What Happened Today: August 1, 2023

U.S. military hegemony threatened; Attempted attack on Jewish school; Uber is finally profitable

Aug 01, 2023

The Big Story

The U.S. military’s strength and technological superiority over other nations has largely evaporated, according to a new report by the RAND Corporation, an organization whose primary funding comes from the U.S. government: “The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks.” The report concludes that the current military structure could leave the United States unable to deter simultaneous threats from China and Russia.

With U.S. forces across Europe and the Western Pacific lacking both combat size and protection around their bases, RAND notes they could fail “to seize the initiative from China or a reconstituted Russia” and become “vulnerable to attacks by salvos of accurate ballistic and cruise missiles.” Part of the problem is the dearth of critical equipment and insufficient domestic production capacity to arm the military to face current competitors and hostile powers. That weakness was underscored recently by Washington, D.C.’s struggles to supply Ukraine with enough shells and missiles for its war against Russia—a shortfall that reflected a lack of capacity that could become a serious vulnerability if the United States needs to manufacture arms in its own conflict.

“The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” Becca Wasser, head of The Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security, told Politico in June about war games against China. “The United States needs to take steps now in the Indo-Pacific to ensure the conflict doesn’t happen in the future. We are hugely behind the curve. Ukraine is our wakeup call. This is our watershed moment.”

In The Back Pages: Ending Aid Won’t Stop the Demonization of Israel

The Rest

→ A gunman opened fire outside of a Jewish school in Memphis, Tennessee, after he was thwarted from entering by the building’s security system. After Margolin Hebrew Academy-Feinstone Yeshiva staffers alerted police, the man fled the scene before he was eventually shot by police who found him in his truck. The gunman survived and was detained following the incident. Tennessee state authorities have not yet announced charges or suggested a motive, though Assistant Chief of Memphis Police Services Don Crowe said, “I personally truly believe that we have avoided a tragedy. … I think this suspect was going to harm somebody before the day was over.” Tennessee lawmakers are waiting for the new general assembly session to weigh potential gun legislation after a gunman killed six people in a shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School four months ago.

→ Number of the Day: 40%

That’s how many Americans lack confidence in the military, the lowest number in 25 years, according to a new Gallup poll. Joining analysts at RAND and a growing number of lawmakers, regular Americans from across the political spectrum worry about the state of our armed forces. Confidence among Republicans fell more than 20 points in just the past three years, while among Democrats it dropped 6 points over the past year. That decline in confidence comes just as military leaders struggle to replenish their ranks in the midst of the most significant recruiting crisis in half a century. A recent report found the army was 15,000 soldiers short of its latest recruitment goal.

→ For 10 days, four Nigerian men traversed 3,500 ocean miles while stowed away in a tiny space tied to a net above the rudder of a cargo ship. After running out of food and water, the men survived by drinking salty ocean water that splashed against the ship, while sharks and large fish lurked below the surface. “It was a terrible experience for me,” said 38-year-old Opemipo Matthew Yeye, one of the four men who boarded in Lagos before being rescued by Brazilian police when the ship moved into a port in Vitoria. “On board it is not easy. I was shaking, so scared. But I’m here.” Unable to sleep with the engine roaring nearby, the exhausted men hung on, hopeful the ship would take them to Europe. Landing in Brazil, two men requested help to get back to Nigeria, while the other two applied for asylum.

→ Billions of dollars in profits might go up in smoke as a pathogen rapidly spreading across American cannabis crops threatens to infect the nation’s weed supply. The problem, growers say, is that hop latent viroid, or HLVd, can significantly reduce the potency of the psychoactive compounds of marijuana plants, a problem that cultivators call “dudding.” Some critics of today’s increasingly strong cannabis products say maybe that’s not such a bad thing, but the big movers in the $32 billion cannabis marketplace don’t want to rock the boat with customers who’ve come to expect a wallop in their pipes. Growers of major operations are now struggling to contain outbreaks. “You saw the spread happen in the legal states first, like California, where you started having bigger grows and bigger greenhouses that are making thousands and tens of thousands of plants,” Jeremy Warren, director of cannabis genetics company Dark Heart, told The Wall Street Journal.

