Biden rewards Russia on Storm Shadow missiles

September 16, 2024

Keir Starmer’s first visit to Washington as Britain’s prime minister last Friday did not go well.

His meeting with President Joe Biden failed to resolve U.K.-U.S. disputes over whether Britain could transfer its Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine for use inside Russia. Kyiv has repeatedly asked that such restrictions on munitions like Storm Shadows be lifted.

Last week’s Starmer-Biden meeting did not change the status quo, to Ukraine’s dismay. The United Kingdom needs Washington’s approval because Storm Shadows contain technology from the United States and rely on our intelligence. Although there were other topics on the agenda, this first meeting since Starmer took office provided an opportunity to affirm the “special relationship” and the shared objective of defeating Moscow’s unprovoked aggression. Instead, Starmer was unceremoniously rebuffed. Worse, the Biden administration showed that, even in its last months, it remained wavering, hesitant, and uncertain on Ukraine 2 1/2 years since the war began.

Elaborate preparations preceded the Starmer-Biden meeting, starting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conferring in Kyiv. Blinken then met with Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, reaffirming that “we’re determined to see Ukraine win this war” and “we will adapt, we will adjust, and make sure that Ukraine has what it needs when it needs it to deal with this Russian aggression.” A decision to allow the British to proceed seemed almost assured. But the next day in Washington, that did not happen. There was only silence.

Starmer implied afterward that decisions regarding Storm Shadows had simply been postponed, perhaps until the end of September when Biden and other world leaders address the United Nations General Assembly. Further delay alone, however, is harmful to Ukraine’s self-defense efforts. Delay, unfortunately, encapsulates the essence of Biden’s unwillingness to act decisively not just to prevent Ukraine from being overrun, but to ensure it is restored to its full sovereignty and territorial integrity, NATO’s stated goal.

Although the U.S. and NATO failed to deter Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has consistently deterred Biden from aiding Ukraine in a strategic and well-ordered way. Repeated White House statements indicating fear of “a wider war” explain that Biden has been more worried about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluffs than about prevailing militarily, thereby not only defeating Moscow’s aggression but unmistakably showing China and other American adversaries that our capabilities and resolve are strong. We should be deterring them, not the other way around.

Since Russia’s 2022 attack, with each painfully slow additional delivery of advanced armaments to Ukraine, Putin has threatened dire consequences, including last week against NATO itself. But there has never been evidence of a credible threat of a “wider war” with conventional forces. If the Kremlin had such capacity, why hasn’t it already been deployed to Ukraine to overcome Russia’s poor offensive performance, including recently against Ukraine’s so-far-successful incursion into the Kursk region?

The Kremlin’s nuclear threats, including the most recent, deserve to be taken seriously, given the stakes involved. But taking a nuclear threat seriously does not mean believing it. When Putin has rattled the nuclear saber before, testimony of U.S. intelligence community officials before Congress has indicated that Russia has not actually redeployed any of its nuclear capabilities to ready them for use. Each assessment must stand on its own merits, but simply cringing before a Putin threat gives Russia what it wants at no risk and no cost. That is the short road to Ukraine’s defeat.

After meeting with Biden, Starmer downplayed the lack of a decision on Storm Shadows, saying that larger strategic questions were discussed. He is continuing London’s policy, begun by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, making it the strongest advocate within NATO for aiding Ukraine, notably more forcefully than the Biden administration. What should be on Starmer’s mind, however, is what may be coming after the November elections.

At last Tuesday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump refused to say whether he favored Ukraine winning the war, merely asserting that he wanted to “end” it. Worse, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance later said Trump’s “peace plan” would separate the parties by a demilitarized zone, with Russia keeping all Ukrainian territory it already holds, and that Ukraine would never join NATO. Putin could hardly ask for more. But if that’s Trump’s opening position, you can bet Putin will.

Biden has very little time left in office.

The least he could do is let allies aid Ukraine in ways that might allow it to prevail against Russia’s invasion, a shot that would definitely be heard round the world.

John Bolton served as national security adviser to then-President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

This article was first published in the Washington Examiner on September 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific

September 12, 2024

China’s recent incursions into Japan’s airspace and territorial waters materially escalate Beijing’s efforts to intimidate and dominate nations in the Indo-Pacific. Tokyo responded by announcing a multibillion-dollar satellite program to bolster detection capabilities against such intrusions.

Chinese “fishing vessels” have in the past periodically sailed near the Senkaku islands, which are claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China. Chinese coast guard ships and military vessels later began to appear, ratcheting up Beijing’s aggressiveness. Washington doesn’t explicitly recognize Tokyo’s sovereignty over the Senkakus but has committed to defend the islands under the U.S.-Japan mutual cooperation and security treaty.

These escalating forays follow Chinese interference in Taiwan’s airspace and waters, and its efforts to assert sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. Chinese naval encounters with the Philippines over disputed islands, shoals and reefs have made headlines. Vietnam and others have often faced Chinese challenges.

None of this is coincidental. Beijing is unmistakably contesting control of the First Island Chain. This variously described topography extends from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Kuril islands, through Japan and the Senkakus to Taiwan, on to the Philippines and then Borneo and the Malay Peninsula.

America’s next president will have to face the strategic consequences of this belligerence. Climate-change negotiations with Beijing should no longer top Washington’s East Asia agenda. Tweets suggesting China consult Google Maps won’t suffice, though they at least show someone on Team Biden understands the problem.

With China pressing all along the First Island Chain, existing U.S. bilateral cooperation with affected states like Japan and Taiwan has plainly become insufficient. Finding seams in the intelligence or defense capabilities across the chain is far easier for Beijing when such efforts among the targets are absent. If China breaks through the First Island Chain at one place, other states in the chain and the Pacific would be at greater risk. Washington should recognize that the integrity of each nation’s air and maritime spaces requires multilateral cooperation, especially among air and naval forces and the intelligence communities of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. Given the high stakes, involving other Asian and Pacific states, along with key European allies like Britain, could be critical.

Such cooperation doesn’t require creating an East Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization or accepting a decision to contain China—at least not yet. More-robust multistate activities are nevertheless urgently needed across the island chain. Several areas of multilateral cooperation are already under way, but if much more isn’t done, Beijing will play one nation against another, calibrating belligerent activities along its periphery to advance its interests. If the affected nations don’t hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, China may well hang them all separately.

