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Knicks take commanding NBA Finals lead over Spurs after they scrape through Game 2 nail-biter

NY Post

1 week 3 days ago

The Knicks are heading back to the Garden with a commanding NBA Finals lead.

Jared Schwartz

Has Trump Opened Pandora's Box?

Zero Rss

1 week 3 days ago

Has Trump Opened Pandora's Box?

Authored by John Rosenburger, Senior Fellow at Eisenhower Media Network

The limits of U.S. military power are now fully exposed.

2.5 months in to the U.S.-Israeli war against a nation that posed no threat to the United States’ vital interests, justified by a pyramid of lies, several things are abundantly clear. President Trump failed to define clear and viable political objectives to achieve in our role as Israel’s proxy in yet another war of choice. “Viable” here meaning objectives that are realistically attainable through the military means at a nation’s disposal.

In his classic work Strategy, British theorist B. H. Liddell Hart emphasized that a political leader’s foremost duty is to ensure that war aims are grounded in military reality. As he famously warned, political objectives must “not demand what is militarily impossible.”

Yet that is precisely the error President Trump committed.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons & Amazon

Without clearly defined political objectives, it is impossible to construct U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is in charge of military operations in West Asia and appears to be moving from one ineffective tactic to the next without any unifying operational design. The repeated bombing of military‑related targets across a country the size of Western Europe with more than 90 million people is not a strategy; it is a tactic untethered to any discernible operational or strategic end state.

By limiting ourselves almost entirely to the use of airpower—fully aware that the American public will not accept another protracted ground war in the Middle East, particularly on behalf of Israel’s interests—the Trump administration has boxed itself into an approach with no historical precedent for success. No regime of Iran’s scale has ever been overthrown through airpower alone, and there is no reason to believe this conflict will be the first.

Despite repeated assurances that the war is being won, President Trump has provided no stable or coherent definition of what “victory” actually means. Is it regime change and internal overthrow of the Iranian government? Is it unconditional surrender of Iran’s armed forces? Is it the seizure of nuclear material previously claimed to have been obliterated? Take your pick. The absence of a clear, consistent political end state leaves military commanders struggling to determine what they are supposed to achieve.

Credit: Evan Vucci, @realDonaldTrump/Truth Social

History shows that wars fought without well‑defined political objectives, matched with a viable military strategy, tend to devolve into wars of attrition—conflicts that favor the side with greater resilience and willingness to endure. We see that historical truism unfolding before our eyes. We fail to appreciate that Iran is waging a fundamentally different kind of war, one rooted in national survival, and that resolve has shaped the character and trajectory of the conflict.

It is also clear that this war was based on a host of flawed assumptions. The Trump administration assumed that by assassinating the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, the IGRC and security apparatus of the nation would collapse, and the Iranian people would flood into the streets to violently overthrow the government. How they would do that while being unarmed defies logic. That overthrow, of course, didn’t happen. It had the opposite effect. The government and the people have never been more unified.

Credit: Hamshahri Photo/Wikimedia Commons

The Trump administration assumed that the massive armada of air power it would employ would quickly destroy Iran’s capability to retaliate. It didn’t. It assumed that the Iranian armed forces would not attack U.S. bases and embassies in the region. They did. It assumed that Iran did not have the capability to hide and accurately employ thousands of ballistic missiles and drones for days and weeks on end. It did; another gross failure of both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies as the Iranians pound Israel’s cities, U.S. bases, and Gulf nations night after night.

The Trump administration assumed Iran was incapable of closing the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. military destroyed Iran’s naval surface fleet. They ignored the fact that Iran had several other means of interdicting the movement of any ships through the Strait—a plethora of different mines, small attack submarines designed to operate in shallow water, swarms of armed fast boats, multiple types of attack drones, and an arsenal of ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Equally concerning, the administration overlooked the fact that Lloyds of London and other maritime insurance companies would not underwrite the loss of tankers and cargo ships that attempted to cross the Strait. Iran will ensure the Strait remains closed using its arsenal of asymmetric weapons they’ve designed for just that purpose, giving them powerful leverage in future negotiations.

Credit: MassLive, AP, CalMatters

The result? Cascading and disastrous effects. The U.S.-Israel war against Iran initiated a global economic crisis, strangling the production and transportation of oil, liquid natural gas, urea, helium, and aluminum from the nations surrounding the Persian Gulf. The war further increased U.S. national debt, which is just shy of $39 trillion dollars and growing. The Trump administration increased our national debt by $1 trillion in the first 5 months of this year, and borrowed another $343 billion last month alone. Now, the Department of War is asking Congress for another appropriation of $200 billion to cover the unexpected costs of this war of choice. For the first time in our nation’s history, our debt-to-GDP ratio is 122 percent, with no sign of decreasing. The consequences could be catastrophic to our economy in the months and years ahead if left unabated.

