New York Times Insists Missile Defense Is Impossible

Plus, wisdom from Harvard’s new president

Soldiers from a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense Battery work to ensure the launcher is ready and prepared to launch interceptors to counter ballistic missile threats at an undisclosed location in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, Nov. 27, 2023. U.S. Army Courtesy Photo.

An article in the latest New York Times Magazine includes this passage:

It was 1983.

That March, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” To Moscow, such rhetoric seemed recklessly provocative. Two weeks later, Reagan doubled down by proposing to abandon the pact of mutually assured destruction upon which the peace had long relied. In its place, the United States would develop a hyperexpensive, multilayered shield against ballistic missiles. He called it the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.). The press called it Star Wars. It remains far from possible even today, despite Donald Trump’s recent vow to expand on Israel’s modest and ultimately inadequate missile-defense system and build a comprehensive “Iron Dome” over the United States.

This manages to be wrong not only about the missile shield but also about the evil empire speech. While the Soviet Communist dictator may have found the speech “recklessly provocative,” the words were greeted with elation by political prisoners in the gulag. Here is how Natan Sharansky tells the story in his book with Ron Dermer, “The Case for Democracy.”

One day, my Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread through the prison. The dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth—a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us….Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.

As for the missile defense, the Times describes it as “Israel’s modest and ultimately inadequate missile-defense system” yet in fact it is a multilayered U.S. and Israeli system that includes not only Iron Dome but also David’s Sling, the Arrow, land-based Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, and Navy ship-based Aegis ballistic missile defense. Israel is also developing for near-term deployment an “Iron Beam” system that will use lasers rather than more costly missile interceptors.

Iran and its allies have launched two major barrages against Israel along with thousands of rockets from Hezbollah and Gaza, and the casualties have been miraculously minimal. That’s especially so if one sets aside the damage inflicted in Gaza by terrorist misfires of rockets aimed at Israel. While one always hopes for better—say, a system that would make sirens, cellphone alerts, and bomb shelters unnecessary—it seems strange to focus on the supposed inadequacy of the shield rather than the fact that it has functioned better than almost anyone dared hope, and certainly better than the New York Times would ever have predicted.

Wisdom from Harvard’s new president: “An excessive aversion to risk is a risk itself,” Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said Saturday evening at his formal installation.

His embrace of risk apparently didn’t extend to chancing a public welcome to his new job. Garber, in contrast to recent practice, did not include the full faculty or even the student newspaper at the invitation-only event, described as “private” in the alumni magazine and “secret” by the student newspaper, the Crimson.

One can understand the 69-year-old physician-economist’s caution. His predecessor, Claudine Gay, resigned under pressure after about half a year amid allegations of plagiarism and a congressional investigation into Harvard’s response to antisemitism. The Crimson editorial board has so much overlap with the anti-Israel activists that keeping it out of the inauguration may have been the only way to avoid having it disrupted by the raucous demonstrations— “Alan Garber, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”—that have otherwise shadowed him. During an outdoor alumni event this past spring, Garber was doused with glitter in an attack by an animal-rights protester.

Yet it’d be a shame if Garber’s message about embracing risk is lost because of the small audience at the ceremony or the contradiction between the message and how it was delivered. It’s a message that today’s Harvard students and administrators need to hear.

Critics of elite higher education have been talking about excess risk-aversion for months.

Back in August when Garber was promoted from “interim” Harvard president to a stint that will last through June 2027, I noted that Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora had also recently won a contract extension through September 2027, despite the team’s unimpressive win-loss record. “Harvard looks a lot like the Red Sox—change-averse, risk-averse,” I wrote then.

David Brooks made a similar point in his big recent Atlantic piece about how the Ivy League ruined America. “People raised in this sorting system tend to become risk-averse, consumed by the fear that a single failure will send them tumbling out of the race,” Brooks wrote.

Genuine risk-takers in American higher education these days may be more likely found at the startup University of Austin (“Bari Weiss University”) or at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center than at Harvard. And the competition for talent extends beyond students. Scientists nowadays might prefer to go work for a pharmaceutical company or a Silicon Valley startup instead of a Harvard lab or the tenure track. Garber boasted of Harvard’s track record churning out Nobel laureates, but this year Google won thrice as many Nobels as Harvard. Garber himself is a director of Vertex, a pharmaceutical company.

Garber, to his credit, seems to have taken some of the criticism on board, displaying a humility that has been scarce in an institution more frequently characterized by arrogance and defensiveness.

“We often proceed with caution, when we proceed at all,” Garber said. “Yet we forfeit opportunities.” He said Harvard “will need to move forward with greater alacrity—and to correct course more quickly—than has been our custom.”

