As Israel and Iran continue to exchange blows, accelerating prospects for another major conflict in the region, Sen. Tim Kaine (D - Va.) is introducing a war powers resolution that would force a Senate floor debate and vote prior to any use of U.S. military force against Iran, except in the case of self-defense.
“It is not in our national security interest to get into a war with Iran unless that war is absolutely necessary to defend the United States,” Kaine said as he introduced the legislation. “I am deeply concerned that the recent escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran could quickly pull the United States into another endless conflict.”
Kaine, a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, added: “the American people have no interest in sending servicemembers to fight another forever war in the Middle East. This resolution will ensure that if we decide to place our nation’s men and women in uniform into harm’s way, we will have a debate and vote on it in Congress.”
The legislation can be considered on the Senate floor after 10 calendar days.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) posted on X Saturday that he would introduce legislation that would block the use of federal funding for military force against Iran without Congressional authorization to do so, again with the exception of the U.S. acting in self-defense.
President Trump said Sunday that “it’s possible” the U.S. could get involved in Israel’s ongoing offensive against Iran, which Israel started with strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, top scientists, and senior military officials. The U.S., which gave Israel a “green light” to attack Iran, has been helping Israel strike down incoming ballistic missiles and drones. The U.S. is also shifting its military resources in the Middle East in response to the strikes.
Iran’s foreign minister said Sunday that Israel’s attack on Iran could not have happened "without the agreement and support of the United States,” explaining that Iranian officials do not believe repeated U.S. claims of non-involvement in Israel’s attack.
In 2020, Kaine had similarly led a Iran war powers resolution to prevent military involvement in hostilities with Iran without congressional approval; it passed through the Senate with bipartisan support but was subsequently vetoed by President Trump.
RS contacted Sen. Kaine’s office to request a comment about the legislation, which directed the publication to its statement on the legislation.
Various members of the Brazilian government have been trying unsuccessfully to reach their counterparts in Washington ahead of August 1. That is the date Donald Trump has set for the imposition of 50% tariffs on all Brazilian exports unless the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva finds a way to meet two very controversial conditions set by the U.S. president.
Those conditions include dropping charges against Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces a possible prison sentence for his role in an alleged conspiracy to undermine the 2022 election and adopting a more lenient stance towards U.S.-based social media companies operating in Latin America’s largest nation.
While Lula’s government has insisted it is willing to negotiate the terms of its bilateral trade relationship with the United States, it regards the first condition as an interference in Brazil’s domestic affairs, violating both its sovereignty and its administration of justice under the 1988 constitution.
The stage has thus been set for a showdown that will materially hurt both nations, raising fresh questions about the global political and economic order Trump is forging.
As Brazil’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad has insisted, Trump’s tariff threats make no economic sense. For one thing, Brazil cannot be said to be ripping off the United States, as Trump alleges. The United States has enjoyed a trade surplus with Brazil for almost two decades. Moreover, many Brazilian exports to the U.S. contain parts manufactured by American companies in the United States itself.
For example, 45% of every commercial Embraer aircraft is composed of American-made parts. Those parts would be slapped with reciprocal tariffs if Trump follows through on his threat.
A 50% tariff on Brazilian exports of orange juice, which constitute 75% of the orange juice marketed around the world and some 60% of all U.S. orange juice imports, would almost certainly make that staple in many American households much more expensive, in addition to putting workers at the bottling plants of well-known brands Tropicana and Minute Maid, both major importers of Brazilian juice, out of work. Trump’s stand on behalf of Bolsonaro would also raise the cost of beef, coffee, and other staples for American consumers.
The United States has enjoyed more than two centuries of friendly relations with Brazil. The hostility toward it today, unfortunately, is indicative of Trump’s foreign policy, where, much more so than his first term, he has been eager to weaponize tariffs, using them in the way previous presidents have used unilateral sanctions — to punish and coerce other nations.
