Required reading from around the web of the best, most interesting, or most though provoking things we’ve read:
Hinderaker: Iran On the Ropes?
“I confess that even after I boarded the Trump train–basically, when no alternative was left–I didn’t imagine that Trump would prove to be a foreign policy genius. But isn’t that what we are seeing? Improving our trade deals, finally doing something about North Korea, standing up to Putin’s Russia, pushing back against Chinese theft of intellectual property, exposing anti-Semitism and fecklessness in the U.N., getting more contributions from NATO allies–it’s been a heck of a year and a half! Then there is Iran. Barack Obama pursued a bizarre Iran policy, from the first days of his administration, when he went on Iranian television. […] Donald Trump’s policy is, thankfully, entirely different.”
Strassel: Devin Nunes, Washington’s Public Enemy No. 1
“Mr. Nunes’s efforts have provoked extraordinary partisan and institutional fury in Washington—across the aisle, in the FBI and other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, in the media. ‘On any given day there are dozens of attacks, each one wilder in its claims,’ he says. Why does he keep at it? ‘First of all, because it’s my job. This is a basic congressional investigation, and we follow the facts,’ he says. The ‘bigger picture,’ he adds, is that in ‘a lot of the bad and problematic countries’ that Intelligence Committee members investigate, ‘this is what they do there. There is a political party that controls the intelligence agencies, controls the media, all to ensure that party stays in power. If we get to that here, we no longer have a functioning republic. We can’t let that happen.'”
Krumholtz: The Facts Behind The Trump Tower Meeting Are Incriminating, But Not For Trump
“The truth is that it doesn’t matter whether Trump knew of this meeting or not, or whether Mueller can ever prove that he did. Don Jr. and his associates did nothing wrong in setting up this meeting. But the events surrounding the meeting are damning for the intelligence agencies, the media, and the Democrat Party.”