A possible model is George W. Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative against trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. A British diplomat described PSI as “an activity, not an organization,” almost entirely operational and not overtly political. Its success rested on military and intelligence exchanges and exercises, only rarely involving diplomatic palavering among foreign ministries. What worked for PSI on a global basis can work in Asia and the Pacific.

The elephant in the room is Taiwan. Without it, there is little chance other concerned countries can effectively thwart China’s destabilizing efforts. This time it isn’t Taipei asking for help, but other regional capitals that need help as much as Taipei. Losing effective control over what Douglas MacArthur labeled an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”—much less actual Chinese annexation—would fatally breach the First Island Chain. There are ways around the Taiwan dilemma that would irritate Beijing. But that need not precipitate a political crisis unless China is resolved to have one, which in itself would reveal Beijing’s hostile intent.

Long before the Abraham Accords established full diplomatic relations among Israel and several Arab states, they were working together. Wide-ranging intelligence cooperation, especially over the common threat of Iran, stimulated creative, mutually advantageous ways to do business. In another context, West Germany’s somewhat anomalous status didn’t prevent its full integration into NATO. Instead of hypothesizing about obstacles to closer cooperation with Taiwan, Asian and U.S. diplomats should emulate their predecessors and include Taiwan in collective security.

More Chinese air and sea incursions are coming, along with increased influence operations in Asian and Pacific countries and more intelligence-gathering efforts. Beijing is dictating the pace and scope of its intrusions, underscoring the need for closer cooperation among its targets. That alone would augment deterrence, but we haven’t got time to waste.

Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on September 10, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Dealing with the greatest adversary

September 01, 2024

The United States is certainly split internally, as this year’s presidential race shows. Donald Trump and his congressional supporters question US mil itary support for Ukraine, and even espouse withdrawal from NATO, or fundamentally restructuring alliance commitments. Nonetheless, recent polling shows overwhelming majorities of Americans back NATO (73%–27%) and believe the US should defend NATO allies if they are at tacked (74%–26%). However, that same poll also found comparable majorities believe NATO relies too much on US funding and that other NATO allies are not doing enough (74%–26%).

Read the full article in the Stern Stewart Journal Sep 24 edition.

Yet another Biden foreign policy failure

August 07, 2024

The Biden administration has again fallen victim to its own foreign policy, this time in Venezuela.

Entirely predictably, Nicolas Maduro’s illegitimate regime has stolen its second straight presidential election, propelled by White House concessions and naivete. As a result, the Venezuelan people remain under authoritarian rulers strongly backed by Russia, Cuba, China, and Iran. This is a U.S. failure by any measure.

Responding to Maduro’s first electoral larceny in 2018, Venezuela’s National Assembly, acting under the country’s constitution, declared the presidency vacant. The National Assembly then named Juan Guaido as acting president pending new elections. Some 60 countries, mostly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere, recognized Guaido’s government and its authority over Venezuelan state assets. Many imposed economic sanctions, particularly against PDVSA, the government-owned oil company, to pressure Maduro’s criminal regime into accepting this.

After extensive efforts to oust Maduro, opposition efforts failed in April 2019. Although he successfully reimposed authoritarian rule, the sanctions weakened Venezuela’s already-collapsing economy, forcing Maduro to rely increasingly on illegal drug trafficking for revenue.

Former President Donald Trump’s loss of interest in Venezuela thereafter meant that American policy drifted until his term ended. Unfortunately, and unavoidably, Maduro then proceeded to rig Venezuela’s 2020 parliamentary elections, which the opposition boycotted, giving Maduro’s supporters overwhelming control of the National Assembly.

President Joe Biden’s election brought a return of Obama-like policies toward Latin America, which downplayed Venezuela’s importance to the emerging Beijing-Moscow axis, or to Havana and Tehran.

Meanwhile, now fully in control of Venezuela’s governmental institutions, Maduro systematically dismantled opposition parties. He intimidated anti-regime political leaders ahead of the next presidential election, disqualifying candidates such as Maria Corina Machado, the opposition’s main leader.

Even as this repression was underway, the Biden administration made a deal with Maduro, weakening U.S. sanctions and making other concessions if Maduro committed to holding free and fair elections.

This agreement simply accelerated Maduro’s election-rigging, while simultaneously benefiting the regime through loosened sanctions.

After Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election, Maduro’s officials quickly declared him the winner. No one believed these assertions, not even Biden’s White House. Both the opposition and international observers believed Edmundo Gonzalez, the opposition candidate, had won a 2-1 majority.

Given Maduro’s long record of dishonesty, this was all tragically foreseen, except by the Biden administration. Distracted by his own political troubles, and with the international coalition against Maduro (particularly the Western Hemisphere’s Lima Group) in disarray, Biden had no strategy to respond.

However, led by Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Congress reacted quickly, and with strong bipartisan support, to recognize Gonzalez as Venezuela’s president-elect and reimpose U.S. sanctions.

The White House followed, declaring Gonzalez the winner and abandoning its initial feckless call on Maduro to make public the Venezuelan vote-tally sheets proving he had won.

Leftist regimes in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have so far waffled, not taking a public position on the outcome, and thereby providing Maduro oxygen. Reviving the Lima Group is now critical to show Western Hemisphere solidarity, but doing so requires urgent White House effort to get these important South American countries to recognize Gonzalez.

Without question, all previous American sanctions must be restored immediately, and more should be added.

Venezuela is the right place to start dramatically enhancing U.S. sanctions enforcement: in resolve, capabilities, and resources. Targets of sanctions don’t meekly accept their fate, but do everything possible to evade or mitigate sanctions’ effects. Accordingly, U.S. enforcement must be dynamic, evolving ahead of targets’ efforts to escape the economic bullseye.

The objective of U.S. and multilateral sanctions and other punitive steps against Maduro’s regime must have as their ultimate objective the defeat of “Chavismo” once and for all. Only by sweeping away Venezuela’s reigning ideology and returning government to its people will they have a meaningful chance to better their status, economically and politically, and reduce the heavy hand of foreign influence.

Although some observers believe Maduro has been weakened, there is no sign his masters in Moscow, Havanna, et al., have gotten the memo. Ensuring that they do should also be a U.S. diplomatic priority.

