Nukes in the Time of MAGA
The volleying of ballistic missiles over the Levant has started. Now What?
Short note.
There was much isolationist sentiment in the United States in the lead up to the nation’s entry into the Second World War. And it was a bad thing, we were told, for it merely delayed the inevitable but righteous and imminently correct business of defeating Fascism in Europe and in the Pacific.
That’s one of those canned lessons people in my age cohort will likely have encountered as middle school students. But the underlying theme was incontrovertible gospel: The isolationists were bad people.
The isolationists, the story goes, believed that “we” (Americans) had been unnecessarily led into the First World War. Let those Europeans fight it out among themselves! But, we went “Over There” and bailed them out. We lost about 10,000 per month to do the job. Then 1941: Let’s get neither sucked nor suckered into another European war. But, then we did, and we bailed them out again. Suckers!
This line of reasoning is explicitly dramatized (and rejected) in an extended scene in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
The film recounts the return of three veterans to Pleasantville in the American Midwest. One fellow had been grievously wounded in the war, and his hands had been amputated. The greater humiliation was the fact that he had lost his hands not in combat but in a training accident. (The actor had actually had his hands amputated after a training experience gone bad.) Another fellow returns from the air war over Germany to his Depression-era existence on the wrong side of the tracks. The third fellow returns from the Pacific both physically and mentally intact. Mostly. He happily returns to his posh job as a bank executive. The fellow from the wrong side of the tracks falls in love with the bank executive’s daughter. Boy gets girl at the very end with the blessing of the parents. The disabled fellow learns to accommodate and accept his disablement and is then able to accept himself as abundantly adequate for the girl he had left behind—and who remained eager and hopeful to take him back.
The end of war marked a sharp end to a sharp chapter in the lives of everyone. It set the initial conditions for a new chapter. But, there was much uncertainty. What trajectories would their lives set off on?
The film ends like a Jane Austen novel: everyone sets off on good trajectories! It’s not like War & Peace where Sonya gets blown off but everyone else gets to ride off into the sunset. But, in The Best Years of Our Lives, everyone does not get to ride off into the sunset without the film first dedicating a scene to rounding up and rejecting the isolationists.
The everyman-isolationist in the film recounts a view often attributed to such figures as George S. Patton: We got suckered again, but, if we were to have fought with anyone, we should have fought with Hitler’s Nazis against Stalin’s Stalinists. We were suckers for helping to defeat the Germans and to elevate the Russians.
Some self-anointed members of the MAGA crowd almost sound like this. Tucker Carlson comes to mind. He had taken time to interview an “amateur historian” who went so far as to suggest that the Brits and Winston Churchill should, in May 1940, have accepted the overtures from the Nazis, given up fighting, and, if anything, taken up arms with the Germans against the Soviets. I would suggest that there’s nothing wrong with an interview, but to leave that claim unchallenged … puzzling.
Then there’s this:
Again, there’s nothing wrong with expressing a view. It’s good to get clues about what people are thinking. But what are people thinking? This business of “warmongering” and “peacemaking” requires a lot more development. I fear that that development will not be forthcoming. Instead, we get slogans that are tossed out like slabs of rancid meat on a filthy butcher’s table.
That said, to draw parallels with the weekend’s events might itself seem a little ambitious. But the “anti-war” crowd of the sort that I encountered at an anti-war rally in early 2023 in Washington, DC maintains a deep reservoir of pro-Hamas, pro-Russian and pro-Iranian sentiment. All of that affirmative sentiment derives from a deeper reservoir of affirmatively negative anti-Western sentiment. That anti-Western sentiment is anti-American and anti-Jewish.
Bad as that may seem, there is something worse out there. The “Libertarians.” Even the Libertarian Party had set up a booth at that anti-war rally, but they really seem offended by borders and are ideologically committed to no borders. Everywhere. People should be able to go and live wherever they want. The borders of the United States and Israel offend their pure, uncompromised and uncompromising principals.
It all sounds so great, but what happens when others don’t respect the “essential precondition” of “respect for individual rights”? Might one Libertarian’s Utopian principals be another ethnocentrist’s license to casually stroll on in and impose his own incompatible vision of Utopia from the end of a gun. Such was (is) the jihadists’ program of October 7, 2023. Submit or be raped, tortured and die. But, we’re supposed to let these people walk on in and impose their explicitly totalitarian program of Submission, because everyone is going to respect individual rights. The experiences in Britain, France and Germany … and the whole of the Middle East suggest otherwise.
Meanwhile:
Good question: Is the prospect of Iran developing nuclear capabilities just a fiction? I would suggest not, but …
A bigger question: So what if Iran develops nuclear capabilities?
This last question really gets at the matter of how we manage fraught relationships over indefinite time horizons. How should we manage the proliferation of nuclear weapons? The formula for building nukes has been out there for 80 years. Perhaps we should be surprised that more countries have not already developed nuclear capabilities. Should we really make an effort to restrict who can develop capabilities? Would the world be a safer place if everyone were to maintain nuclear capabilities? Or, does greater proliferation increase the prospect of some party ultimately “pushing the button”? More buttons means greater likelihood of nuclear holocaust? Probably.
