Weekly Standard

Nothing can redeem the harrowing massacre that unfolded last week at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. But something does enter on the positive side of the ledger: A genuine American hero revealed himself that day.

Chris Mintz’s biography seems to fit the profile of a student enrolled in community college. He’d finished high school, done a stint in the army, worked at Walmart among a series of unremarkable jobs. He fought mixed martial arts and was going to school because he wanted to become a personal trainer. He’s the father of a young son with autism, and though he is no longer together with the boy’s mother, he remains thoroughly engaged in his son’s life.

It all sounds perfectly ordinary, and in most ways it was. Under almost all of the plausible scenarios in which a life such as this plays out, the rest of his countrymen would never have heard of him. He would have lived his life as tens of millions do, privately, with the travails and rewards of work, family and friendship. And the rest of us—and perhaps he himself—would never have known that a heroic heart was quietly beating inside him, awaiting only the occasion to reveal itself.

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The Weekly Standard

It’s an especially tense time for the Baltic states and Russia’s other Western-leaning neighbors. Wariness with regard to Vladimir Putin and long-term Russian intentions toward the “near abroad” has long been the norm here, well before the 2007 cyberattack on Estonia and Russian military action against Georgia in 2008. But with the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine, general wariness has given way to focused concern about the new threat Russia poses.

Call it “hybrid war,” “unconventional conflict,” “political warfare,” or “little green men.” The sense is not only that Russia is now unwilling to abide by such twenty-first-century principles as “no changing borders by force,” but that Putin has developed sophisticated new methods of asserting power unconstrained by conventional notions of warfare and even the law of armed conflict between states. Continue reading →

The Weekly Standard

Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan
Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force base on Okinawa shares a runway with the civilian planes on this island about 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo. When the American-made Japanese F-15s scramble, as they often do these days, the civilian traffic awaiting takeoff pulls over to a side taxiway. It must be a pretty decent air show for those with a window seat.

The F-15s scramble in pairs, perhaps a minute apart. Two flights of two roared off as I watched from a balcony at the base HQ, then another pair 20 minutes or so later. Most likely, they were off to intercept traffic inbound for airspace over Japan’s Senkaku Islands, to which China has laid a territorial claim that both Japan and its powerful ally, the United States, categorically reject. Planes from the Chinese mainland have repeatedly been probing to test the Japanese response. Scrambling to meet the provocations has been more or less a daily affair since last year. More Japanese F-15s are redeploying to Naha Air Base to meet the mounting demand. Continue reading →