America failed the Venezuelan people once before. We must not do so again.

John Bolton served as national security adviser to then-President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

This article was first published in the Washington Examiner on August 6, 2024. Click here to read the original article

Reflections on where things stand in the Iran-Israel war

August 01, 2024

If press reports are accurate, not only Hizballah, but Iran itself is preparing to launch an all-out attack on Israel. Reports are such an attack could include up to seven fronts, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen let alone Iran itself, Gaza and the West Bank. Clearly, it is likely that we stand on the precipice of the next phase in this war — the phase of the great and direct showdown between the Islamic Revolution of Iran regime and Israel.

And though the grave reality seizing headlines across the world, astonishingly most appear to be still missing how big this moment is.

Iran faces a classic sunk investment — whatever money has been made is history, the net balance is now a loss and further clinging, let alone sinking, of more money into it is a growing loss. Such is Iran’s great “ring of fire” war against Israel. The war started on October 7^th with an Iranian victory via proxy and immense growth of stature and influence — and an especially successful seizing of the direction of the region’s strategic and geopolitical momentum toward itself, its axis of rogue states, and its geopolitical great-power allies of Russia and China. But since Israel entered Rafah and severed Gaza off from the rest of the world by seizing the Philadelphia corridor, Iran’s successful war to redefine the region around its eclipsing power has crossed into retreat.

The IDF is beginning to operationally reach peak performance, much as the U.S. armed forces did by the late spring of 1942.

The IDF is now fielding weapons that did not exist half a year ago. It is a heavily trained force, well equipped, and morale remains astronomical. It is fielding power that is unimaginably far beyond anything it was in October 2023.

Any further conflict — any form of Iranian escalation — thus invites an Israeli response that delivers gallopingly increasing marginal returns that ravage Iran’s assets and strength — from its proxies to forces on its own territory.

Given how dangerous Israel has become, and given how the relative balance of military power is shifting toward the IDF, Tehran should be desperate to cut bait and walk away. It should “take the win of October 7” and shut everything down.

But it cannot. The humiliation at this point of these recent hits — Israel’s seizing the Philadelphia corridor and Rafiah, Muhammad Deif’s demise, Fouad Shukr’s demise, Ismail Haniyah’s demise, several top Hizballah operational sector heads’ demise — all devastated Iran’s initial success and have shifted the strategic momentum in this war.

As such if these defeats are left unanswered by Iran’s regime, it exposes Tehran’s weakness, which in turn leads the Iranian people — who long ago divorced from their regime — to smell fear and impotence. That is how repressive regimes fall.

So, the ayatollahs of Tehran have to act and sink more into their investment of destroying Israel. But the more they do, the more Israel musters yet further defeats and humiliations, the more Israel strengthens, the more it seizes strategic momentum and emerges as the strong horse of the area. This in turn whittles away ever more or outright demolishes Iran’s assets, real strength and reputation.

The only thing that can save the regime in Tehran is an imposed ceasefire, which it might try to claim hampered it from its inevitable victory — which is receding faster than Yul Brenner’s hair line.

But the Ayatollahs cannot accept a ceasefire that leaves their most recent humiliations without retaliation, for which Israel is waiting to respond — likely in devastating ways against Iran itself. So they face a Hobson’s choice with no good path forward.

Moreover, Iran has always managed to survive and strategically win by being far more sophisticated in the arts of manipulation and strategic seductions than their opponents. They are the masters of playing strategic chess, unrivaled by any on the face of the earth. But all these strategies that are anchored to manipulation depend on an opponent that is predictable, sane, and rational. Israel’s strategic behavior is increasingly possessed – – the genies have seized the mind of Israel to create a parenthesis much known” – – and this is unpredictable, wild, dangerous, and impossible to manipulate. It is in a moment like that, that the normally strategically sophisticated and supremely controlling Iranian strategy leads to a moment of frozen paralysis. Iran is forced to fall back on a pattern of what has worked before, but that is precisely what Israel’s being possessed by the genie has rendered useless. Iran is thus strategically seized up and finds itself reacting to an unpredictable and unmanageable deadly rival — precisely the position it always wants to impose on its opponents rather than have imposed on it by them. Iran thus finds itself upside down and can only act — or rather react — out of habit rather than strategic intelligence.

We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the Iranian regime emerging since a regime whose sole currency is based on the employment of a reign of terror, burn whose impotence is being exposed, and facade weak, defeated and humiliated is a regime not long for this world.

And if that happens …..

JD Vance is a disturbing choice for Vice-President

July 29, 2024

Although widely expected, Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate is nonetheless profoundly disturbing in its implications for American foreign policy in a Trump presidency. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater are turning in their graves.
Describing the substantive defects in the Trump-Vance approach could fill many pages of newsprint, but – taking Ukraine as an example – both men are disinterested, or openly disdainful, of assisting Kyiv’s defense against Russia’s unprovoked aggression. For Vance, the US lacks both the military assets and the defense-industrial base to be a global power, meaning it must concentrate its resources to defend against China.
It is beyond debate that years of inadequate defense budgets have made Washington’s job harder. Bill Clinton’s eagerness (along with European governments) to cut military budgets after the Soviet Union’s collapse (the so-called “peace dividend”) and Barack Obama’s debilitating military budget cuts still need repair. But these are failures of will and resolve, typical of Democratic foreign policies, not inadequate assets. Trump should work to correct these deficiencies, not treat them as excuses for further reductions, thereby abandoning even more international positions of strength.
Ironically, Trump rejects Vance’s foundational ‘logic’. He is apparently unwilling even to defend Taiwan. As re centently said: “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything. [It’s] 9,500 miles away. It’s 68 miles away from China…China’s a massive piece of land, they could just bombard it…Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.”
Isolationism combined with such incoherence is a toxic brew for US national security. But Vance’s nomination has additional implications beyond his and Trump’s poorly conceived statements.
In Vance, Trump unmistakably named his heir-apparent, which he had heretofore resisted. Many first-term officials and members of Congress had hoped for that designation, but their hopes have now been dashed. The new reality may persuade many disappointed aspirants not to serve in a second Trump term. They know that a VP’s influence in decision-making can be profound, especially when his personal chemistry with the President is as strong as that between Vance and Trump. Working in the West Wing, just yards away from the Oval Office gives the VP’ a customary advantage of being the last person to speak with a President before a major decision. These advantages are not overcome even by running great Cabinet empires like Defense or State.
Accordingly, the small army of political figures considering becoming candidates for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination might be best served by remaining in Congress or the private sector rather than joining a second Trump term, allowing them to retain their distance in case of disaster in the next four years, preserving their 2028 viability.
Moreover, choosing Vance signals that Trump will not be “normalising” his policy or personnel decision-making in a second term. Non-Trump Republicans hoped desperately during his march to the 2024 nomination that a second Trump term would profit from the mistakes of his first. They longed for four years of consistent policy directions and sound implementation, rather than the first’s transactional, unpredictable neuron flashes. Unfortunately for that dream, and the country, Trump clearly wants no troublesome subordinates, only yes-men and -women. Vance isn’t going to modulate Trump’s behavior. He is no Mike Pence.
Trump wants undiluted personal loyalty in his post-election government team, at all levels. Vance craved Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate primary, and his help in that year’s general election. He worked for the past two years to get into Trump’s inner circle, adopting his policies as he went. He has now succeeded. As Chinese Communists describe their relationship with North Korean Communists: Trump and Vance are like lips and teeth.