→ After notching some $31 billion in losses since Uber first opened its books up to investors in 2014, the ride-hailing operator has turned its first operating profit. Spending wildly to expand its footprint across the globe, Uber had long put growth ahead of returns, a strategy that might have finally paid off, at least for its investors, after it reported $326 million in pretax operational earnings, a nice bump up from the $713 million lost at the same time last year. While Uber left taxis at the curb long ago, recent successes have also allowed it to lap direct competitor Lyft, which said this spring that it would have to slash its fares to try to keep up with Uber.

→ For the second time in three days, an Ukraine drone struck Russian military offices in Moscow in what one Ukrainian official said will become a more frequent occurrence. Described by Russia as an attempted “terrorist attack,” the strike on Tuesday was against Russia’s IQ quarter, which is home to the ministry of industry and trade and the ministry of economic development. No one was injured in the strike, which left some minor damage on the structure, but the event has rattled Russians, who have to square up the increased encroachments into their territory with Russian claims that the “special military operation” in Ukraine is humming along as planned. “Moscow is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter, adding that Moscow should anticipate “more unidentified drones, more collapse, more civil conflicts, more war.”

→ Miami continues to be a huge draw for affluent homeowners and businesses who cater to them, but that’s a problem for the city, as it now drives away more residents than it brings in. Between 2020 and 2022, Miami-Dade saw a 79,535-person drop in net migration, according to a new report by the Brookings Institution. The first population loss in successive years since 1970, the demographic trend is driven, it seems, by soaring housing prices, which have jumped 53% in Miami since the summer of 2020. Median rents are way up, too, having increased 27% since 2019. The trend line has some concerned that Miami could go the way of New York City and San Francisco, where only white-collar finance and tech workers can afford to live in the city while residents making less money head elsewhere for affordable housing. “It’s the middle class, it’s our talent base, it’s our college graduates moving out for better opportunities elsewhere,” Maria Ilcheva, a census analyst at Florida International University, told the WSJ.

→ Paul Reubens, the man behind the iconic Pee-wee Herman character that reached its height in the 1980s, died in Los Angeles on Sunday. He was 70. Created when Reubens was a troupe member of the L.A. comedy group The Groundlings in the late 1970s, the odd, bow-tied character launched into the American consciousness when HBO broadcast the 1981 comedy special of The Pee-wee Herman Show. Appearances on late-night talk shows and a running series on CBS kept Pee-wee front and center for much of the decade, until a scandal around Reubens being charged for indecent exposure in a Florida adult movie theater shredded his reputation. A late career revival came in 2016, when Judd Apatow helped Reubens put out a new Pee-wee movie on Netflix. Reubens was born in Peekskill, New York, in 1952; his father had been a pilot who’d helped sneak fighter planes into Israel during the 1948 war of independence.

TODAY IN TABLET:

It’s Bad to Be a Sheep by Armin Rosen

What Israel can learn from Armenia’s misplaced reliance on a superpower patron

The Culture of Transgression by Michael Lind

Our antinomian elite’s war against tradition has become a war against the working class

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

The publication on July 16, 2023, of an article by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel opened a fresh debate over a topic dominated by outdated assumptions and emotional entreaties. To deepen the conversation, Tablet invited a group that includes a retired IDF general, U.S. Senators and members of Congress, former Middle East diplomats, and writers from various political persuasions to offer their thoughts on the issue. We will be publishing them in the Scroll today and next week.

Ending Aid Won’t Stop the Demonization of Israel

Tampering with something that works would put Israelis in danger

By Ritchie Torres

Lately, I have heard more and more pro-Israel Americans, still a small minority within the pro-Israel community, grow increasingly convinced that U.S. aid to Israel is no longer worth the political scrutiny it attracts. If the U.S. were no longer providing aid to Israel, then the anti-Israel zealots, the argument goes, would stop obsessing about Israel and stop singling out the Jewish state for delegitimation.

I, for one, am skeptical that the hyperbolic and hysterical hatred for Israel, reinforced by decades of demonization, would magically disappear with the end of U.S. foreign aid.