The course correction was clear both from what Garber said and what he didn’t say. His speech didn’t mention the words “diversity” or “equity.” It did mention “excellence” and “veritas,” which is Harvardese for “truth.” It mentioned, positively, “Harvard veterans and ROTC cadets.” It affectionately cited Henry Rosovsky, the Harvard dean who, with Derek Bok, brought Harvard out of its previous crisis, of the late 1960s.

Vice President-elect Vance has sponsored legislation to increase the tax on university endowments to 35 percent from 1.4 percent. Harvard’s endowment was $53.2 billion at its latest annual report.

To judge by Garber’s speech and some other, even less public recent developments, the risk that President Trump might raise revenues by targeting the endowments of Harvard and other “woke” universities is already having a positive effect on events in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A rapid course correction for Harvard might not entirely sate Trump and congressional Republicans. It could, though, help improve America’s oldest and richest university. From Damascus to Harvard Yard, change is coming.

“Lived experience”: The Wall Street Journal reports on a Pennsylvania court appearance by Luigi Mangione, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who faces murder and other criminal charges in New York in connection with the killing of UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson:

Mangione had an outburst before entering the courthouse for appearance Tuesday. While resisting the officers escorting him, he shouted to people gathered outside, “It’s an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.”

In my own lived experience, any time someone starts throwing around the term “lived experience,” it is almost invariably a bearish signal. William Safire’s “Squad Squad” might point out the redundancy.

Supreme Court opines on Boston Latin School admissions: It was in the “shadow docket” of announcements on whether to accept a case, rather than a formal opinion or dissent after full-fledged arguments, but Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas all weighed in on the case known as Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v the School Committee for the City of Boston, in which Boston changed its exam school admissions policies to admit fewer white and Asian students and more blacks and Hispanics. I wrote about the case in the Wall Street Journal in April 2021 under the headline, “The Red Sox Speak Up for Racial Engineering in Boston Schools.”

Alito and Thomas both wanted to hear the case. An Alito dissent, joined by Thomas, from the decision not to hear the case, recounts some of the livelier details from the factual record, including that during the meeting, some school committee members were texting:

Oliver-Dávila told Rivera that she expected “the white racists [to] start yelling [a]t us” during the public-comment period. Id., at 2397. She went on to note that she “hate[s] WR,” a reference to the predominantly white West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Id., at 2401. Rivera agreed, stating she too was “[s]ick of westie whites.” Ibid. Loconto, Oliver-Dávila, and Rivera voted to approve the working group’s proposal, but they all later resigned as a result of their racist remarks.

Alito noted that “Except in extraordinary circumstances, intentional discrimination based on race or ethnicity violates” the Constitution's Equal Protection clause. He writes, “the lower courts mistakenly treated evidence of disparate impact as a necessary element of an equal-protection claim.”

Alito went on, “In making such an error, the First Circuit rendered legally irrelevant graphic direct evidence that Committee members harbored racial animus toward members of victimized racial groups. As the Committee members made ‘explicit,’ they worked to decrease the number of white and Asian students at the exam schools in service of ‘racial equity.’ Record 433. That is racial balancing by another name and is undoubtedly unconstitutional.”

There are rule-of-law issues here and also “merit” issues. It’s a complicated situation, and the status quo of basing the admission strictly on grades and test scores on a standardized test had its own drawbacks. Yet at some point the Supreme Court may accept one of these selective high-school admissions cases and deliver rulings similar to those it issued in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases.

Nancy Pelosi’s finest hour: Rep. Nancy Pelosi has an interview with the National Catholic Reporter in which she sharply criticized Pope Francis’s deal with Communist China. From the Reporter: “Pelosi appeared incensed over the Vatican's China agreement, the precise details of which have never been made public. First announced in 2018 and twice renewed, most recently in October, the deal marked a significant milestone in a relationship long strained by internal tensions between China's state-supervised Catholic church and an underground church loyal to the Vatican.”

“I'm not too happy about that, and I don't know what they have achieved," Pelosi said in an interview. "Do you know of any success?" "We have, for decades, seen the suffering of Catholics in China," Pelosi said. "I have a completely different view" from Pope Francis' approach. "Why should the Chinese government be having a say in the appointment of bishops?”...

​​"With all the respect in the world for His Holiness, Pope Francis, my point of view is closer to the cardinal of Hong Kong, Joseph Zen," she said. Zen has led the opposition to the Vatican deal with China and told Reuters it thrust "the flock into the mouths of the wolves. It's an incredible betrayal.”

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