This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph on July 20, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Against the International Criminal Court – Lawless in the Hague

July 25, 2024

Since the late 19th century, generally well-meaning idealists have tried to conjure an international judicial system that would transform diplomatic, military, and economic conflicts into legal disputes. Led by sensible legal experts (who, of course, thought as they did), the global rule of law would replace destructive strife. If the rule of law worked within nations, why shouldn’t it work internationally? Whether parading under the banner of “world government,” “global governance,” or “the rules-based international order,” this blinkered, reductionist view of foreign affairs always includes a judicial component.

After World War II, the pace quickened. The United Nations Charter created the International Court of Justice (ICJ), to which nations could bring their disputes, replacing the failed Permanent Court of International Justice (formed by the Treaty of Versailles as an adjunct of the League of Nations). No one noticed the irony. The charter admonished the Security Council “that legal disputes should as a general rule be referred by the parties” to the ICJ (Article 36), and U.N. members agreed to comply with ICJ decisions in cases to which they were parties.

Contemporaneously, the victorious Allies established the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals to try allegations of “crimes against peace,” war crimes, and “gross abuses of human rights” committed by Germany and Japan. These tribunals were controversial even in their day, faulted for trying ex post facto charges (thereby violating the principle Nullum crimen sine lege, “No crime without law”), for being “show trials” with largely predetermined outcomes, and for constituting mere “victors’ justice.”

Advocates of judicializing international affairs wanted more, and in 1998, by the Statute of Rome, established the International Criminal Court (ICC), seated in The Hague near the ICJ. The European Union and Bill Clinton were ardent supporters of the treaty. Clinton signed it in his administration’s waning hours, knowing there was no chance of Senate ratification. His chief negotiator described the ICC as “the ultimate weapon of international judicial intervention” and “a shiny new hammer to swing in the years ahead.” George W. Bush reversed course, ordering the treaty unsigned in 2002, effectively ending any prospect of U.S. membership far into the future. India, Russia, and China, among others, also did not join.

American opposition to both the ICC and the Rome Statute’s substantive provisions (defining four crimes: genocide, aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity) was hardly confined to the Bush administration. Shortly after the statute entered into force, Congress enacted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, authorizing, among other things, “all means necessary and appropriate” to release Americans held by or on behalf of the ICC. For good reason, it was dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act.”

Simultaneously, President Bush launched a global campaign under the statute’s Article 98 to prevent U.S. citizens from being turned over to the ICC, in time securing agreements with over 100 nations. The Trump administration made further efforts to protect U.S. interests, although Joe Biden has abandoned many of them.

The ICC’s flaws are too numerous for one brief article. Fundamentally, the very concept of the ICC is illegitimate, an utterly unwarranted derogation of our constitutional, democratic sovereignty by an unaccountable entity operating in an international void. The court is not part of a coherent international-order structure. It is simply “out there” pretending to be a court in a pretend constitutional system that lacks even a pretend legislature to make laws and a pretend executive to enforce them. The ICC combines all three branches of government authority into one body, defying every American concept of separation of powers and the “structural constitutionalism” the Framers believed so critical to protecting our freedoms. Though ICC supporters claim it as vital, it is precisely this consolidating of functions that makes the court most dangerous.

The ICC is not checked anywhere in its jurisdictional reach, its legal conclusions, or its prosecutorial discretion. ICC supporters argue that its member governments ultimately control the judges and the prosecutor, but that is entirely theoretical. So far-reaching is the ICC’s purported jurisdiction that it applies even to nonmembers such as the United States and Israel when alleged crimes are committed on the territory of a state that is party to the Rome Statute. When such nonmembers try to protect themselves against the ICC’s excesses, they are accused of interfering with its independence. While the ICJ decides cases among nations, the ICC purports to exercise jurisdiction directly over individuals, authority no prior international organization ever claimed. Americans fought a revolution against such usurpations.

ICC advocates believe that if they just pretend hard enough, real governments will come to accept the prosecutor’s unaccountable decisions and follow the ICC’s orders. Unfortunately, for over two decades, it has been the court and its prosecutor that have done most of the pretending. Nonetheless, Westerners especially have a childlike capacity to pretend; they see hope in the ICC where potential aggressors see only opportunity. Those whom the threat of prosecution and punishment is supposed to deter have not been impressed, an outcome surprising to ICC partisans but not to history’s hard men. The likes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and Ayatollah Khamenei couldn’t care less about the threat of “legal” consequences for their actions.

The ICC’s most dangerous component is its essentially unaccountable prosecutor, whose extraordinary leeway makes U.S. “independent counsels” look tame. As with the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, the Rome Statute’s substantive crimes are vaguely stated, written in broad and sweeping diplomatic prose. They do not pass muster by American standards, which require clarity and precision in criminal statutes in order to give citizens notice of what prohibitions and obligations they face. The Supreme Court has long employed the “void for vagueness” doctrine to declare unconstitutional laws that afford too much discretion to prosecutors, impermissibly putting citizens at risk of prosecution for crimes they never understood existed.

