Free Republic

The assassinations of Iran’s senior leaders by Israel and the United States have triggered unprecedented churn within Tehran’s political and military establishment, eliminating the supreme leader and some of the most powerful men in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have left in place a hard-line government and little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough, according to regional and Western officials. Rather than usher in what President Donald Trump has called “more reasonable” leadership, the surviving Iranian regime is newly emboldened to inflict economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations, according to the officials who spoke on the...

Gazing across what Zbigniew Brzezinski once called the “arc of crisis,” U.S. foreign policy appears to be disintegrating. On the Horn of Africa, Islamic warriors have seized Mogadishu. The warlords, our allies, are on the run. In Islamist Sudan, the Darfur horror rages on. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, whom our secretary of state was only recently snubbing for undemocratic behavior, now appears again to be persona grata as our only alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the Egyptian president scarcely seems chastened. His judges just confirmed a five-year jail sentence for his democratic opponent Ayman Nur, and his regime just...