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  • Opinion | Russia’s Weakness Is Trump’s Opportunity

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    Having just commemorated two years since Oct. 7, 2023, we’re now approaching another grim anniversary—Feb. 24, four years since Russia invaded Ukraine. For all of President Trump’s shortcomings, he deserves credit for recognizing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was vulnerable after having overreached by bombing Qatar. The president leveraged Bibi’s weakness to force a cease-fire. Russia is in a similarly vulnerable position after the failure of its third offensive against Ukraine, yet Mr. Trump has failed to exploit this weakness. This raises the question: Why is Mr. Trump reluctant to take advantage of Vladimir Putin’s helplessness?

    In February, Mr. Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “You don’t have the cards.” Yet from nearly every angle and measure, it’s Russia whose hand is weak. Mr. Putin is more vulnerable today than at any point in his three decades on the global stage. Either Mr. Trump’s sixth sense for using leverage is failing him, or some strange fondness for the Russian president’s strongman persona is preventing him from appreciating the strategic opportunity that lies before him.

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    [ad_2] Rahm Emanuel
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  • Opinion | America’s Debt to Israel

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    Two years after Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, the U.S. should be grateful to Israel. The Jewish state has defanged a range of militant actors who despise the U.S. and have killed Americans. Yet the Gaza war, with its substantial civilian casualties, has turned much of the Democratic Party against Israel and fractured European-Israeli relations. Israel’s enemies on the left depict the Jewish state as an illegitimate pro-Trump “apartheid” state, and the war has also stirred anti-Israel sentiments in corners of the American right.

    This hostility to Israel wasn’t inevitable; wars have sometimes transformed the Middle East for the better. Take the Six Day War. In the 1960s, the radical Arab republics led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser aligned with the Soviet Union. Nasser helped finish off the British in the Middle East, menaced the oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms, and harassed Israel. Arab nationalism—a crude amalgam of socialism, opposition to Western imperialism, violent cultural chauvinism, and sometimes not-so-latent Muslim pride—had gained sway in the region. Nasser and militant Arabism looked like the future.

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    Reuel Marc Gerecht

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