President Joe Biden's announcement that the U.S. military had successfully eliminated al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri this week is unquestionably a major milestone in the conflict once known as the "Global War on Terror." The Egyptian-born Zawahiri had been al-Qaeda's intellectual heavyweight ever since he folded his own militant outfit, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, into Osama bin Laden's network in 1998. In the wake of bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. special-forces operators in 2011, Zawahiri assumed the terror group's top post, serving as its operational and strategic head. In that capacity, he guided al-Qaeda through a pitched power struggle with its offspring and jihadi competitor, the Islamic State, and expanded the group's beachhead in Africa, among other accomplishments. Zawahiri's killing is timely proof that the U.S., though preoccupied with other foreign-policy priorities and plagued by domestic political divisions, is still committed to the counterterrorism mission. But it also serves to highlight the bankruptcy of the Biden administration's foreign-policy agenda on at least two other fronts.

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Lebanon was once a noble experiment. When the age of European imperialism ended, most Arab and Muslim lands became dictatorships where ethnic and religious minorities – Christians, Jews, Kurds, Druze, Baha'i, Yezidis, and others – enjoyed no rights or freedoms.

The Lebanese attempted to find a better way – a modus vivendi among its peoples.

In 1943, an unwritten agreement known as the National Pact established Lebanon as a "multiconfessional" state. Its president was to be a Maronite Christian, its prime minister a Sunni, its speaker of the Parliament a Shia, its deputy speaker Greek Orthodox.

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America's killing of Ayman Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda and the number two to Osama bin Laden during the 9/11 attacks, is yet another important blow to a pioneer of Islamist terrorism, a victory for U.S. counterterrorism efforts, and a political win for President Joe Biden.

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Last week, Israel's intellectual scene received a long overdue injection of some good old-fashioned common sense, when the country hosted its first-ever Conservative Political Action Conference.

Founded nearly five decades ago in the United States, CPAC has become the largest and most important gathering of political conservatives in America, serving as both a platform and a laboratory for fresh ideas and policy prescriptions.

The initiative has expanded internationally, seeking to connect like-minded conservatives from different countries and backgrounds and build a global and influential network.

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Australia's new Labor Party government has signaled that it will maintain the hardline policies toward China pursued by the previous conservative government and expand security ties with the United States.

Australia's fraught relationship with China was a key issue in the May 21 election and the Labor Party was said to have won due in part to hopes that a new left-leaning government could improve bilateral ties.

Those hopes have been dashed by China itself. On July 8, in the first high-level meeting since China froze bilateral relations in 2019, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong met with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali.

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President Joe Biden earned deserved modest praise for his visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia last week, restoring confidence in core Middle East alliances. But the president made at least one major misstep: He pledged $201 million to the corrupt and bloated United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a step back into the failed policies of the past on a trip dedicated to continuing the forward progress made in the region in recent years.

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A shadow primary is developing among Democratic politicians concerned about President Joe Biden's prospects for winning a second term and interested in running for the top job themselves. This shadow primary is fueled by a wave of articles in the legacy media questioning Biden's leadership, age, and cognitive abilities. Recent stories in CNN and the Washington Post have blistered Biden on these fronts. And a recent poll revealed that a majority of people do not want Biden to run again.

But that wasn't the news. What was surprising was that a majority of Democrats do not want him to do so either, including a staggering 94% of Democratic respondents under the age of 30.

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President Joe Biden earned deserved modest praise for his visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia last week, restoring confidence in core Middle East alliances. But the president made at least one major misstep: He pledged $201 million to the corrupt and bloated United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a step back into the failed policies of the past on a trip dedicated to continuing the forward progress made in the region in recent years.

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JOE BIDEN came to the presidency trailing a long history of unfiltered outbursts, offensive gibes, and cringe-inducing comments. When he called himself a "gaffe machine" in 2018, no one suggested he was being too hard on himself. More than once in the course of the Ukrainian crisis, Biden has lived up to that reputation by uttering ill-chosen words — from his suggestion in January that a "minor incursion" by Russia wouldn't result in a united NATO response to his startling statement last Thursday that any Russian use of chemical weapons "would trigger a response in kind" by the West.

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Popular wisdom is often wrong. Consider, for example, how it views organic agriculture, which has grown to a $48 billion a year industry in the U.S. Organic products are sold at outlets ranging from local farmers' markets to large supermarket chains, and many people assume that there is something more natural, wholesome, or environmentally sustainable about them. None of that is true.

What's remarkable about this agriculture sector is that the government's extensive promotion has been a hoax from the beginning, having nothing to do with agricultural sustainability, protection of the environment, or food quality.

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Observers seeing a brutal, thuggish war criminal trying to crush the will of a neighboring people to live independent and free of domination are at least partly right. Vladimir Putin is indeed a throwback to Russian rulers past, whose identity was tied up with glorification of conquest, empire, and a twisted spiritual quest inspired by Russian Orthodox Christianity. But it's more than that today: for Putin and those of his inner circle who keep him in power, the prospect that the people of Ukraine (whose very name connotes "borderlands" or "outskirts" . . . of the Russian Empire) would choose not only to break away from Mother Russia, but to edge ever closer to the West, is unthinkable and intolerable. It's not about any imagined military threat from NATO (although that's the misunderstood excuse): It's about the very real fear that Ukraine is breaking free of its Russian roots to build the democratic structures of a Westward-looking nation state.

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