Trudy Rubin, who writes the ‘Worldview’ column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, states in her bio that she “tries to make sense of the world’s chaos and conflicts,” but, alas! sense is the one thing she doesn’t seem to have. In her column of Saturday, published before news of the United States strike on Iranian nuclear weapons sites, she wonders why the United States doesn’t want to fight against Russia for Ukraine, but seemed willing to fight for Israel against Iran:

Ukrainians ask why Trump contemplates war vs. Iran while refusing to help Kyiv vs. Russia

Moscow, allied with Iran, North Korea and China, presents a more serious and immediate threat to the U.S. than does Tehran.

by Trudy Rubin | Saturday, June 21, 2025 | 6:00 AM EDT

ODESA, Ukraine — You get a very different perspective on the Iran-Israel war when you are viewing it from Ukraine.

On June 13, the date Israel began bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, I watched Ukrainian volunteers help elderly residents remove wreckage from a Russian strike with deadly Shahed drones – provided by Iran.

A couple of paragraphs further down:

My own question is broader: Why is President Donald Trump mulling bombing Iran, even as he retreats from defending Ukraine against Russian aggression?

Yes, Trump has paused for two weeks his threat to bomb the deep underground Fordow enrichment plant with U.S. bunker buster bombs to help Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear program. But why provide defensive – and possibly offensive – help to Israel while denying even the former to Ukraine?

Is it really that difficult to understand? A sophomore could see the difference: Iran is trying to build atomic bombs, while Russia already has a strategic nuclear arsenal!

I believe the president has U.S. security priorities backward. A nuclear armed Russia whose president openly detests the West poses a vastly greater and more urgent threat to the U.S. homeland than do the ayatollahs. Especially when Putin is allied with China, North Korea — and Iran.

Vladimir Vladimirovich might “openly detest the West,” but he’s not willing to commit suicide, personal or national, by launching a strategic nuclear attack against the United States unless he’s pushed into desperation. Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, on the other hand, does not think like a Westerner in any way, and is just bat guano insane enough, at least as sanity is defined by Western civilization, to use an atomic bomb sneaked in on a Panamanian-flagged merchant vessel against New York City as he is against Tel Aviv.

The G7 nations stated explicitly that Iran can never be allowed to have nuclear weapons, because even though some of the leaders of those countries detest President Trump, they recognize that the mad mullahs with nuclear weapons pose a threat to all of Western civilization. It makes sense to keep Iran from developing them, if that can be done.

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported:

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the Trump administration’s message that the U.S. military’s strike on Iran was a surgical one, and that what comes next is up to Tehran. Rubio said “it doesn’t matter if the order was given” by Iran to develop a weapon, arguing that the enrichment levels that Iran had were far beyond anything for civilian use. Pressed on what the intelligence from the U.S. actually showed, Rubio called a description of the March intelligence assessment that Iran was not in process of building a bomb an “inaccurate” representation of the intelligence. While Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, believes that Iran can achieve a nuclear weapon in 15 days, American spy agencies believe that it could take several months, and up to a year, for Iran to make a weapon.

We have previously pointed out that intelligence estimates can be wrong, sometimes very wrong. At this point, does it matter? If American intelligence estimates are that Iran could have built an atomic bomb in “several months” and “up to a year,” the case for destroying their nuclear weapons facilities is not significantly different from Mossad’s estimates of two weeks.

After several more paragraphs in which Mrs Rubin tells readers of Russia’s perfidy, we come to this:

Israel has the right to preempt an Iranian move toward nuclear breakout by a country whose leaders constantly threaten its existence, irrespective of Netanyahu’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. But military responsibility for waging that war lies with Israel’s forces, not those of the United States.

Wouldn’t the same be true of Ukraine’s responsibilities?

As for Trump’s helping Israel defensively, fine, but the contrast with his brush-off of Ukraine’s defensive needs is mind bending. The threat to U.S. security interests from the Russian invader is far more immediate. Kremlin officials have used nuclear bluster to intimidate three U.S. presidents, including Trump. And Putin has broken the basic foundation of postwar European peace by invading and threatening to destroy a sovereign neighbor.

