest of the world can absorb. And then dumping the excess products onto the market at unfairly low prices….” Biden said Tuesday in a speech at the White House.

In addition, Biden endorsed maintaining tariffs on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods that were put in place by former President Donald Trump. In 2019, Biden actually criticized Trump’s tariffs on China as being taxes pushed onto American consumers.

“Trump doesn’t get the basics,” Biden posted on X at the time. “Any freshman econ student can tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs. The cashiers at Target see what’s going on — they know more about economics than Trump.”

With these strengthened tariffs, the Biden administration could be hoping to win favor with voters in swing states that rely heavily on manufacturing jobs.

“We know China’s unfair practices have harmed communities in Michigan and Pennsylvania and around the country that are now having the opportunity to come back due to President Biden’s investment agenda,” Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, said.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, a former critic of the Chinese tariffs, said they were necessary because China produced an excess of products that flooded American markets.

“President Biden and I have seen firsthand the impacts of surges of certain artificially cheap Chinese imports on American communities in the past, and we will not tolerate that again,” Yellen said, explaining that the tariffs were not meant to be “anti-China.”

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Biden’s tariffs also garnered criticism from Republican leaders since the administration only put tariffs on electric vehicles and not gas-powered ones. 

“The fact that these tariffs do not apply to gas-powered cars and trucks but only to Chinese EVs shows that this has nothing to do with protecting American Workers,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “It’s all about Crooked Joe’s agenda of killing gas-powered automobiles while forcing Americans into ultra-expensive Electric Vehicles they don’t want and can’t afford.”

“We must return to Gaza now! We are coming home to the Holy Land!” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said during an Israeli Independence Day rally. “We must encourage emigration. Encourage the voluntary emigration of the residents of Gaza. It is moral!”

Those policies would run contrary to international law, according to United Nations officials and leading Western powers. Ben Gvir’s airing of those goals has drawn criticism from President Joe Biden’s administration, but some families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas believe that Ben Gvir has obstructed the liberation of the captives by pushing Netanyahu to conduct the war along lines conducive to those hard-right ambitions.

“There’s this complete fallacy of what ‘total victory’ has to be in this case for Israel — and that is Hamas completely ceasing to exist and for full Israeli control, forever, over the Gaza Strip,” Hebrew University historian Jonathan Dekel-Chen, an Israeli American whose son, Sagui, was taken hostage on Oct. 7, told the Washington Examiner last week. “Neither of those are going to happen in the real world, and striving for that will only get the hostages killed — and a lot of Palestinians as well, of course — because you cannot avoid in such a densely populated area more civilian casualties.”

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 amid the Second Intifada, almost 40 years after seizing the territory from Egypt in the Six-Day War. Hard-right distaste for that withdrawal has created internal pressure on Netanyahu to make the safety of the hostages a secondary objective in the war, according to Dekel-Chen.

“They’re looking for population transfers; they’re looking for very radical things. They never came to peace with Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005,” he said. “And they now see an opportunity to return to what they consider to be the good old days, which is Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and intensive Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip, which will just cause endless conflict in our region and untold bloodshed.”

The United States, Egypt, and Qatar have been coordinating indirect negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage deal, fueled in part by an offer from Netanyahu that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described as “extraordinarily generous.” Hamas rejected that offer and countered with a demand that Israel “basically lose the war and let Hamas win the war,” as Netanyahu put it Sunday in an interview with Dan Senor on the Call Me Back podcast. Yet his theory of victory has drawn frank skepticism from Biden’s team in recent days.

“We are struggling over what the theory of victory is, and, I think sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, ‘total victory,’” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said Monday at the 2024 NATO Youth Summit in Miami. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible. … And so, ultimately, I think, we view that there has to be more of a political solution.”

Netanyahu outlined his theory of the case in broad strokes on Sunday, saying he envisions the destruction of Hamas as an organized military force, followed by “mop-up” operations to kill surviving terrorists and then a transition to an administration of Gaza by Palestinian civilians who are not associated with Hamas.

“That’s the realistic plan right now,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “People say, ‘What are you going to do on the day after? Where’s your plan?’ Well, the first thing is make sure it’s the day after.”

Those general statements fail to acknowledge the difficulty of defeating a terrorist organization, according to top U.S. officials who warned that Hamas’s recruiters would thrive amid the protracted instability and carnage.

“One of the risks of engaging in any kind of counterinsurgency campaign is the ability of the terrorist group to attract more recruits and more followers as time goes on,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday. “So, one of the key points that we have been reinforcing is to step back just from a tactical military analysis of the situation and ask strategically: How do we get to the common goal, the enduring defeat of Hamas? And that is going to require military pressure, yes. But more than just military pressure — a political plan to get there.”

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If Netanyahu has faced criticism for lack of a plan, Israel’s hard-right politicians made their political plan clear on Tuesday.