As it tries to negotiate with the White House, the Brazilian government has also sought recourse at the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Well beyond the widespread violations of international trade rules,” Brazil’s representative warned at the WTO Wednesday, “we are now witnessing an extremely dangerous shift toward the use of tariffs as a tool to interfere in the internal affairs of third countries.” While the Brazilian official did not directly cite the United States in his complaint, he garnered the support of 40 other countries — not only China and Russia but also key U.S. allies, including the European Union, New Zealand, and Canada — in his thinly veiled denunciation of Trump’s policy.
It is unclear that anything decided at the WTO will compel Trump, of course — his disregard for international institutions is well known at this point. But Brazil’s efforts indicate an investment in a multilateral global order that the United States is now actively undermining. As Celso Amorim, Lula’s principal foreign policy adviser, observed in an April interview:
“What the U.S. sought to do was not to impose one tariff on China, another on Brazil, etc…. That too, but I think they wanted to force bilateral negotiations” to the detriment of existing multilateral forums. While some might see opportunity in this disruption, Amorim concluded, “the breakdown of the multilateral system brings much greater harm than any possible comparative advantage one might obtain.”
In the short term, Trump will probably manage to establish favorable bilateral deals with multiple countries. In the medium to long term, however, he risks permanently undermining the U.S.-led post-World War II global order, pushing nations like Brazil — deeply invested in multilateralism — toward alternative frameworks beyond Washington’s overweening control.
This is where the BRICS, the intergovernmental organization that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and five other Global South middle powers, enter the picture. As Amorim put it in a separate interview in a reflection of the mainstream view of Brazil’s experienced diplomatic corps, “BRICS is the new name for multilateralism. It is BRICS that gives us hope for a truly multilateral world.”
From the Brazilian perspective, the point of the BRICS, of which Lula currently serves as chairman, is not necessarily to replace existing bodies like the UN but to make them more representative and thus more durable. This might not be the objective shared by all BRICS members, but it does reflect Brazil’s aspiration for a bigger say within the existing architecture of global governance.
Trump seems utterly uninterested in engaging productively with the constellation of international associations, as his withdrawal this week from UNESCO indicates. Indeed, some of his key backers at home are rallying behind his aggressive approach towards defiant countries. “If you drop the trial and drop the charges [against Bolsonaro], the tariffs go away,” Steve Bannon, once a close advisor to the president, told theNew York Times. When asked how this policy approach differed from extortion, Bannon replied simply: “it’s MAGA, baby…It’s a brave new world.”
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Top image credit: www.afnwc.af.mil
Air Force conducts third Sentinel static fire test > Air Force ...
The Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) nuclear weapons program, in which the Air Force is moving to replace its old land-based nuclear missiles with new ones, has been troubled from the start.
Running at more than 80% over-budget, the Sentinel’s gargantuan costs and slow development paceeven triggered a critical DoD review under the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which says if a program exceeds a 25% cost overrun it must be terminated unless the Pentagon determines it meets the criteria to continue. The DoD insisted the Sentinel would continue.
Rather than consider all of this, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026, which authorizes the DoD’s budget and sets its priorities for the year, is poised to enable the Sentinel program’s gravy-train further. Indeed, House and Senate versions of the legislation, soon to be considered in Congress, would provide it with an additional $400 million and $2 billion in funding respectively.
Given the Sentinel’s track record, experts call the NDAA’s Sentinel funding push budgetary malpractice.
“It is an absolute disservice to American taxpayers for Congress to continue throwing funds in the money pit that they call the Sentinel program,” Mackenzie Knight-Boyle, a senior research associate at the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, told RS.
“The Defense Department has failed to show it is even capable of executing this program,” she added, “with new ‘unforeseen’ challenges cropping up every couple of months and higher and higher cost estimates announced while the program fails to meet benchmarks.”
Efforts toward program oversight in the same legislative package, meanwhile, are flopping. An NDAA amendment by Rep. John Garamendi (D-Ca.), which would have restricted funds for the program until successfully completing Milestone B, failed in a 15-42 vote at the House Armed Services Committee markup preceding its consideration on the House floor.
