Let’s start by discussing Spain, which may seem like an odd choice, but bear with me. Spain’s socialist government has become a study in radicalism and spiraling decline. The left-wing prime minister’s wife has now been criminally charged in a ballooning corruption scandal that is engulfing the family. Unpopular with voters and losing his grip on power, Pedro Sanchez has rammed through a measure to grant amnesty to at least half a million illegal immigrants – many of them military-aged men from North Africa. He says the move will help ensure a “rich, open and diverse” future and says it’s necessary to combat the “far right.” Despite its status as a NATO ‘ally,’ Spain has been aggressively unhelpful to the United States during the war against Iran’s terrorist regime, closing its airspace to U.S. military aircraft and denying access to jointly operated bases on its soil, including for refueling. Sanchez’s government has also ostentatiously refused to meet bare minimum mandatory standards for NATO military spending, distinguishing itself as a uniquely derelict deadbeat. Spain rejected the latest consensus higher-spending threshold, having failed to even meet the previous, significantly lower threshold.
Rather than pressuring the Spanish to pull their dead weight, NATO has carved out a special exception for Sanchez’s laggardism. Spain relies on allies for its own defense, but now that its principal security guarantor needs help, or at least nonresistance, Spain has actively impeded its war aims. Sanchez is also virulently anti-Israel, severing defense agreements with the Jewish state (which harms his own country far more than it impacts Israel) while recognizing a Palestinian “state,” vociferously embracing the Gaza “genocide” lie, and even pushing for Israel to be banned from the international singing competition, Eurovision.
It was in Pedro Sanchez’s Spain, appropriately, that a ‘Leftists-of-the-World Unite’ confab was held last week, drawing a number of prominent American speakers. One of them was outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), a Democrat who recently decided to eschew a reelection campaign due to the fraud fiasco over which he’s bumblingly presided. An incompetent dunce, Walz may be (barely) remembered by history as a congenital and weird liar who joined Kamala Harris’ failed 2024 presidential ticket.
In Barcelona, Walz aggressively dispensed with the long-fading norm of American leaders refraining from directly criticizing a commander in chief while abroad (“politics stops at the water’s edge” seems to have fallen by the wayside on both sides of the aisle), especially during an active military operation. Pandering to his audience of global leftists, socialists, and communists, Walz thundered that President Donald Trump is a “feeble-minded, trigger-happy president who plunged us into a war where no threat was present, with no clear objectives and no exit plan.”
He added, “We need to call that what it is. That’s fascism—or at least it’s fascist-curious.” This person, amazingly, is not some fringe figure, but rather his party’s most recent vice presidential nominee. It’s unclear whether the unhinged ‘fascism’ comment was intended as a nod to a dark chapter in Spain’s history. It’s possible, but probably unlikely, given Walz’s demonstrable and buffoonish historical illiteracy. It’s also a bit mind-bending to denounce as ‘fascism’ a war being waged to defang and disarm an objectively Islamofascist regime.
Setting aside the “feeble-minded” line, which seems like near-laboratory-pure projection, what does Walz mean when he says “no threat was present” from Iran’s regime? The regime’s unofficial slogan, chanted endlessly for decades, is “death to America.” The regime hasn’t just shouted those words, they’ve lived them as an animating creed, murdering Americans throughout its decadeslong reign of terrorism. The revolution’s first international act upon seizing power was to take dozens of Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979, killing several of them. The deadly acts have carried on for nearly half a century, including maiming and murdering hundreds or thousands of Americans abroad. It was responsible for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre that stole the lives of dozens of US citizens. And it plotted to assassinate our president, an act that may not have offended Gov. Walz, who smirkingly referenced scrolling social media for news of Trump’s death in a speech last year. “There will be news” to that effect at some point, he assured his audience.
The regime is also fanatically fixated on developing a rogue nuclear weapons program (they’ve aggressively pursued and lied about this for years), as well as a missile shield to protect said program from future “Operation Midnight Hammer”-style attacks to disrupt and defeat it. They’ve just recently been caught lying, as usual, about their missile range capabilities. Permanently stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons and a protective umbrella of conventional weapons is the overarching goal of this operation, as has been publicly articulated by administration officials countless times. Walz may pretend that such threats and objectives do not exist, but that doesn’t make them any less true. Maybe he’s playing dumb for his audience. Perhaps no play acting is required. He’s wrong, either way.
So is fellow Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who appeared on a Sunday morning talk show last weekend to summarize the weekslong campaign against Iran’s regime thusly: “What have we achieved in Iran? Devastation, higher gas prices, the pope admonishing America.”
An uptick in gas prices is a cheap political talking point, especially coming from someone whose political party’s peacetime policies are designed to raise gas prices. The president’s social media flaming of the pope is regrettable and gratuitous but it’s not an argument against the mission. As for “devastating,” one must assume Khanna somehow isn’t talking about the blows dealt by our incredible military to the regime — from decapitating its top leadership, to pulverizing its nuclear program, to massively degrading its missile and drone capabilities and supplies, to sinking its navy, to dominating its airspace, to squeezing its economy, to hammering its ability to project power, to marshaling a coalition of regional allies (including Israelis and Arabs alike) against the regime. Those all seem like rather important data points in assessing what we’ve achieved in Iran.
It’s one thing to believe the Iran war is the incorrect call, though the common, lazy “war of choice” refrain falsely suggests that forcibly crushing the regime’s nuclear weapons ambitions ought to be considered optional for American and global security and stability. It’s quite another to feign ignorance (or, possibly in Walz’s case, advertise genuine ignorance) about the war’s righteous purpose, while deliberately ignoring the remarkable, historic successes achieved by our men and women in uniform. The latter approach might be described as partisan defeatism at best.