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A semitruck carrying the caskets of Iran’s president, foreign minister and others killed in the May 19 helicopter crawled through downtown Tabriz on Tuesday, while the Biden administration faced blowback for offering “condolences.”
… Israel is scrambling to contain the fallout from a request by the chief prosecutor of the world’s top war crimes court for arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders.
… Google, Meta, OpenAI and other top artificial intelligence companies are gathered for a conference in Seoul, South Korea.
… The U.S. is poised to keep heavy tariffs on imports whether President Biden or former President Donald Trump wins in November.
… And Mr. Biden’s new law could grant benefits to more than a million veterans affected by burn pit or other toxic exposure.
Massive pro-theocracy demonstrations have long undergirded Iran’s Shiite Muslim regime, beginning with the millions who thronged Tehran’s streets to welcome Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Whether President Ebrahim Raisi, his foreign minister and others killed in a helicopter crash draw comparable crowds remains in question. A procession Tuesday led by a semitruck carrying the caskets of the dead slowly moved through the narrow streets of downtown Tabriz, the closest major city to the site of Sunday’s crash.
The Biden administration offered its condolences on Monday but tried to walk a fine diplomatic line by highlighting the human rights abuses and alleged atrocities connected to Mr. Raisi, 63, and the Iranian government’s unapologetic support for terrorist groups such as Hamas during his time in office.
The “condolences” statement drew outrage from critics, who argue the U.S. should say nothing at all or harshly condemn Mr. Raisi. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller found himself boxed into a corner on the matter at a department press briefing Monday. “As long as we’re addressing the historical record, the United States offered condolences when Hugo Chavez died, when Joseph Stalin died — people with whom we had great disagreements,” he said.
Much of the American tech industry is now aligning with the federal government to develop a comprehensive response to the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of military-civil fusion, which has forced cooperation between Chinese businesses and the government in Beijing.
U.S. private-sector leaders who hoped to remain neutral now recognize that they must pick sides in the global competition between the U.S. and China, Jacob Helberg, an adviser with the leading software company Palantir, told a private gathering of tech executives and policymakers in Washington this month.
“In practice, being neutral often meant being equidistant between Washington and Beijing. It meant companies saw themselves as global and detached from their American origins,” Mr. Helberg told the Hill & Valley Forum. “I’m happy to say that I think the era of Silicon Valley’s neutrality is over.”
National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace reports that the CIA agrees. The agency’s Chief Technology Officer Nand Mulchandani told a separate recent forum that private American tech entrepreneurs and investors are no longer shy about working with the U.S. national security community and to be seen doing so. “I think that debate’s over,” Mr. Mulchandani said at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI expo in Washington.
If Russia were to deploy a low-earth orbit nuclear weapon, it would threaten “basically all of our communications and use of space,” House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner warns in an exclusive Threat Status video interview.
“We need to make sure that satellite does not go up,” Mr. Turner says in the interview, the latest in the Threat Status Influencers series. “The moment that Russia decides to put a nuclear weapon in space, we are going to have to change every system that we have in place. We have to assume that from that day forward, all of it [our systems] can be turned off in an instant.”
The Ohio Republican also weighs in on a range of other intelligence matters, characterizing China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the new “Axis of Evil” threatening the U.S.-led global order of democracies.
“They are the leading authoritarian regimes in the world today, and the conflict that’s evolving is between authoritarian regimes and democracies,” he says. “They would like authoritarianism to win because they see democracy as a threat to their regimes and a threat to their power.”
The period since the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — and Taliban takeover of Kabul — has resulted in an “opportunity environment” for terror groups in the war-torn nation bordering Pakistan and Iran, warns Asfandyar Mir, a senior U.S. Institute of Peace expert on South Asia and counterterrorism.
Mr. Mir analyzes the situation in an exclusive interview with National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang and National Security Editor Guy Taylor on the latest Threat Status weekly podcast, asserting that there is currently a prevalence of Taliban-trained young men in Afghanistan who “have a lot of resources available, either because of direct connections to the Taliban or resources … left behind by the Afghan National Defense Security Forces.”
“That creates a structural environment in which these groups can easily collaborate with one another and recruit at scale,” he warns. The interview follows a recent USIP report outlining how the power vacuum that America left behind in Afghanistan is fueling a resurgence of Islamist terrorists who have the will, and perhaps the capability, to target the U.S. and its interests abroad.
The death of Iran’s president and foreign minister finds Iranian dissidents celebrating with fireworks while the ayatollahs are left to decide on successors who will reinforce the theocracy’s hold on power and support its violent actions abroad, writes retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord.
“Those divergent points of view highlight the tightrope the current Iranian regime must walk now – appeasing the fundamentalist mullahs without further alienating an increasingly youthful, secular and vocal population,” the retired general writes. “I hope that the Biden administration is working just as hard right now to tip the scales toward a more moderate leader who will steer the country away from funding and directing terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and others and instead work toward peaceful coexistence.”
In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated while touring Austro-Hungarian military positions in occupied Serbia. Ferdinand’s assassination was part of a wider political agenda.
In all probability, the death on May 19 of Mr. Raisi in a helicopter crash was a freak accident, writes Brandon J. Weichert, a national security analyst for The National Interest.
“Nevertheless, his death and the suspicions that there was more to his death than what meets the eye may indeed be the spark for the next world war,” Mr. Weichert writes. “Rather than an assassination of a prominent leader from a declining empire in a region that was of ancillary concern to the rest of the world’s powers, this next world war may be triggered by the accidental death of a tyrannical leader in the middle of a proxy war involving Iran and Israel.”
• May 29 — Lessons for an Unserious Superpower: The “Scoop” Jackson Legacy and U.S. Foreign Policy, American Enterprise Institute.
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