There is no reason to think that BDS activists here in the U.S. would suddenly stop promoting the delegitimation of Israel simply because foreign aid for the Jewish state is no longer a line item in the federal budget.

For the BDS movement, which would retain its raison d’etre regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., ending U.S. aid to Israel is a distant second to ending Israel itself. The anti-Zionist crusaders in U.S. politics will not declare mission accomplished until the Jewish state ceases to exist.

Tablet magazine recently published a controversial piece, “End U.S. Aid to Israel,” that alleges that “America’s manipulation of the Jewish state is endangering Israel and American Jews.” The article’s assault on U.S. aid to Israel is so provocative that Tablet has invited me, as a pro-Israel member of Congress, to offer a response.

The article asserts that U.S. aid to Israel provides “Congress and the White House with a tool to leverage influence over a key strategic ally.” Exactly which White House and Congress the authors have in mind the article doesn’t say but the claim here is readily refutable by the recent history of the American-Israeli relationship.

No recent American president or congressional majority has ever proposed conditioning or otherwise leveraging aid to Israel. Nor has any recent American president or congressional majority ever actively attempted to do so in order to impose its will on Israel. Quite the contrary: Both the White House and Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, have never wavered in affirming that, no matter what policy differences emerge between the two democracies, U.S. aid to Israel should be unconditional, much like the friendship itself. Indeed, Israel is an oasis of bipartisan cooperation in the D.C. desert of partisanship and polarization.

The article then proceeds to provocatively portray U.S. aid to Israel as an exploitative arrangement that subsidizes the U.S. defense industry at the expense of Israel’s own defense base. Although the argument might contain a kernel of truth, I disagree with the cynical conclusion it ultimately draws.

The value of U.S. aid to Israel is no abstraction to Israelis. It has led to lifesaving inventions like Iron Dome, which has been extraordinarily effective at saving the lives of civilians and deescalating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would be far more destructive and deadlier without an American-Israeli missile defense system.

If Israel were to ever find itself engaged in new hostilities with Hezbollah, which has the capacity to fire infinitely more rockets and missiles than Hamas, an Iron Dome system replenished by U.S. aid would become even more critical, not less.

The article raises doubts not only about the value of U.S. aid to Israel but also about the overall U.S. contribution to the founding and flourishing of Israel as a Jewish state. That President Harry Truman was the first international leader to recognize the independence of the fledgling Jewish state is brought up only in passing as though it were a trivial development. That the U.S. has been the leader of the free world since Israel’s rebirth goes entirely unmentioned.

The success of democracies like Israel or Japan or Germany or Taiwan did not happen in a vacuum. It was neither accidental nor inevitable. It took root within a liberal democratic order that the U.S. not only built after WWII but also singularly sustained in the eight decades since then. It seems ahistorical to separate the stunning success of Israel—which is undoubtedly a testament to the resiliency and resourcefulness of the Jewish people—from the American-led international order that rendered it possible, or at a minimum, raised the probability of its improbable success.

To read the article, one would be forgiven for thinking that Israel is America’s battered spouse, desperately in need of a divorce. It laments that U.S. aid has shrunk Israel to “an adjunct to American power in a crucial region.” “Adjunct” is hardly the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Israeli military might. To the extent that Israel might appear to be an adjunct, it is more a function of America’s superpower status than of U.S. aid to Israel.

There is simply no evidence that the U.S. has stunted the growth of Israel, which has emerged as the regional superpower of the Middle East. Nor is there any evidence that foreign aid has made Israel feel remotely inhibited from disagreeing with the United States and doing what it believes to be best for its own country. Both the Israeli government and the Israeli people have never been shy about voicing opposition to U.S. policies. The JCPOA comes to mind.

As a member of Congress, I do not recognize the stunted, inhibited, manipulated Israel that the article seems to describe. The Israel I know is self-confident enough to advance its own interests and often does so unapologetically to the chagrin of its harshest detractors.

The provocative proposal to end U.S. aid to Israel is, quite simply, a solution in search of a problem. And the attempt to reduce the American-Israeli relationship to something “forthrightly more transactional” would deprive the world of one of its most fruitful friendships.

The Scroll

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