Give Peace a Chance?

When moral and strategic paralysis is what passes for "peace," it's time to give war a chance. And we'd best do it before Iran gets The Big One.

Murdering civilians by the hundreds and taking women and children hostage to be subjected to abuse one can only imagine is not warfare. It’s barbarism. Either it will win or civilization will. We’ve tried to fuzz this choice for decades and we can see now what it got us.

The New York Times, of all things, has a piece out this morning that, in its own nauseating but still half-illuminating way, tells a part of the story. It starts beautifully:

Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II.

China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan.

India has embraced a virulent nationalism.

Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history.

And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.

All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries — and political groups like Hamas — are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire.

Yes, it’s all true. The Likud and its allies, having won a democratic election (you remember from January 6 how important “safeguarding democracy” is, right?) is just like Russia’s having invaded the Ukraine! Yet for it all, the Times give us a worthwhile hint: The absence of consequences does count.

Goodness gracious. Every now and again the Left does wake up to reality.

The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar. The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged.

…says the Times after decades of campaigning that the US was too dominant — a risible hegemony with too big a “footprint,” and that it’s past time for Pax Americana to fade into its racist, militarist, colonial-era past.

Without a trace of the disastrous irony for which it’s spent years cheerleading, the Times continues (with its own bolded subhead):

A weaker U.S. …

Why has American power receded? Some of the change is unavoidable. Dominant countries don’t remain dominant forever. But the U.S. has also made strategic mistakes that are accelerating the arrival of a multipolar world.

This is the Times’ weaselly way of admitting what conservatives have been saying forever — that decline is a choice, and a choice we’ll regret.

Among those mistakes: Presidents of both parties naïvely believed that a richer China would inevitably be a friendlier China — and failed to recognize that the U.S. was building up its own rival through lenient trade policies, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer has argued. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. spent much of the early 21st century fighting costly wars. The Iraq war was especially damaging because it was an unprovoked war that George W. Bush chose to start. And the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, overseen by President Biden, made the U.S. look weaker still.

A few points to note: First, they weren’t exactly merely “mistakes.” They were deliberated choices. Second, our years of involvement in Iraq were, in hindsight, very likely misbegotten, yes — but they began when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and looked very much like he was building WMD. That is hardly “unprovoked.” Third, this is the only time the article so much as mentions the word “Biden,” and not once does in include the word “Obama.” Fourth, our panic-driven retreat from Afghanistan did not just make the US “look” weaker. It was weakness, with a good measure of cowardice thrown in.

And Hamas and Iran noticed! My goodness — will wonders never cease?

Still, the real problem here isn’t Hamas or Iran or Bush or (the unmentioned) Obama or (the also and conspicuously unmentioned) Jimmy Carter or (the barely mentioned) Joe Biden. Readers will have no trouble guessing who it is.

Perhaps the biggest damage to American prestige has come from Donald Trump, who has rejected the very idea that the U.S. should lead the world. Trump withdrew from international agreements and disdained successful alliances like NATO. He has signaled that, if he reclaims the presidency in 2025, he may abandon Ukraine.

This paragraph is dishonest in more ways than I can describe. The agreements from which Trump withdrew were precisely those that reduced the power of the United States (our reduced power being, as the Times was saying very slightly up the page, the No. 1 source of renewed terrorist adventurism). And it’s hardly an abandonment of NATO to understand that other wealthy countries should bear more of the load — if they did, then of course NATO would be stronger, not weaker. And where oh where is even subliminal recognition that the whole Islamic terrorist threat began with Carter’s handing Iran to the Ayatollah? The Times displays less its gross partisanship than its classic Leftist hubris and mendacity in simply dumping down the memory hole what is by far the single greatest gift to and enabler of the Islamic terror we see now — Carter’s weakness and cowardice in the original hostage crisis.

Netanyahu’s extremism has contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas. An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, yesterday argued, “The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.” Netanyahu, Haaretz added, adopted “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”

The Times simply can’t keep under wraps where its real sympathies lie, even when it’s trying, or at least pretending to try, to write what in its Leftist world is a “balanced” article. The real problem isn’t Hamas. And for God’s sake, it’s not Iran (which again is barely mentioned, although, as the Wall Street Journal explains, and as the Times certainly knows, Iran orchestrated all of it). Nope, the real problem is Trump and Netanyahu.

And let’s be clear about the only thinly disguised domestic political point of this article, namely, to provide excuses for Biden when he talks big and does zip. In that regard, there is one other glaringly conspicuous omission in the Times’ article: There’s not a word that, just a few days ago, Biden paid six billion dollars to ransom five hostages Iran had been holding for years. So now, barely a week later, Iran’s proxy seizes yet more American hostages. But the only thing about Biden that gets even fleeting mention is his exit from Afghanistan (which the Times views as, politically, a sunk cost anyway).

At the very end of the piece, the Times does, in its annoying way, admit at least some part of what we need to hear:

I understand that some readers may question whether the long era of American power that’s now fading was worth celebrating. Without question, it included some terrible injustices, be they in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala or elsewhere. But it also made possible the most peaceful era in recorded history, with a sharp decline in deaths from violence, as Steven Pinker noted in his 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” And the number of people living in a democracy surged.

Smith concluded his Substack newsletter on the new Middle Eastern war this way:

Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism,” to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police” and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.