Challenging Sentinel
Broadly, proponents say a modernized ICBM program is key to maintaining America’s nuclear triad, a compilation of weapons systems and platforms which together aim to serve as a credible nuclear deterrent against adversarial attacks on American soil. They point out that the Minuteman ICBM, which has been in place decades longer than originally intended, is being phased out, thus needing to be replaced or refurbished.
But other experts increasingly take issue with ICBMs altogether, saying such weapons systems do little for national security while their placement on land invites, rather than deters, adversarial attack. And they assert that technological advances in other parts of the U.S. nuclear triad have proven adequate for nuclear deterrence, rendering the ICBM redundant. To this end, hundreds of scientists wrote to the Biden administration last year to request it retire the use of ICBMs as part of the U.S. nuclear arsenal entirely, calling ICBMs “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy Program, similarly told RS that ICBMs, of any kind, may escalate conflict in the event of an acute political crisis or attack.
ICBMs “pose serious security risks because a president would have only a few minutes to decide whether to launch them on warning of attack, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm,” Hartung explained.
“There is no reason to rush the Sentinel when we should be debating about whether we should build it at all.”
Along this vein, other lawmakers are now challenging the Sentinel program existentially with new legislation, saying the funding sent to it is better used elsewhere.
Namely, senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) introduced the Investing in Children Before Missiles (ICBM) Act of 2025 on July 23, to pause funding for the Sentinel program, and redirect those funds to the U.S. Department of Education. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Ca.) introduced companion legislation to pause development of the new Sentinel program in the house.
“Instead of sinking tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into propping up a relic of our outdated Cold War-era nuclear strategy — and raising the risk of global mass destruction — we can invest more in fostering greater opportunity for our next generation,” Sen. Van Hollen said of the senators’ new legislative push, citing the Sentinel program’s excessive costs and risks to national security. “If there ever was an opportunity for greater government efficiency, this is it.”
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Top photo credit: Sen. Lindsey Graham (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons); Elbridge Colby (Photo by Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA); Sen. Mitch McConnell (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
When reports surfaced in early July that Donald Trump’s administration would be pausing some U.S. aid to Ukraine, it didn’t take long for the knives to come out.
Anonymous officials inside the administration, as well as critics on Capitol Hill who disagreed with the policy, pointed the finger at Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official and a longtime advocate of refocusing U.S. military power to the Pacific.
“He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration,” one anonymous official told Politico, describing Colby as a driving force behind what they saw as a dangerously narrow foreign policy vision.
Another former U.S. official, reacting to Colby’s moves recalled hearing from a State Department colleague: “Who is this fucking guy?” The piece also looks back to past moves from Colby that apparently surprised others in the administration, including undertaking a review of the Biden-era security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States; telling the UK to focus on European security rather than sending aircraft to the Pacific; and telling allies such as Japan to increase their defense budget.
The piece, which in its headline refers to the DOD policy chief as “rogue,” relies almost entirely on anonymous sources.
A Wall Street Journal editorial called the pause “a hostile act that favors Vladimir Putin,” attributing it squarely to Colby and accusing him of “demonstrating weakness that invites more war.”
While Washington media has often lumped Colby in with the MAGA movement’s restrainer camp — with some critics even calling his views akin to “isolationist” — the label does not quite fit. Instead, Colby has long argued that U.S. national security policy should focus on deterring China, even if that means reducing military commitments in Europe or the Middle East. His critics see that as a retreat; his allies argue it's overdue triage. But he has nonetheless become the flashpoint in the latest drama inside Trump’s foreign policy team.
“His crime was the most heinous one can commit in the eyes of the U.S. establishment: halting weapons shipments to Ukraine,” James Carden, a writer and former adviser to the U.S. State Department, tells RS. “He is the target, but only because he crossed that reddest of red lines.”
Shortly after the news broke, Trump reversed the pause and publicly claimed he had no idea who had authorized it, a move that only intensified scrutiny of his national security team. This was only the latest flare-up in the ongoing push-and-pull between realists inside Trump’s orbit and more traditionally hawkish Republicans. The balance between the two camps has shifted repeatedly in the administration’s first six months in office. Just weeks before the Ukraine pause, Trump had joined Israel’s war and authorized a series of strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, seen as a win for the hawkish faction.
