The Middle East Nuclear Arms Race Has Begun

In recent negotiations with the White House, Saudi officials requested American aid in building a nuclear program, including the ability to enrich uranium—a process that can be used for both military and civilian applications. (Most countries with civilian nuclear programs purchase already-enriched uranium, but don’t have the capacity to enrich it further into fuel for atomic weapons.) Jonathan Schachter sees these demands as evidence that America’s failure to restrain Iran has sparked a regional arms race that is already well under way:

Riyadh’s insistence on enrichment follows previous revelations of Saudi activity since the conclusion of the [Iran deal] that appears aimed toward matching Iran’s growing ability to produce and deliver nuclear weapons. In August 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that, with the help of China, the Saudis have built a facility to process uranium ore. In December of the following year, the Journal revealed that the kingdom, again with Chinese assistance, is producing its own ballistic missiles.

The U.S. is incentivizing regional nuclearization by downplaying the Iranian nuclear threat, excessively restraining its responses to Iranian nuclear violations and other provocations, and alienating and undermining its allies.

The way to halt and even reverse the Middle East nuclear arms race is straightforward and requires two steps under U.S. leadership. First, it is well past time to end, rather than enable, Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The U.S. should work with its European allies to . . . reimpose the United Nations arms embargo on Iran and a complete ban on Iranian uranium enrichment.

Second, the United States should take a complementary approach to its allies and partners in the Middle East, by providing them with the diplomatic and military support necessary both to deter Iran and to instill in them sufficient confidence to obviate their own pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Read more at The Hill

More about: Iran nuclear program, Israeli Security, Joseph Biden, Nuclear proliferation, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Foreign policy

Universities Are in Thrall to a Constituency That Sees Israel as an Affront to Its Identity

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.

Read more at Dispatch

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel on campus, University