Not a good day for Ukraine

It seems to me that Putin is getting everything he wanted: All of Donbas, including cities and towns he hasn't managed to conquer after throwing away a million men killed, wounded, or disappeared; all of Crimea, of course; and presumably the great slice of southern Ukraine now occupied by Russian troops. Weirdly, this last bit includes the Chernobyl-sized Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, now to be managed by the United Nations and half of its output reserved for Russian electric meters! Ukraine's army will be cut nearly in half, with no NATO or other foreign boots allowed, and the Kyiv government forbidden to join the European Union. The Russian language and religion will regain their former privileged status. And so on and on.

What Putin has failed to win on the battlefield, Trump now proposes to give him at no cost. It's a betrayal that makes Joe Biden's flight from Kabul look positively Churchillian.

3.7 cents for your thoughts!

A penny saved is a penny earned ... penny-wise and pound-foolish ... a penny for your thoughts ... a penny-pincher ... a penny whistle ... in for a penny, in for a pound?

Alas, you can forget all that. The other day, the Secretary of the Treasury visited the US Mint in Philadelphia to oversee the stamping of our last one-cent coins. They're now a losing proposition, each one costing 3.7 cents to produce. The president, meanwhile, keeps assuring us that inflation has been quelled and that we're enjoying the greatest economy in history. Obviously he hasn't paid cash for a cup of coffee lately.

A Ukrainian cruise missile

Every Saturday, the Wall Street Journal leads off its "Review" section by interviewing someone who's doing his or her best to change the world. Today's voice is that of Iryna Terekh, a 33-year-old Ukrainian. She set out to become an architect, hoping to make her country's Soviet-style cities more liveable. In the turmoil following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and Ukraine's far east, Ms Terekh dropped out of university to work as an engineer. After Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, she became technical director of Fire Point, designing drones and cruise missiles. They include the flamboyantly named Flamingo that saw its first combat use in August against a Russian FSB (secret service) base in occupied Crimea.

Flamingo is most often compared to the American Tomahawk, which is nearly 50 years old and has targeted terrorist bases since the Clinton administration. Most recently, we paid $1.4 million apiece for 149 Tomahawks. The Pentagon is okay with sending some to Ukraine, but Trump has demurred: "No, not really," he said last Sunday when asked about Tomahawks for Ukraine. (The US cruise missile is nuclear-capable, though it has never done so in combat, and Putin likes to spook American and European leaders by hinting that it might be a nuclear game-changer in Ukraine.)

The Flamingo has an engine mounted above its fuselage, rather like the German V-1 "buzz bomb" of 1944-45. "Thousands" of turbofan engines were junked in Ukraine when the Soviet Union broke up in 1990, Ms Terekh explains -- Ukraine was a major supplier of aircraft and assemblies for the USSR. Fire Point has refurbished and downsized them to give the Flamingo a range of 2500 miles while carrying a 2500-pound warhead -- nearly double the distance and quadruple the destructive power of the Tomahawk. Accuracy, of course, is quite another matter, but to judge by the August attack in Crimea, it's pretty good.

No Jews need apply

My granddaughter graduated from Yale last year with a keyiffeh on her shoulders, and she was hardly the only Yalie celebrating Hamas over Israel, which is to say: favoring Heinrich Himmler over the inmates of Auschwitz. The atrocities of October 7, 2023, were just a shadow of Adolf Hitler's Holocaust, but the goal was identical, to destroy the Jews next door, murdering and kidnapping as many as they could reach. The goal was to force Israel to retaliate, which of course it did, and turned the world against the Jewish state instead of the monsters who had defiled it.

Anti-Semitism has now gone mainstream in the Americas, Europe, and around the world. Ireland and Canada and dozens of other nations have recognized a "state" of Palestine, though no such state exists outside the fever dreams of the Hamas terrorists. And the actual state of Israel, on land where Jews have lived for three thousand years, is condemned as a colonial oppressor. "From the river to the sea," chant our students, their professors, and the likely next mayor of New York City, "Palestine will be free." How many of them can name the bodies of water they're chanting about? Indeed, do they even know what that freedom will look like, once eight million Jews have been murdered or forced into exile?