The president has since promised more military assistance to Ukraine and threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin with aggressive secondary sanctions if Moscow and Kyiv do not agree to a ceasefire within 50 days.
“May was the zenith for restrainers,” says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine. Trump had fired national security adviser Mike Waltz, delivered an “astonishing” speech discrediting the neoconservative legacy while in the Middle East, opened up diplomatic negotiations with Tehran, and halted American attacks on Houthis. Then came the so-called 12-day war. “It’s been a pretty crappy 45 days,” says Mills.
Hawks have moved quickly to capitalize on this apparent momentum. They have seized on the perceived success of the Iran strikes to frame the operation as a vindication of hard power and urging Trump to stay on offense. “On the Republican side, the hawks are so slavish,” Mills tells RS. “It appeals to Trump’s vanity. They’ll just say anything.”
These interventionists have greeted these new developments with glee. In The Washington Post, columnist and American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen celebrates that restrainers are “a tiny minority” within the Republican party.
“Indeed, the only thing as satisfying as watching Trump exercise bold American leadership on the world stage over the past six months has been watching the isolationists realize that Trump is not one of them,” he writes.
Hawkish opponents of Trump’s like Bill Kristol and John Bolton offered slightly more measured approvals of the president’s decision to bomb Iran.
The pressure campaign to convince Trump and his administration to embrace certain hawkish instincts is now spreading to other theaters. After POLITICO reported that the Pentagon’s brief pause was driven by concerns from Colby over dwindling munitions stockpiles, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) responded with a pointed public statement. While crediting Trump for resuming aid, he blasted “the self-indulgent policymaking of restrainers — from Ukraine to AUKUS,” which have “so often required the President to clean up his staff’s messes.”
During Colby’s confirmation hearing, McConnell warned that his policies could amount to “geostrategic self-harm.” The former majority leader was ultimately the only GOP Senator to oppose Colby’s nomination.
“I think the pro-war, pro-intervention forces from within and without government are waging a media campaign against Colby because they know it works,” Carden says. “Trump has folded again and again in the face of demands for a war on Iran; for an attack on Syria; for full-throated support for Israel and Netanyahu; and for more arms to Ukraine. Trump is not a committed restrainer in any sense.”
Hawkish Senators like Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have celebrated Trump’s sudden tough talk on Putin, saying that the president will sign off on his punishing sanctions bill if Congress approves it.
Elsewhere, Sen. Marco Rubio and his allies have reportedly sidelined presidential envoy Ric Grenell on Venezuela — where Grenell had shown openness to diplomacy with Caracas — in an effort to steer policy back toward pressure on the regime.
International developments and domestic pressure campaigns have coincided with tension inside the administration. Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired three close advisors on allegations of leaking that were never substantiated. “This all exists in the context of Hegseth’s operation, which is defined by incompetence mixed with panic,” Mills tells RS.
As a result of the shrinking circle around Hegseth and the reorganization of Trump’s national security team that added interim national security adviser to Rubio’s list of titles, the inter-agency process in the administration appears to have authentically broken down.
Amid the broader dysfunction, dissenting views on foreign policy have found themselves gradually sidelined as decisions are shaped by pressure from both inside and outside the White House.
“I have serious policy differences with Colby, including the decision to halt arms to Ukraine,” wrote former Bernie Sanders foreign policy advisor Matt Duss on X. “But we should all be clear that this is an effort by the nat sec establishment to discipline a policymaker who breaks from DC groupthink, which we need more of.”
Efforts to combat this groupthink have been challenged from all directions, sources tell RS, including career officials who are resistant to change, powerful members of Congress, and, increasingly, the President himself.
“I don’t think he fundamentally wants a war. Trump has changed a million times,” Mills tells RS. But in recent weeks, the people who seem to have his ear are those urging him to double down on force projection in the Middle East and maintain an aggressive posture toward Russia.
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