Turned loose on the Rome Statute’s definitions of crimes, U.S. courts would not hesitate to declare much of them unacceptably vague. Moreover, the statute’s drafters openly advocated expanding the list of criminal prohibitions as the prosecutor and the ICC confronted new circumstances. Here, of course, the lack of separated powers and checks and balances figures importantly. It is one thing for a popularly elected legislature to enact new criminal laws but quite another for a prosecutor accountable to the ICC alone, and a court accountable to no one, to do so, especially where the ex post facto issue arises every time a new “crime” is detected. Nor are defendants protected by jury trials, as our Sixth Amendment requires; cases are tried instead before panels of the court, juries being so 18th-century to the statute’s drafters.

ICC supporters believe that many of these concerns are overstated because of the doctrine of “complementarity.” Embodied in the statute’s Article 17, complementarity means theoretically that jurisdiction to handle serious international crimes lies primarily in member states, with the ICC involved only rarely. Although reasonable-sounding, complementarity is not some well-settled principle of international law. It is simply an academic theory, carrying about as much force in the real world as most such fantasies. In practice, the ICC decides whether states have sufficiently met their obligations, and if not, the ICC will act. States are subordinated to the ICC’s unreviewable decisions, period. This is as plain a usurpation of sovereignty, especially from constitutional democracies, as one can imagine. What other countries accept is up to them, but America bends its knee to the ICC at its own peril.

Concern about the mirage of complementarity is not hypothetical. The prosecutor’s recent decision to seek arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant, along with two Hamas officials, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza (and other Iranian-backed terrorist threats against Israel) was a fire bell in the night that complementarity was no protection at all. Moreover, by interfering in the heat of battle, the ICC undoubtedly made resolving the war politically more difficult, all the while exhibiting the stench of moral equivalence by seeking arrest warrants against both sides as if they were equally culpable. Similar concerns apply to the prosecutor’s decision to proceed against Vladimir Putin and then–Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu in the ongoing Ukraine conflict. Who holds the ICC to account for these unilateral decisions? The precedent for irresponsible interference in future conflicts is unmistakable.

The solution is to treat questions of whether and when to prosecute internationally as unique to their circumstances. Prosecution über alles is not the answer. Nations should take responsibility for their own citizens’ crimes even if that is impossible until there is regime change in the offending state. That may mean justice delayed, but international probity will ultimately increase only when nations accept responsibility for crimes committed in their names. Merely that the ICC can try cases more immediately is no answer. The hard reality is that many (perhaps most) contemporaneous ICC trials would be in absentia, which simply fuels grievances that provoke future conflicts. Who, for example, believes that trying Putin in absentia would increase global peace and security? The most grievous crimes ultimately require international resolution in broad political terms, not narrow legal ones. The ICC cannot bear that burden.

For Americans, the fundamental question is how to protect ourselves and our allies from this illegitimate court and prosecutor. During two decades of operation, the concerns expressed while the Rome Statute was being negotiated have too frequently become realities. “Fixes” to the ICC, of whatever magnitude, will not suffice. The institution itself is irreparably flawed.

Sporadic U.S. cooperation with ICC investigations is potentially dangerous. Indeed, the most insidious temptation is for Washington to assist the ICC when the likely accused nation is discernibly evil. In George W. Bush’s second term, for example, the United States cooperated with the ICC in the Darfur conflict and more broadly. Barack Obama found numerous opportunities, including in Kenya, Libya, and the former Zaire. Under Joe Biden, with the support of several congressional Republicans, U.S. cooperation with and rhetorical support for the ICC advanced to its highest levels, especially regarding multiple allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Although such cooperation has not to date increased the chance that Washington will join, the risk is still real, and the allegation of hypocrisy hard to ignore. The unpleasant reality is that U.S. cooperation with the ICC when it suits us is hypocritical and ultimately damaging to America’s principled case against the ICC’s legitimacy. Biden personally demonstrated the hypocrisy when he criticized the prosecutor’s pursuit of senior Israeli officials while simultaneously supporting the ICC investigation of Russian crimes in Ukraine.

The only safe and conscientious American approach is what I have long called the “three noes”: no U.S. cooperation of any sort with the ICC, no direct or indirect financial contributions to the ICC, and no negotiations with other governments to “improve” the Rome Statute. We should continue and expand our efforts, especially with European Union members, to obtain Article 98 agreements to protect U.S. citizens. And we should continuously reexamine the adequacy of our weapons against ICC efforts to investigate American conduct.

This zombie organization cannot ultimately survive without American support. We shouldn’t give it oxygen.

This article appears as “Lawless in The Hague” in the September 2024 print edition of National Review.

John R. Bolton served as national-security adviser to President Donald Trump and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush. He is the author of The Room Where It Happened.

This article was first published in The National Review on July 25, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Biden Drops Out, the Dangers of a Lame-Duck President Emerge

July 21, 2024

Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race effectively makes him a lame duck. The odds favored his achieving this status on Nov. 5 anyway, but America now faces a nearly 100-day longer interregnum than in prior transition periods. We may focus on the election campaign, but the wider world worries what Washington’s global role will be for the next six months.

History affords no clear answer. The constitutional rule that we have only one president at a time is often hard for Americans, let alone foreigners, to grasp. The dangers posed by uncertainty about who’s in charge even in normal transitions are exacerbated by a weak incumbent no longer seeking re-election. U.S. adversaries, and even some allies, will see opportunities to advance their interests. Nor can we rule out what an otherwise responsible, but disappointed and possibly bitter lame duck might consider doing as his tenure in office dwindles.

The national-security risks and opportunities facing lame-duck presidents vary with the international environment and their own beliefs and proclivities. This year, the length of Mr. Biden’s lame-duckery offers unique complexities. Given the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit, one could argue that presidents become lame ducks on their second Inauguration Day, but that obscures the key differences between how the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations ended versus the “defeated” Lyndon Johnson, Carter and Biden presidencies.

Past lame-duck periods don’t uniformly demonstrate presidential (or national) weakness. While Mr. Biden may simply slumber through the remainder of his term, that outcome is far from preordained. For good or ill, presidents retain broad discretion, and their approaches have ranged from high-minded to vindictive, with enormous consequences for their successors.