Twenty-odd years ago, I was a late-blooming grad student at King's College London, so that photo came as a shock. I emailed it to a friend on the faculty, and he confirmed that Jews do indeed feel unsafe at King's. He has talked to students who dress to disguise their ethnicity (avoiding the kippah or the Star of David) and who "deliberately [vary] their routes to and from the College at night.

'A look inside a broken White House'

No, no, it's not a historian mourning the demolished East Wing, it's Joe Biden's press secretary explaining what went wrong with last year's presidential election. Apparently Donald Trump won because the Democratic establishment was so mean to Joe Biden. "Indeed," Isaac Chatiner explains in The New Yorker, Karine "Jean-Pierre is so outraged by the often unnamed Democratic establishmentarians who maneuvered to push Biden to step aside as the Presidential nominee, during the summer of 2024, in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, that she has decided to leave the Democratic Party and become a political Independent." Wow. Perhaps now she'll be voting with Bernie Sanders's Independents, or with Zohran Mamdani's Socialists.

Trump seems to be catching on

Nine months after he took office, after pledging he'd end Russia's war on Ukraine within 24 hours, Donald Trump is beginning to notice that Putin has been playing him like a harpist. The big problem with 47 is that he envies the near-total dominance that Comrades Putin and Xi enjoy over their people, so he tolerates behavior that from a lesser dictator -- Comrade Maduro, for example -- is met with live fire against drug-running boats and the deployment of B-1 bombers, F-35 fighters, and a naval task force including five vessels equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to 1550 miles.

Those missiles should be aimed at Russia instead. It's Putin who's at war against the independent democracy of Ukraine, and it's Xi who's watching Trump's response as a guide to what China can get away with against the independent democracy of Taiwan. Putin has been stringing Trump along since the day he moved into the White House, most blatantly getting the literal red carpet in Alaska and US fighter jets to escort him back home. Whenever they meet or talk on the phone, they're chums. Trump is charmed by Putin, and in return gets nothing from him.

That's slowly changing. Trump dismissed the notion of another summit with the Russian dictator, sanctioned Russia's two largest oil companies, and allowed Ukraine to send its short-range Storm Shadow missiles onto Russian targets. (We have a veto over the British weapon because it uses American targeting information.) So Trump now permits Ukraine almost as much freedom of action as it had under the slow-walking Biden administration -- just enough to prevent Ukraine from losing the war, but never enough for it to win.

Send those Tomahawks to Ukraine, Mr President, or admit that you're a paper tiger.

The men of the hour

Well, of course I must tip my hat to the twenty youngish Israeli men who survived two years of ghastly imprisonment in the tunnels of Gaza. But beyond them stand the two victors: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netayahu. They did what no other pair of national leaders could have done, or arguably would have tried to do. Let the Nobel peace prizes flow!

About the dead in Manchester

Seventy-one years ago, I arrived at Southampton, England, by way of the SS United States for a year of graduate study at the University of Manchester. I lived in the village of Withington, about as far south of central Manchester as the Heaton Park synagogue is to its north. I assume that some Jews attended the university then, and perhaps a Muslim or two, but I only took notice of the Irish (they shared my bloodline), my fellow Americans, a few Canadians, and a lovely Polish girl with whom I fell desperately in love. Really, in the 1950s we didn't pay much attention to each other's religious or ethnic background, though we Fulbright Fellows had had a black waiter on shipboard. (He had us call him Jersey Joe in honor of a heavyweight boxer of the time.)

And now Manchester is home to Europe's latest antisemitic atrocity! It left two Jews dead, three wounded, and their killer killed by armed police, of whom Manchester had none in 1954. The killer's name was Jihad Al-Shamie, recently arrested for rape. We can assume that on Thursday he was globalizing the intifada, as we are regularly urged by students at our better colleges and universities. My younger granddaughter graduated from Yale not long ago, wearing a keffiyeh on her shoulders, as did more than a few of her classmates. Like Greta Thunberg and millions of other young fools, she saw nothing amiss in chanting From the River to the Sea, while not knowing the name of either body of water. Neither did the late Mr Al-Shamie, I suspect.