While the West has united in its condemnation of the Russian assault on Ukraine, China has refused to condemn Moscow at the UN or elsewhere. Russia and China have strong ideological, economic, and military ties, noted Dan Negrea, and he further argues that the West should act quickly and forcefully to prevent China from more substantive support of Putin’s aggression.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in February at the Beijing Olympics, their 38th visit in the nine years since Xi took power. In a 5,000-word statement on February 4, Xi and Putin proclaimed their friendship with “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation.” Just weeks before the invasion, China signed agreements to buy from Russia energy and agricultural products worth over $200 billion.

Despite early reports that Xi was displeased with Putin’s decision to invade, China has since refused to condemn Russia at the UN and elsewhere—and has prohibited criticism of Russia in the Chinese media and on its heavily censored Internet. This close partnership also had a military aspect: Russia felt comfortable enough to move two-thirds of the troops it normally kept on the Chinese border to the Ukrainian front.

China cannot be shamed into abandoning its support for Russia’s brutal aggression. We know this as the U.S. and the free world have publicly condemned the genocide in Xinjiang, but China has not relented. Yet China is vulnerable to economic pressure. The Chinese people accept the dictatorship of the Communist party in the expectation that their standard of living will continue to increase.

But China’s economic news has not been great recently. Its growth is pegged at just 5.5 percent this year, about half of what it has been since 1978. Even this may prove optimistic.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”