Chairman Wilson, Ranking Member Phillips, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thank you for the opportunity to testify. My testimony is built upon the premise that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is valuable to Israel and the United States but only if it functions properly. Today, with chaos in the West Bank mounting, the PA is in danger of collapse, due primarily to Iranian malign activity and corruption. These and other issues in the Palestinian arena all contribute to the challenge of curbing the deplorable Palestinian policy of rewarding terrorism through "pay-for-slay." At the conclusion of this testimony, I will offer a handful of concrete recommendations on how to tackle some of these challenges.

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America marked a grim anniversary on August 30. That was the date, two years ago, when the United States ended its military presence in Afghanistan. The war that began there in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks lasted a full two decades. The war ended with a botched American retrograde that led directly to the deaths of 13 brave servicemen and thousands of stranded American citizens and Afghan allies.

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This week's U.S.-brokered hostage exchange with Iran has Jerusalem on edge. The United States is providing Israel's greatest adversary with billions in sanction relief while making major nuclear concessions that will only empower the regime in Tehran and put Israel, and the rest of the world, in peril.

The administration notified Congress on Monday that it intends to release $6 billion in frozen funds in exchange for five American hostages being held by Iran. The deal amounts to a ransom payment that will fund the terror-sponsoring regime's malign activities across the Middle East while doing nothing to curb Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon. Israel's leaders are more than justified in their concern.

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Thought leaders and foreign policy veterans can't stop themselves from writing about the new era of great power competition with China and America's lack of a grand strategy. Gen. James Mattis wrote about it in 2015. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton penned an opinion piece about it earlier this year. The RAND Corporation has a Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy. Universities are adding grand strategy programs—Yale, Harvard, Duke, Georgetown, Texas, and most recently Florida, to name a few. Would-be diplomats and policy wonks are poring over writings of Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and Henry Kissinger. They debate the Thucydides Trap and the clashes that often result from a rising power's efforts to replace a ruling power.

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Senior Israeli military officials tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the risk of war on the northern border is the highest in years. The IDF intelligence division warns that Hezbollah "is close to making a mistake that could plunge the region into a big war."

This grave assessment is not new. For several months, the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon has been steadily provoking Israel. The group is daring the IDF to respond.

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