“In order to preserve the security achievements for which so many of our troops gave up their lives for, we must settle Gaza, with security forces and with settlers,” Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, told the same rally where Ben Gvir spoke. “This is not because there is no other option but out of a deep understanding that this is the only real way, both to exact a heavy price from the Nazis, from Hamas, and to protect our people and our homeland. We will wipe out the disgrace of the year 2005 with settlement in the year 2024-2025, God willing.”

Doctors said they were no longer sure if they would be able to leave the area despite being scheduled to leave this past Monday. Last week, Israel gained control of the Rafah crossing, the border between Gaza and Egypt, which was being used heavily by aid organizations.

“Right now we are stuck in Gaza,” Monica Johnston, a nurse from Oregon who is one of the American doctors stuck in Rafah, told the Washington Post. “No safe way to get out and no new help or supplies coming in.”

Johnston and the other doctors are on a two-week rotation at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. They entered Gaza on May 1 alongside doctors from Australia, Egypt, and Jordan. The doctors are reportedly rationing water, and at least one is in poor health.

A Virginia-based organization, the Palestinian American Medical Association, announced that the doctors were stranded and urged U.S. officials for help.

State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said the United States is aware of the doctors and is working with the Israeli and Egyptian governments to secure their safe exit.

“We don’t control this border crossing, and this is an incredibly complex situation that has very serious implications for the safety and security of U.S. citizens,” Patel said. “Rafah is a conduit for the safe departure of foreign nationals, which is why we continue to want to see it get opened as swiftly as possible.”

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On Monday, a United Nations official was killed in Rafah despite being in a vehicle marked with the U.N. flag, marking the first U.N. casualty since the war with Hamas began following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. The attack alarmed Johnston.

“With the convoy incident today, we are extremely nervous about any promises made to us about safe passage,” Johnston said.

“Any military operation … has got to be connected to a strategic end game that also answers the question ‘What comes next?’ And that’s something that we’re really bearing in on with the Israeli government,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Monday afternoon. “We want an outcome in which the page gets turned from Hamas’s terroristic reign over Gaza and a better future comes for the Palestinian people and for the security of the state of Israel.”

Sullivan’s appearance in the press briefing room put a spotlight on a dispute that is roiling Israel’s high military counsels in conjunction with a related controversy around President Joe Biden’s opposition to a major Israel Defense Forces operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Netanyahu maintains that an assault there is “a precondition for victory” in the war, even as the reappearance of Hamas formations in northern Gaza feeds skepticism of his theory of the case.

“Military pressure is necessary but not sufficient to fully defeat Hamas,” Sullivan said. “If Israel’s military efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back, and Israel will remain under threat. We are seeing this happen in Gaza City.”

Netanyahu rebuffed such criticisms on Sunday, arguing in an interview that Israel is in the first phase of a three-stage process that will see the IDF “destroy” the Hamas battalions in Rafah, then conduct “mop-up” operations targeting the remnants of the fighting forces, and finally coordinate for the administration of Gaza by Palestinian civilians unconnected to Hamas.

“That’s the realistic plan right now,” Netanyahu said on the Call Me Back podcast with Dan Senor. “People say, ‘What are you going to do on the day after? Where’s your plan?’ Well, the first thing is make sure it’s the day after.”

Those general ideas have not only failed to satisfy Biden, but they have drawn sharp and public pushback from senior Israeli officials. Israeli generals are perceived as “openly briefing against Netanyahu,” as one prominent Israeli journalist put it, following a detailed report on a rebuke delivered to the prime minister by Israel’s top general.

“We are now operating once again in Jabaliya. As long as there’s no diplomatic process to develop a governing body in the Strip that isn’t Hamas, we’ll have to launch campaigns again and again in other places to dismantle Hamas’s infrastructure,” IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi told Netanyahu in a recent meeting, according to an Israeli broadcaster. “It will be a Sisyphean task.”

Israeli officials ordered the evacuation of Jabaliya on Saturday. “You are in a dangerous war zone, Hamas is trying to rebuild its strength, and therefore, the army will act forcefully against terrorist organizations in the area,” leaflets dropped to the residents warned. “Anyone who remains there will be in danger.”

Netanyahu, without mentioning Halevi, sidestepped the suggestion that such operations run contrary to his stated theory of victory.

“The important thing to understand is that once you destroy these battalions, you haven’t eliminated all the Hamas fighters,” he told Senor. “They’re still there, but they have a hard time having an organized structure. … Now, sometimes they congregate, as they did in the Shifa hospital. They all congregated because they don’t have a place. … We killed several hundred terrorists, captured another 500. And we did this with a far smaller force and with much less intense fighting because we’ve already destroyed those battalions.”

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Sullivan maintained that Netanyahu should “consider the tactical battlefield situation in Gaza in light of the bigger strategic picture” in Gaza, including a more detailed consideration of the political process that could unfold after the conflict.

“And [we] feel that there needs to be more attention on that piece of it, lest we end up in a circumstance where Israel conducts a military operation, kills a bunch of Hamas guys, also creates some harm to innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, and then terrorists come back,” he said. “As we have seen them come back in Gaza City and Khan Younis and other places.”