Wide-ranging actions by lame ducks are sometimes simply unnecessary. Transitions between same-party presidents, which may or may not happen this cycle, are rare, but in 1988-89 Ronald Reagan worked hard to facilitate Vice President George H.W. Bush’s accession to office.

In some cases, lame-duck presidents simply do their own thing, irrelevant to their successor. Bill Clinton continued to chase the gray ghost of Middle East peace while Gov. Bush and Vice President Al Gore slugged it out in the Florida recount. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, global disarray so thoroughly dominated international affairs that the U.S. didn’t seem particularly vulnerable.

Lame-duck periods during party-to-party transitions are the most dangerous, almost unavoidably so, whether the outgoing president was defeated or simply trying to finish without impairing his party’s nominee. Freighted with potential consequences, conflicts between the lame duck and his successor, and between their teams, are often testy, reflecting just-concluded campaigns, and most acutely raising the question of who’s in charge.

The 1980-81 Carter-Reagan transition was such a case, dominated by the Iran hostage crisis. The campaign had been bitter, with mutual recriminations on many fronts, including about the hostages. Fortunately, a potentially destructive Carter lame-duck period was averted by a deal that suited all the actors: releasing the hostages (a plus for Mr. Carter) after Reagan was actually inaugurated (a plus for Reagan), bringing a temporary end to Tehran-Washington tensions (a plus for Tehran). Nonetheless, with controversies like the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and high tensions with China, the prospect of conflict clouding Biden’s lame-duckery is palpable.

After the 1992 election, George H.W. Bush intervened militarily in Somalia to open closed channels for humanitarian assistance. The White House made it clear Bush would act as he saw best while still president, but he offered to withdraw all U.S. forces before Mr. Clinton’s inauguration if the new president desired. Mr. Clinton chose to continue the mission, later mistakenly expanding it, but the two presidencies functioned smoothly during the handover.

In stark contrast, Barack Obama chose to settle scores with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the United Nations Security Council. By abstaining on Resolution 2334 (passed 14-0-1 on Dec. 23, 2016), Mr. Obama figuratively knifed both Mr. Netanyahu and the incoming Trump administration, which had openly advocated a U.S. veto. While abstaining wasn’t a startlingly new position, it was unnecessary and vindictive, auguring in a small way what a determined lame-duck could do.

Mr. Trump made the 2020-21 transition perilous by trying frantically and erratically to thwart the results of the 2020 election. Whether one considers the Jan. 6 riot and the runup to it an insurrection or simply disgraceful and disqualifying for Mr. Trump, his lame-duck period was the second-worst in American history (after James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln in 1860-61).

While it’s difficult to predict what Mr. Biden may do as a lame duck, or what external threats or crises might develop, our current circumstances hold uncharted dangers. Congress, the candidates and especially the American public need to begin thinking about the challenges ahead, and monitoring Mr. Biden’s prolonged lame-duck status closely.

Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

This article was first published in Wall Street Journal on July 21, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The New Iranian President and Donald Trump

July 16, 2024

Masoud Pezeshkian probably never expected to become Iran’s President, nor did most of his countrymen, nor the outside world. Whatever the reasons for his success, Pezeshkian’s victory means only that Tehran now shows a smiley face to foreigners rather than a mean face. Beneath surface appearances, nothing substantive has changed.

Westerners especially have long misunderstood that Iran’s elected Presidency does not hold decisive political power, certainly not on Tehran’s critical national-security priorities like nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and supporting innumerable terrorist groups. Ayatollah Khamenei is the Supreme Leader, like his predecessor and father of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. “Supreme Leader.” That title tells you everything.

Elections for Iran’s presidency are hardly free and open. To start, only candidates satisfactory to the Guardian Council may run, and the Council has never been slack in applying rigid ideological standards. The races are ultimately never more than hardline-hardliners running against moderate-hardliners. If the Guardian Council had wanted to exclude Pezeshkian from the election, they could have. If they wanted to ensure he lost, they could have allowed multiple “moderates” in the race and only one “hardliner.” Instead, they did the opposite, and Pezeshkian prevailed. If the regime had really been worried about such an outcome, it would simply have stolen the election, as in 2009. Interestingly, voter turnout figures remain hotly disputed, so we may never know exactly how many people legitimately cast ballots.

Until the regime finally issues a definitive statement on why Pezeshkian’s predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter crash, questions about regime stability will linger. Whatever the cause of the crash, Pezeshkian is an accidental President. For Raisi, the presidency may well have been but a steppingstone, given Khamenei’s age and infirmities. He had been fingered by the Supreme Leader and others as potentially Iran’s third Supreme Leader upon Khamenei’s death or incapacity. Pezeshkian, by contrast, seems to be a temporary fill-in, even more of a figurehead than other Presidents, until the key ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard decide how to proceed.

Over 45 years, Iran’s two Supreme Leaders, through successive presidencies, have never deviated from their fundamental national-security precepts: (1) pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile delivery capabilities; and (2) creating and enhancing multiple terrorist proxies across the Middle East and globally. These have been foundational both to Tehran’s hegemonic regional ambitions and its broader aspirations for dominance in the Islamic world. No mere substitute President is going to obstruct that strategic vision.

What Pezeshkian does for the mullahs is to provide what Russians call “maskirovka”: camouflage that disguises Iran’s real foreign policy. Like other puppets and front men Tehran has used over the years, including former Foreign Minister Javid Zarif and Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator now nestled comfortably at Princton, Pezeshkian is a walking, talking disinformation campaign. Susceptible Westerners, longing for resumed nuclear talks with Iran, now have a straw to grasp at. Nothing will come from any resumed diplomacy, of course, because there is no sign Iran the Supreme leader has made a strategic decision to change course.

Ironically, therefore, the mullahs have scored a public-relations coup by having an empty suit like Pezeshkian replace Raisi, widely called “the butcher of Tehran” for his judicial role in ordering executions of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of political prisoners. If Pezeshkian chooses to attend the UN General Assembly opening in New York this September, one can imagine the welcome America’s credulous media and academic institutions will afford him. He smiles, he waves, he acts informally, perhaps he likes progressive jazz, maybe he drinks a little Scotch whiskey in private (who knows!), he must want to make a deal the United States!