One possibility is that, were the Iranian regime to develop nuclear weapons and systems for delivering them—whether by missile or suitcase—a host of other nations in the Middle East would also clamor for developing their own nuclear capabilities. We’d end up with more itchy fingers on more buttons. Would the world be a safer place if the Iranians, the Saudis, the UAE, the Turks, the Jordanians, the Syrians, the Egyptians and other parties all situated themselves to mutually threaten each other with nukes? Would they also threaten other countries? (Yes.) Alternatively, do we really want to bear the costs of denying the Iranians nuclear capability, and what would that entail going forward?
There are some observers out there who demonstrated a scrap of perspicacity in that they have managed to pose something approaching that last question: What comes after war with Iran? A Chiliastic regime change? Or, do the Israelis and the Americans find themselves having to monitor and police developments in Iran indefinitely?
Admittedly, the last experience the United States had with the business of actively monitoring and policing conduct in the Middle East proved to be problematic. After the Gulf war of 1991, the United States managed to secure license from the United Nations to police a “no-fly zone” over Iraq and to impose a sanctions regime on Iraq. Left open was the question of how and when all of this policing and sanctioning would end. The French, the Russians and the Chinese ended up trying to extract Iraq from under the UN-sanctioned monitoring and enforcement. The United States endeavored to tighten its grip on Iraq. It went so far as to engineer an excuse to impose “regime change” in Iraq and thereby pull Iraq permanently into its sphere of control. The exercise amounted to a big FU to France, Russia and China.
So clever that was, right? But, ironically, the ultimate unintended result of the American effort in Iraq was to enable Iran to absorb Iraq into its sphere of influence. Iraq had served as something of a counter-balance to Iranian influence, but going forward, the Iranians would be free to use Iraq as a base for extending its influence even further afield. Iran was able to reach through Iraq and then Syria to then elevate its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza.
The Israelis took note. Professional Israel haters also took note. That’s why they complained so much when the Assad regime in Syria finally collapsed, for it would then be harder for the Iranians to support their cohorts in Lebanon and Gaza via Syria. The Iranian pincer around Israel would relax. “They” would include Dave Smith, Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey Sachs and George Galloway, people who have demonstrated delight in casually tossing around terms like “genocide.”
The Libertarian view might be to let the Israelis take note and to do with Iran what it will without active American support. Were Iran to vanquish Israel through its agents Hezbollah and Hamas, then so be it. Were Iran to vanquish Israel with nukes, then so be it. America should stay out of it.
I myself do not subscribe to that view, but one does not have to look far to find people who, one suspects, would delight in seeing the state of Israel vanquished. The first names that spring to mind include Glenn Greenwald, Dave Smith, Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey Sachs and George Galloway. And I don’t fault these people for being affirmatively anti-Israel. I do fault them, however, for not taking the time to articulate a vision of what a properly governed Middle East should look like. And I suspect that they assiduously avoid articulating a vision, because that vision would involve the extermination of people they don’t like, Jews in Israel.
Much the same goes for Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon or “Poso” (Jack Posobiec). Making incantations of “America First!” does not correspond to a thoughtful argument. “America First” amounts to nothing more than sloganeering. They disrespect their audiences by being lazy and not making an earnest effort to communicate an understanding of how matters should work out.
* * *
I was not planning on writing anything about the weekend’s flair-up in the skies of the Levant and Persia, but the surprising shallowness of all the hot takes from segments of the self-anointed MAGA crowd … I couldn’t put it out of my mind.
Meanwhile, it seems that the best the Iranian leadership can do for now—what’s left of it—is randomly lob ballistic missiles into Israeli neighborhoods. The effete, Sybaritic leadership of Hamas, comfortably ensconced in Doha, lounging about in the $billions of UN funding it has embezzled over the years, might approve of that kind of thing, because Hamas has made a point of lobbing rockets into Israeli neighborhoods since 2006. Lob rockets; blame Israel for retaliation; collect more aid from the West; wash-rinse-repeat. But, ballistic missiles with big warheads make for a big innovation in the fighting.
All that said: Now What? The Jew-hating Antifa types like the fiction of “stochastic terrorism” perpetrated by phantom phalanxes of Nazi right wingers. A better concept might be “stochastic war”: We can always endeavor to go back and connect dots. How did war start? How could it have been avoided? But, “stochastic” suggests that you can draw a bad card from the deck on any given day. Effective diplomacy might sharply reduce the prospect of drawing a bad card, but bad cards will sometimes yet be drawn. We can’t deterministically control everything.
That said, the Israelis, the Iranians, and the Americans have been dancing around this business of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East for decades. Yes, the Israelis have been sounding alarms for years about Iranian development of nukes and ballistic missiles—because the Iranians have been endeavoring for years to develop nukes and ballistic missiles. Fighting has finally broken out. The start of war marks the sharp end to the dancing and sets the initial conditions for a new chapter. But, there remains much uncertainty. Along what trajectory, either foreseen or unforeseen, will events yet unfold?
What would Sir Humphrey have to say about this?
