Dave Patterson: The Time for Talk Is Over - US, Israel Strike Iran and Kill Khamenei

The time for substantive talks between the US and Iran has come and gone. At 1:15 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, the US and Israel launched a massive airstrike against targets in Iran. Operation Epic Fury was the American name for the attack, while Israel’s code name was Roaring Lion. Unlike similar strikes in the past, Iran’s senior leadership was targeted, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In a Truth Social post, President Trump announced: “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead.” The objective was to decapitate Iran’s leadership immediately in order to provide the Iranian citizens the freedom to rise up against a leaderless government. Much of that job now appears to be done.

Talks With Iran Were Going Nowhere

DTNZ: Iran puts army on high alert – Reports

Tehran has reportedly told its neighbours in the Middle East not to support a potential US attack.

Iran has placed its forces on high alert, warning neighboring countries that host American bases not to support potential US strikes, Reuters reported on Sunday, citing an official familiar with the matter.

John Klar: EU Tariffs and Sweeping Climate Directives Threaten Global Trade

The European Union (EU) is facing off with the United States over tariffs, war with Russia, and increased regulations governing corporations doing business on the continent. Some claim globalist NGOs exert undue influence over modern Europe through the union: Pending laws that seek to impose environmental and social rules on all US and international companies resemble a globalized regulatory structure. The showdown is underway.

Dr Don Brash: Is an independent foreign policy really feasible?

A week or so ago, Helen Clark and I argued that New Zealand would be nuts to abandon the independent foreign policy which has been a characteristic of New Zealand life for most of the last 40 years, a policy which has seen us retain a close and cordial relationship with the United States and Australia on the one hand while developing an increasingly cordial relationship with China on the other.

Geoffrey Miller: Jacinda Ardern continues to forge a more US-friendly foreign policy

Jacinda Ardern is slowly but surely shifting New Zealand’s foreign policy towards the West.

That was the underlying theme of a keynote address by New Zealand’s Prime Minister this week.

Ardern mentioned China only once by name when she spoke to the US business summit in Auckland on Monday, but Beijing was clearly on her mind throughout the 3000-word address.

Some of the hardest-hitting passages came early in the speech and appeared deliberately indirect and oblique, leaving it up to listeners to make up their own minds on the intended likely target of the PM’s words.

Ron Smith: On being 'fracked'

The London Times, quoting NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, reports that, “Russian agents are secretly working with environmental groups campaigning against fracking to try to maintain Europe’s dependence on gas imports from Moscow.

It should be no surprise to us.  This sort of manipulation of left-leaning activists was a characteristic and quite successful ploy during the Cold War period, when, for example, western anti-nuclear groups were exploited to protest against the dispositions of NATO forces in Europe in the 1980s.  The successful resistance to these pressures by (in particular) President Reagan and Prime-Minister Thatcher, led to the ultimate collapse of the ‘evil empire’ that was holding a substantial part of Eastern Europe in what then seemed perpetual political subservience.

Richard Epstein: The Flat Tax Solution

To step back from the fiscal cliff, we need to simplify our tax policy.

This past Friday, I gave the “Presidential Address” at the Southern Economic Association (SEA) in New Orleans, on the topic of what President Obama’s reelection means for the future of liberty in the United States. As a classical liberal, my outlook is best captured in one simple proposition: a system of sound governance needs to promote a mixture of individual liberty and private property in order to allow individuals to maximize the gains from individual effort and social cooperation.

Richard Epstein: The Austerity Morass

A close look at the economic woes at home and abroad raises this unedifying question: who has proved more inept at handling the current economic crisis, the European Union or the United States? To Paul Krugman, this question has an easy answer: The Europeans for their maddening insistence on fiscal austerity when large government expenditures and credit infusions are needed to prop up a sagging economy. With fiendish glee, Krugman denounces the EU’s austerity measures as “pain without gain.”

The spending cuts of the EU nations, Krugman argues, have shrunk their economies, without offering any prospect of generating long-term growth. The Europeans, it seems, have emulated the worst of President Herbert Hoover’s skinflint budgets that helped prolong the Great Depression. The United States, which this time around has been more liberal with the purse, has suffered far less damage than the EU, which shunned Keynesian prescriptions.

Gary Judd: Arresting a Dangerous Decline

I have read claims that US capacity for generating entrepreneurship and innovation will be a pathway out of the current crisis and will lead to recovery and reassertion of US’s former economic ascendency. I disagree with that proposition.  If there is recovery it will be temporary and its situation will settle at a lower level of economic activity.

The US is in dangerous state (most of the world is, but in relation to the western world’s recovery, the US is the most important).  US government policies have progressively moved from the nearest any state has been to capitalism towards increasingly socialistic measures including continually increasing restrictions on business.  Companies like Microsoft, Google, Blackberry (RIM) have been able to succeed in spite of these policies, but are constantly under attack through the vicious anti trust laws and other restrictions.

Ron Smith: Collective Security and the Responsibility to Protect

The United Nations was established in 1945 primarily as a collective security organisation, with an ancillary aspiration towards the security of individuals. This is reflected in the opening words of the Prologue to the Charter. In latter years, this broader aspiration towards human security has been reflected in the formal adoption by the General Assembly of the policy report ‘Responsibility to Protect’. This envisaged collective intervention in cases of oppression or genocide but the notion has always been in tension with the fundamental Charter principle of ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states’.

The project of suppressing aggression has never worked well. Notwithstanding nearly seventy years of aggression, of one sort or another, there have been only two examples of UN action (Korea and Iraq) and both of these depended on an international fluke. In the first case, the Soviet Union was engaged in a boycott of the UN over the non-seating of mainland China and was thus unable to veto the Korean intervention. The 1990 decision to oppose the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait corresponded to the brief honeymoon which followed the collapse of communism. The present UN ‘RTP’ intervention in Libya is also very likely to prove to have been a one-off. Prominent members of the Security Council are either luke-warm, or passively antagonistic.