When War is the Right Answer
And Bad Leaders do the Right Thing
David Brooks had (yet another) interesting piece in the NY Times, this time on June 26, that ties into some broader questions that I think are worth exploring (the link does not require a subscription).
He begins by saying “I’ve spent the past few decades detesting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.” You know that this is a pre-but… and he goes on to say:
And yet those of us in the Bibi critics’ club do have to confront an uncomfortable fact: … Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. … Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.
This leads him to:
But I am saying that people like Netanyahu and Donald Trump, who I generally regard as forces for ill in the world, turn out to be, at least on the broader issue of the Iranian threat, forces for good. I am saying that those of us who detest Bibi and Trump should show a little humility and do some rethinking.
And that is my focus here. Now in truth, unlike Brooks who lumps himself in with those of the “center-right/center-left,” my own position has shifted to the point that I consider myself on the “radical left” of the hard core right. Brooks says that he misses “the days when liberal hawks roamed the earth,” and maybe that’s my crowd.
I won’t go into his recounting of the ways the Arab nations and the Iranians have for decades predicated their actions on the idea that “the Jews could be kicked out of Israel the way the Belgians were kicked out of the Congo.” The Israelis have long held that when someone says they hate you and will not stop until you are dead, you are obliged to believe them and act accordingly. But you should read what he says.
Brooks faces the fact that for forty years America and the West has tried to negotiate its way to a peaceful arrangement with Iran. Iran has simply used the process to delay and dilute any real action. The whole approach to their nuclear program simply followed that playbook and all the while the countdown to the bomb continued. Finally, Netanyahu acted, and while most of the EU gasped in mock horror, it was Germany’s Chancellor Merz who acknowledged the truth that Israel “did the dirty work for all of us.” By focussing on Iran and The Twelve Day War Brooks only addresses why Israel was justified in responding to this immediate and existential crisis. The question is broader and relates to how the West has approached international threats for over fifty years. The term “the West” is a little tricky. Really, what we are talking about is America’s response to threats to itself and the broader Western alliance. These responses have always had the USA at the lead with a combination of more or less willing allies. This is an subject for another essay that I probably won’t get to.
How Did We Get Here?
For this, I’ll start with Bret Stephens’ May 2024 article Do we Still Understand How Wars are Won? He starts off with “In the past 50 years, the United States has gotten good at losing wars,” and proceeds to talk about how it has constrained its allies to doing the same. A central theme is that over this time the US has never faced an existential threat. It had the luxury of not making a total commitment to those conflicts and ultimately preferred morally pure defeats over morally compromised victories.
It was not always thus. When the threat was different American behaviour was different. In WW II, the stakes were indeed existential. The explicit Anglo-American policy was to “undermine the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.” Allied bombers killed 60,000 civilians in Germany. And then, there was Japan. When Stephens wrote this article and up to today, both Ukraine and Israel faced existential threats.
Biden’s behaviour, as leader of the West, was to give Ukraine enough arms to forestall a Russian victory, but not enough to provoke a Russian escalation. Similarly, he attempted to block Israel’s advance into Raffa and warned it against attacking Hezbollah in the north. If his desire for peace arrangements was met, Russia would be encouraged to expand, and Hamas would be left in control of Gaza. There, the history of five previous Gaza wars would be repeated yet again, resulting in many more deaths and much more destruction.
He didn’t come to his policy independently. He was following Obama who was the author of inaction as foreign policy. His primary approach was a public position of “don’t escalate.” In addition, he made threats and when the opponent escalated (the obvious response), he showed himself to be bluffing. About Syria, he said, “There would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.”
After Assad used chemical weapons, Obama’s “enormous consequences” consisted of inviting Russia in to remove the Sarin stockpiles. Russia decided to stay, providing military support to Assad for the duration.
The result of failing to take action (i.e., don’t escalate) in 2013 was 12 more years of civil war in Syria with an additional:
480,000 — 550,000 additional deaths
2.75 — 3.0 million additional internally displaced
4.7 — 5.0 million additional refugees who fled including about 1 million who when to Europe.
In 2025, Israel, responding to threats and missile and drone strikes, destroyed Hezbollah’s military capabilities and neutered Iran’s air defences. Assad relied on both groups for support. In defending itself, Israel created a situation in Syria that finally ended their civil war. Syria is now in the process of reintegrating itself into the broader world community.
What Do We Learn?
In my mind, Matti Friedman summed it up in his article in the Free Press (emphasis mine):
One of the many things that have died in the past 20 months is the idea of the West as a coherent force that can act in its own interests. A few quiet generations in the “free world” have produced leaders who don’t seem to grasp what extraordinarily brutal and ugly things had to be done to make them free, or what must be done to stay that way.
To be kind, young people who have never seen what happens in war, and have been safe and unthreatened for their entire comfortable lives, might be excused for their cries of “Just make peace.” (Or, to be less than kind, Thomas Sowell’s comment could also be applied: “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”)
But the leaders of the West have no such excuse. Sometimes doing what needs to be done does not feel good. Coming back to Brooks: “… it would be a catastrophe if those of us who oppose Netanyahu and Trump concluded that we have to be against everything they are for.”