US liberals and the Biden Administration can dream about this scenario, but they may not be in office after November’s election. Even if they were, of course, the compliant Pezeshkian they imagine would not be making nuclear-weapons policy, nor would his Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, chief negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal. Americans are all too apt to succumb to the diplomatic phenomenon known as “mirror imaging,” where negotiators look across the table and see people just like themselves: reasonable men and women simply looking to find practical solutions to shared problems. That’s exactly opposite from how the Islamic Revolution views the outside world.

Instead, if Donald Trump wins, now more likely than ever after the failed July 13 assassination attempt, his propensity to treat national-security issues simply as opportunities for making deals could lead to a Trump-Pezeshkian get-together. French President Emmanuel Macron almost seduced Trump into meeting with Zarif on the margins of the Biarritz G-7 in August, 2019. Trump’s “zeal for the deal” brought him within an eyelash of seeing Zarif, and foreshadows a contemporary version of that meeting early in a new Trump term. It may take second place to Trump visiting North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in Pyongyang to reopen nuclear negotiations, but it suits Trump’s singular focus on personal publicity.

Thus, while Pezeshkian’s election as President may not have been conscious Iranian maskirovka, there is no doubt the Supreme Leader and his cohorts can take advantage of the opportunity presented if they so choose. Such circumstances do not mean a new nuclear deal would emerge, since that would certainly not be Tehran’s negotiating objective. Instead, the mullahs would be playing for more time, which is uniformly beneficial to would-be nuclear proliferators, hoping to achieve a nuclear-weapons capability, and then to decide how to employ it. The same would be true for Iran’s terrorist objectives in the region and beyond. Trump would not even realize he was playing according to the Supreme Leader’s script.

Although the unsuspecting Masoud Pezeshkian may not realize it, he may be exactly the gift the ayatollahs never thought to ask for.

This article was first published in the Independent Arabia on July 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The Gaza conflict as the West’s Rorschach test

July 15, 2024

Israel’s war in Gaza has become a Rorschach test for elites to examine their strategic assumptions and vision. While not a monumental war across several continents, the Gaza war has become a watershed in the evolution since World War II of how we think about war.

World War II was a defining event of the 20^th century. It also was a seminal moment in the history of war. It was a dramatic total war. It ended with the delivery of absolute victory by the allies and vast destruction of our enemies, including widespread suffering. And it resulted in the annihilation and eclipsing stigmatization of the underlying ideologies of evil that caused the war.

The successful prosecution of that war provided at first a template for understanding war and strategy going forward – a set of understandings Paul Nitze captured in crafting the national security strategy of the United States which was codified in the NSC-68 document in 1948. The strategy assumed a twilight struggle with the Soviets, the strong possibility of an eventual total war, and an aggressive plan to win and ultimately to collapse and annihilate the underlying idea of communism. Even containment at first was an aggressive strategy that sought victory, not by invasion but by forcing the implosion of communism onto itself to eliminate it.

Although World War marked the greatest moment of American power, success and purpose – as well as the solidifying of its moral standing — ironically, within a decade, despite the precedent of World War II, elites in the West abandoned the basic template forged from World War II and have ever since rejected their own legacy and instead confidently concluded that total war is an immoral affair. They concluded as well that victory itself is no longer a valid objective in war. Moreover, despite the utter disrepute in which Nazism and Mikadoism had been relegated, war nonetheless began to be seen as futile as an instrument to defeat evil ideas, or even that ideas themselves can be evil and cause war.

Indeed, the conclusion that ideas cannot be vanquished in war underpins a conclusion that the aim of war is no longer to vanquish your enemy. Instead, war is part of a negotiation to moderate the enemy’s ideas enough to come to an accommodation.

Behind this shift is the idea that nations, especially their populations, do not go to war. Governments, or even sub-cliques in governments, do. Of course, this places a bloated emphasis on employing force so surgically that it guarantees “zero civilian causalities” — the standard indignantly demanded of Israel last month by Secretary of State Blinken. This is a truly impossible standard that gives overwhelming moral and tactical advantage to immoral, cynical and grotesque enemies, such as Hamas. Indeed, it makes the intentional slaughter of their own population a highly effective strategic imperative of such ideologies anchored to martyrdom and its cult of death.

Of course, if one needs in the end to defeat not even a government, let alone entire population, but only a sub-clique within the government, then war must be sharply harnessed and calibrated to allow for some sort of accommodation with your enemy to end the conflict. Undoubtedly it is generally advisable and moral to desist from debasing one’s adversary in ways to the point that it diminishes them as humans. There are many cases in which seeking such a humiliating victory – or seeking deliberately disgracing terms of victory over the defeated — indeed can dishonor a nation culturally to such an extent that it strips it of the confidence to reconcile to its defeat peacefully. Largesse in victory has its role.

And yet, the idea that war has evolved to such a surgical and refined point and demanding that absolute standard is both unrealistic and indeed often unhelpful. Moreover, to apply an antiseptic standard that rejects as valid the aim of defeating a nation and extend it even to a prohibition on inflicting a stunning defeat in war to its government as well, becomes highly problematic.

The idea of displaying largesse in victory and rejecting total dehumanization in his defeat has mutated in the last six decades into a prohibition altogether of victory as a valid goal and discarding entirely the subjecting of an enemy to obvious defeat. This evolution emerges from the idea that seeking victory and imposing defeat undermines those among our enemy who seek to moderate the offending ideology while at the same time vindicates those hardliners – the sub-clique within government which is ultimately guilty for causing or prolonging the war and who see the conflict in Manichean terms within which only one side can emerge as survivor. The world then is divided not between our nation and its ideas against its enemy population or even an enemy government and the ideas or cultural attributes that animate it, but between the sub-cliquish “hardline” advocates of a Manichean struggle to the death on both sides (ourselves and the enemy) against the “moderates” on both sides (ourselves and the enemy) who seek to reform their respective ideas to reach accommodation. In these terms, the goals of victory and the aim of defeat are then viewed not only as inappropriate, nor even just as irresponsible, but as dangerous, immoral and bloodthirsty. The battlelines thus are drawn between moderates and hardliners, not between ideas, government and nations.

The drift in strategic imagery among Western elites — which stands in stark contrast to the experience of World War II – proceeded until October 6, 2023, inexorably toward a universally (among Western elites) refined view of the world.