If Russia can annex chunks of Ukraine with impunity, why not try and take back parts of Baltics? Or the Aleutian Islands? Moreover, Moscow is now trying to militarily dominate Artic waters, the seas around Europe, and space – and is conducting sabotage and assassinations in NATO countries. It is allied with China, North Korea, and Iran in hostility to the West.

And militarily Russia has shown itself to be a poor aggressor. It’s been over three years now, and Russia has been unable to conquer Ukraine, which makes statements like “Moscow is now trying to militarily dominate (Arctic) waters, the seas around Europe, and space” seem silly. Miss Rubin’s argument is the same one that those who have been demanding aggressive support of Ukraine have been making ever since the Russian attack, and the ones made for decades during the Cold War as the specter of Soviet tanks spilling through the Fulda Gap to conquer all of democratic Europe fueled them, and such arguments have all been laid waste by the pitiful performance of the Russian Army in Ukraine.

The columnist continues to tell us that Ukraine not only could have won, but uses the word “would,” as in “Russia would have been forced to end its war by now,” if only Mr Trump had continued President Biden’s policies, policies against which he specifically ran, and won. President Trump, she claimed, “is putting America last.”

It is impossible for those same Ukrainians to comprehend how Trump can be considering direct involvement in a Mideast war with an enemy that doesn’t directly threaten the United States.

But that’s just it: Iran under the Islamist religious fanatics, does threaten the United States, by threatening all of Western civilization. Russia is not going to shoot ICBMs at us unless we push them into an utterly desperate act, but Iran under the mullahs would happily sneak an atomic bomb into New York harbor if they could do so.

Their message, which I heard in cafés, churches, hospitals, drone factories, government offices and military testing grounds, is this: We can defang Russia with our technological skills and battlefield smarts if you help us close our skies — and give us access to critical defensive weapons that Europe doesn’t produce.

I frequently heard Ukrainians call the U.S. president “TACO Trump,” an acronym for “Trump always chickens out.” They referred, of course, to the president’s constant refusals to impose new sanctions on Russia. Many said they also expected him to chicken out of his “two week” deadline to Tehran.

LOL! Mrs Rubin might not have put it that way had her column been scheduled for Sunday morning rather than Saturday! 🙂

Unlike with Ukraine, this would be for the best.

So, once again, a columnist for the Inquirer favors war, as long as it’s war against a flailing Russia, but doesn’t want to protect the United States and the world against Islamist advance and extremism. Unsurprisingly, both the Editorial Board at large and far-left columnist Will Bunch in particular went along with her.

The Washington Post and The New York Times both had a wider range of opinions on their sites, opinions which ranged from support of President Trump’s actions to wariness that they might backfire, to some outright disapproval. That’s why Mr Bunch wrote:

The sober websites of elite mainstream news orgs like the New York Times and the Washington Post are already filling up with news analyses and commentary about what geopolitical strategy might have motivated this American president to bomb Iran — a strategy looked at and rejected by a half dozen predecessors — and to do so right now.

“U.S. Military Is Pulled Back Into Middle East Wars,” read the Times headline on one of the worst examples of this genre; it was as if some occult hand had dragged the United States into yet another ambiguous foreign conflict, instead of Trump’s megalomania. My advice is to read today’s foreign-policy punditry with a jaundiced eye — or just not read it at all.

Translation: the distinguished Mr Bunch doesn’t want you to read anything other than his view on the events.

Nuclear weapons make a qualitative difference, make all the difference. Russia has them, thousands of them, while Iran has just been trying to build them. We have the ability to prevent Iran from ever obtaining them, something the entire civilized world — other than the editorial offices of the Inky — knows is imperative. Perhaps it could have been done a different way, such as more direct aid to Israel’s efforts to end Iran’s nuclear programs, something I would have preferred, but, in the end, it needed to be done.