This war of choice has practically exhausted the U.S. military’s inventory of offensive and defensive missiles, inventories that cannot be replenished for years. It’s increased our country’s strategic vulnerability and reduced the Pentagon’s ability to deter other threats around the globe. The limits of U.S. military power are now fully exposed. Russia and China smile with glee.

Nine U.S. military bases in the Gulf States have been destroyed or abandoned. The Gulf States are unlikely to ever welcome American forces back into their countries, as the Trump administration has demonstrated that the United States cannot and will not protect Gulf Arab allies. The administration has essentially destroyed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) coalition and also managed to alienate most NATO allies in the process.

Russia is enjoying a windfall in oil and natural gas sales and revenue as it becomes the principal supplier of oil to China, India, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other nations that relied on oil from the Gulf nations. Airlines across the globe are rationing jet fuel and reducing flights. Prices for gas and diesel are exploding at the pump here in the United States, which will thrust additional inflation on the American people struggling to afford the costs of food, housing, transportation, and medical insurance.

Credit: U.S. Department of State/Wikimedia Commons

Furthermore, given that the U.S. attacked Iran with no warning twice during earnest negotiations the past year, Iran has no reason to ever trust us again and negotiate an end to this conflict. We’re witnessing the unintended consequences of a war of choice that was poorly conceived and poorly planned, driven entirely by hubris. In two short months, Iran has gained the operational and strategic initiative and will determine the outcome of this war. It seems the Trump administration has opened Pandora’s Box.

Lastly, the administration has failed to define a path to victory that culminates in the restoration of a durable peace in the Middle East.

Professor Donald Stoker captures this imperative in his illuminating book Why America Loses Wars, noting that “…if the political leadership has done its job, their definition of victory [the political objective] includes a clear vision of what they want the post-war situation to look like. Ultimately, as Cicero tells us, war is about the restoration of peace; if it does not seek this, the war is not just. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman insisted that “The legitimate object of war is a more perfect peace. War is fighting for the peace we want.”

You will find more infographics at Statista

It is followed by Sydney (13.8) and Vancouver (11.8), while several U.S. cities, including San Jose (11.4), Los Angeles (10.9) and Honolulu (10.5), also rank among the least affordable.

The first European market in the ranking is London, with a price-to-income ratio of 8.1.

Overall, the list highlights the continued dominance of major cities in Australia, Canada and the United States.

NASA’s MAVEN mission is observing the upper atmosphere of Mars to help understand climate change on the planet. MAVEN entered its science phase on Nov. 16, 2014. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Short for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution," NASA's MAVEN mission launched in November 2013 to study the Red Planet's atmosphere, specifically how it interacts with solar flares and other types of space weather, as well as readings of the dust storms. The mission was supposed to last one year, but the hardware continued to operate for another decade, providing insights crucial to sending a human crew there with the right protection in the future. It was also able to give ground systems early warning of incoming coronal ejecta from the sun.

"MAVEN has profoundly advanced our understanding of Mars's atmosphere, climate history, and habitability, making it a cornerstone of NASA's exploration of Mars for over 11 years," Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said during a press call. "MAVEN's findings have helped shape future mission designs and have strengthened our understanding of Mars as a system."

MAVEN additionally served a crucial communication role as part of NASA's Mars Relay Network, working alongside the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft to pass along priceless data collected by rovers on the Martian surface back to Earth. It was also recruited to help observe the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed through the solar system.

Mission leaders last heard from the spacecraft on Dec. 6, 2025, just before it made a routine pass behind the Red Planet - similar to how NASA lost signal with the Artemis II crew as they flew around the far side of the moon. Loss of signal was only supposed to last 30 minutes.

Mission leaders then explained that "a brief fragment of telemetry data" was able to be recovered by analyzing radio signals picked up by open-loop receivers on NASA's Deep Space Network. That data showed the MAVEN spacecraft was in "safe mode" and caught in a spin when it emerged from behind Mars.

The spin indicated that there was a disruption in the spacecraft's trajectory, and a review board concluded that the rotation caused batteries to drain, rendering it unrecoverable.

An anomaly review board was created in February to determine what happened to the spacecraft while it traveled around the far side of the planet. Mission leaders expected more questions to be answered in the coming months and declined multiple requests to share their own speculation of what happened.

As for MAVEN's fate, NASA officials said that the spacecraft will continue to orbit Mars for 50 to 100 years.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/05/2026 - 22:35

Tyler Durden