But then came October 7.

For Israelis, October 7, however, represented a collapse of the accumulated ideas of the last half century. An evil erupted in reality that had lived only in memory and generationally bequeathed trauma – or so the Israelis had thought. All attempts to moderate Palestinian nationalist ideology had failed. Israeli peace activists and those who reached out to Palestinians and railed against their own countrymen’s nationalism (against the hardliners) were butchered, raped and kidnapped without mercy. The savagery was cheered on by the very “moderates” on the Palestinian side that were imagined to be the partners in peace and accommodation. Nor was it just the Israeli memory and generational trauma bequeathed that was suddenly a reality. Internationally, the global left peace movements and camp – the progressive left which so many Jews imagined was their ally — turned on the Jews with animated hatred that confirmed that Hitler’s ghost had suddenly sprung back to life. Frenzied Jew-hatred became fashionable, and it was led not by an uniformed mass, but by elites and elite institutions. And left-leaning governments wholesale failed their Jews, leaving them unprotected in their streets against the raging mobs.

The Israelis and the Jews, thus, suddenly found themselves not in a conflict that resembled any affecting Western countries in the last eight decades, but in a conflict that resembled 1935-1945. Every horror a Jewish parent and grandparent had told their decedents about which we all were warned but nonetheless believed modern Western society had finally transcended were suddenly alive, insatiable and rampaging.

And the idea of the enemy, of Hamas, of Palestinian nationalism itself, was irreconcilable. Hades himself had emerged from his tunneled netherworld. Every action taken not only by those whom Israelis imagined as hardliners, but by those whom they regarded as moderates, and in fact the entire population, proved to be part of a carefully laid incremental strategy vectoring toward the final goal of destroying the Jewish state. Every attempt at moderating the idea of Palestinian nationalism had resulted in deepening violence, radicalization and finally unimaginable wholesale slaughter. If in the 1980s, Western elites contemplated the practical solutions that might allow Arab populations under Israeli control to exercise self-governance or even freedom, the Palestinian Arabs had now birthed an age in which Western elites rejected the very validity of the continued existence of the Jewish state itself, and implied – and increasingly overtly screamed for — the acceptability of a second Holocaust of its Jewish inhabitants.

In short, Israel found itself in total war, engaged in a twilight struggle to the death, with an enemy animated by an implacable ideology and supported by an entire population that was mentally and materially mobilized, as well as obsessively and entirely focused on the Jewish people’s destruction. Israel was fighting its modern World War II, and not an American war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or even a French war in Algeria. It was not fighting a Soviet-inspired proxy army or an insurgency seeking some sort of exit from a colonial structure. It was fighting to survive a total onslaught by a whole people animated by a genocidal cult of death and martyrdom.

In this moment, the sanitized rules of war, the very playbook of war, that had informed elites in the West thus since World War II was rendered vastly unaligned with the realities of the war Israel faced.

But Israel was torn.

On one side, it knew the war it had to fight, and it mentally transitioned (almost instantly) to an outlook akin to the allies’ image of their mission in World War II. Israel understood it had to restore its regional image of power, eliminate Hamas from controlling any part of Gaza and avoid any path to its reconstitution by controlling the Gaza border with Egypt, and to weaken and distance Hizballah a dozen kilometers or more form the northern border to reestablish a demilitarized buffer zone in Lebanon rather than the current de facto evacuation of norther Israel as a buffer zone so that Hizballah cannot launch a surprise attack. It knew it was in total war with not only Hamas, but the majority of the Palestinian population. It knew that war was not only necessary, but that unequivocal victory in it was the only path to peace and security.

But on the other, Israel labored under the refined and antiseptic standard that Western elites demanded. It was still dependent on US arms supply, so it had to pay homage to the consensus of Western elites detached from the strategic realities and determined to secure a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control of at least a substantial portion of Gaza and Hizballah still tactically positioned to conduct of much larger and more deadly October 7-like attack at will. In short, Israel was not allowed to seek victory, let alone seek total defeat of the idea animating its adversary – an adversary that was both the majority of Palestinian Arab people and the government of Iran.

Israel in its war with Iran – fought through the arena of the Gaza strip and likely Lebanon too – has had to navigate a narrow, even a knife’s-edge width, path.

Essentially, Israel found itself having to seek the sort of victory, the validity, wisdom and justness of which Western elites reject. It must destroy Hamas in its entirety, leaving nobody within Hamas with whom to negotiate, but only to accept terms of unconditional surrender. It must inflict a generational realization among Palestinian Arabs of the self-destructive insanity of fighting to destroy the Jewish people and the futility of ongoing questioning of the permanence of Israel. It must fight to the point at which the very ideas underpinning Hamas, and indeed the ideas of its mentors in Iran, are seen as so suicidal and disgraced that they are taboo, as were Mikadoism and Nazism discredited and taboo after World War II.

Thus, Israel must achieve so total, decisive and absolute victory that it destroys Hamas as an organization and fatally wounds the idea animating it, while the West insists on its impossibility. Israel must deliver such an unrestrained blow to its enemies that even the population of its opponents realize that Israel is so strong that it is futile to attack it and thus discredit radical voices, while the West believes radical voices are defeated only by restraint and compromise.

In short, the very concept of war and conflict informing the West for the last half century is on trial by this war. If Israel actually does emerge victorious wherein Hamas collapses entirely, Hizballah is forced to retreat and Iran is left reeling and ripe for a “1982 Falklands-like meltdown for the Junta” scenario, it disproves so much of what Western elites so firmly believe.

Which is why so many elites in the West — even those elites in Israel who identify with these global elites — cannot fathom, let alone countenance, a total Israeli victory over Hamas in Gaza, cannot accept that Israel is at war with a people at this point (all polls confirm this) nor can tolerate even slightly the means or results that would deliver it.

But Israel does not live in the world of theories. The war it is fighting and the threat of destruction it faces is very real.

So the world is divided between elites who received and internalize the warning, wake-up call and sobering lesson of Israel’s agony, and those who retreat yet deeper and with more determination to preserve the paradigm of war that had defined in the last half century the West’s elites.

The war in Gaza – and how one relates to the idea of Israel’s quest for victory — has laid bare onto which side one falls.

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