It might seem unthinkable today, but what would happen if another global pandemic occurred? After all, there's no guarantee that the Covid-19 outbreak will be the only such event in our lifetimes. So what have we learned? Will we be able to respond more effectively in the future?

The answers to these questions are not at all clear. In a time of deep division, most everyone agrees that the pandemic revealed a host of weaknesses in American society and in our public-health establishment's ability to handle deadly contagions. Yet the failures of 2020, 2021, and now 2022 provide some useful lessons.

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In early February, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced a major new defense initiative when, in an address to Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Strategic Studies, he laid out his administration's plans for a "laser wall" to protect the country from rockets, missiles and UAVs. "In about a year, the IDF will launch a laser interception system," Bennett explained. "At first experimentally and later it will become operational. First in the south and then elsewhere. This will allow us, in the medium to long term, to surround Israel with a laser wall that protects us from missiles, rockets, UAVs and other threats."[1] The announcement marked the public unveiling of a capability that has been an area of intense focus for the Israeli government and industry for some time, with hundreds of millions of shekels allocated to its development to date. It represents an attempt to address what has become a long-standing problem: the war of economic attrition being waged against Israel by Hamas and other militants.

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Vladimir Putin's Russia. Xi Jinping's China. Ali Khamenei's Iran. Al Qaeda. The Islamic State. These and other actors are waging a war on the West, a war against Western power and values. Some Westerners are mounting a vigorous defense. Others are arguing – vehemently and incessantly – that that the West is morally inferior to the rest of the world and therefore indefensible.

Douglas Murray's new book, "The War on the West," looks at the Westerners who denigrate the West. No greater threat exists, he writes, "than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies piece by piece."

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The leaders of France, Germany and Italy have jointly visited Ukraine in an attempt to present a unified European front regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. The one-day visit was long on rhetoric but short on substance: European unity remains elusive.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the European Union responded the following day with a package of unprecedented economic sanctions aimed at isolating Russia.

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Since the late 1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been plying the Hamas terrorist group with cash and weapons while also teaching it how to be self-sufficient. With hundreds of millions of dollars from the Islamist Shiite regime in Tehran pouring into its coffers, the Sunni group has evolved over the past decades into the foremost Palestinian terror organization, capable of hitting Israel's main population centers and strategic infrastructure. Yet Iran's role is often overlooked when assessing the performance of Hamas in its multiple armed confrontations with Israel. Surprisingly, Israeli officials tend to downplay the Iranian regime's role even though history shows that Tehran has played a major part. With continued Iranian assistance, Hamas can only be expected to grow in sophistication and lethality.

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Congressional resolutions honor and commemorate, condemn, and even bluster. Rarely do they endorse a false conception of history as a means of conducting political warfare against an American ally.

House Resolution 1123, introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), does just that. It also serves as an ominous warning about the future of the wider Democratic Party as its progressive wing organizes and grows in anticipation of a changing of the guard.

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Despite over two months of trying to bloody and bomb Ukraine into submission to prevent its strategic drift to the west, Vladimir Putin may soon face one of his worst strategic nightmares: the NATO alliance he despises is about to get larger and stronger. And not a minute too soon.

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There are certain moments in life that can best be described as transformative. One such moment is when you cradle your newborn grandchild in your arms for the very first time.

A few days before the start of Passover, I was blessed to be inducted into the grandfather club. I must admit that it will take time to get used to applying that term to myself or hearing others use it in reference to me.

Like Tevye the milkman, I look at my own children and cannot help but ask, "I don't remember growing older, when did they?"

But, the addition of grandparent to one's resume, as jolting as it might be, is hardly the most heartfelt or meaningful aspect of the experience.

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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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