Senate will surely block misguided House effort to offset Israel military aid with so-called expenditure cuts and delink from Ukraine aid. And they must. A 🧵nytimes.com/2023/11/02/us/… Congress has never sought offset emergency aid to an ally in need before. Doing so for Israel in its gravest hour of need sends a terrible message. 2/

🧵: Russian strikes against Odessa’s port and Moscow’s announcement that it will cut Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea are a threat to global stability and food security. They demand an international response. 1/9 nytimes.com/2023/07/19/wor… While diplomacy needs to be intensified to get Moscow to recommit to the grain deal the UN successfully put in place a year ago, success will be enhanced if alternative ways are pursued simultaneously. One such alternative is naval escorts of grain shipments from Ukraine. 2/9

There is a lot of confusion in discussions about Ukraine and “security guarantees” that the United States, European nations, and possibly NATO might provide to Kyiv. Here’s a 🧵 trying to clarify the issue. 1/n politico.eu/article/the-we… Ukraine wants to join NATO as soon as possible, so that it might benefit from the alliance’s Art 5 commitment, which states that “an armed attack on one is an armed attack on all” and commits its members to come the aid of the member that is attacked. 2/n

🧵 Russia’s actions in Ukraine have cemented American support for both Europe and NATO—a trend reflected in the 2022 @ChicagoCouncil Survey. A look at the data ⤵️ politi.co/3Uk0Ckj Americans now consider Europe the most important region of the world for the military security of the United States (50%), far more than Asia or the Middle East. Two years ago, that figure stood at just 16 percent. bit.ly/3S8RfSH

I would have hoped for a bit more introspection on Merkel's part. Putin's war on Russia didn't come out of nowhere. 🧵
politico.eu/article/merkel… To say that moving actively to bring Ukraine into NATO in 2008 would have led to the war we see today is to ignore that Russia was weak militarily, as its assault on Georgia showed. Had Putin attacked Ukraine then, he would have failed. n/2

Lots of calls for NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as if this is some limited form of intervention in Russia’s war. It’s not. Establishing a no-fly zone requires going to war against Russia, risking rapid escalation. A 🧵

https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1499572944753807379

To take control of the skies over Ukraine, NATO would have to deploy a massive amount of air power to find and shoot down Russian aircraft and helicopters flying over a territory as big as Texas. 2/n

Russia want NATO to clarify its commitment to the "indivisibility of security" -- a concept included in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1990 Charter of Paris, and the 1999 Istanbul Declaration by the OSCE. What's behind this? 🧵
politico.eu/article/russia… Here is the relevant para of the Istanbul Declaration on how all OSCE states have an equal right to security. 2/n

It’s time to junk the NATO-Russia Founding Act, a political agreement signed by Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, and 15 other NATO leaders in 1997–a time very different than today’s. 🧵
nato.int/cps/cn/natohq/… Under the Act, NATO said it would meet its security commitments to new NATO members through interoperability, integration, and reinforcements “rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.” 2/9

New @ChicagoCouncil survey of American public views on foreign policy is out today. Lots of great data. But let's talk China.
washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-… Americans have turned decisively toward seeing China as a major threat. It starts with economics. A plurality of Americans (40%) now thinks China is a stronger economic power than the US; only about a quarter think the US is economically stronger than China.

There's a big fallacy behind the criticism of Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan--which is that the alternative to withdrawal was the status quo (as McConnell and other critics maintain). That's simply wrong. 1/x The situation McConnell describes, of a stable Afghanistan maintained by 2,500 troops and no US casualties in a year, was about to change as a result of the February 2020 agreement between Trump and the Taliban. 2/x

In his latest column, @nytdavidbrooks writes that we’ve entered a “dark spiral” of Americans supporting a US withdrawal from the world. Nothing could be further from the truth, as @ChicagoCouncil polling data shows. 1/8

https://twitter.com/nytdavidbrooks/status/1139506427385602049

70 percent of Americans now favor the United States taking an active part in world affairs. Since @ChicagoCouncil polling on that question began in 1974, the only time that number has been higher was in 2002, just after 9/11. 2/8

THREAD: The idea that US Allies should pay the full cost of hosting US troops on their soil, plus 50%, as reported by @Bloomberg, represents a fundamental affront to the very idea of why we have allies and alliances. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Insisting that US allies pay 150% of the cost of deploying US troops on their territory is preposterous. It would turn the relationship between the US and these allies from an alliance of mutual interest into the US becoming a military for hire—a pay-to-play military.