No, Donald Trump is not Hitler redivivus, as the more excitable Democrats want people to believe, but on occasion he does behave like Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator who danced about playing with a plastic terrestrial globe, spinning it on his fingertips, kicking it and butting it upwards and then hugging it to his chest before, to his chagrin, it suddenly went pop. The man who is making (North) America great again clearly imagines he can reshape the rest of the world by treating lesser potentates like counters in a board game he has devised and, as Vladimir Putin and Voldymyr Zelenskyy, followed by none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, soon found out, he can get very angry when they refuse to do what he tells them.
A couple of days ago, having just announced that he had “obliterated” the ayatollahs’ hopes of acquiring a nuclear arsenal by having the US Air Force drop huge bunker-busting bombs on a key underground installation, Trump ordered Israel and Iran to put an immediate end to the war they were engaged in. He let them know that he was in charge of the playground and that unless they stopped scrapping he would be obliged to discipline them.
When both tried to get in a few last blows, Trump exploded with anger not against the Iranians, who in his view had already been punished enough, but against the Israelis for daring to disobey him. It would appear that, as far as he is concerned, all that nasty Middle Eastern business has been done and dusted and that from now on Netanyahu will not have to worry about what Ali Khameinei and his friends are up to.
However, neither the Israelis nor many other people believe that, thanks to Trump’s decisiveness and geopolitical genius, the danger posed by the apocalyptic religious cults with a suicidal bent that thrive in the Middle East and North Africa now belongs to the past. They have good reason to suspect that, while Iran’s main nuclear programme was in all likelihood set back by several months or even years, enough of it remains to allow the mullahs and their accomplices to assemble quickly the few rudimentary atomic bombs they would need to put an end to the existence of the hated “Zionist entity.” And though Israel would presumably reply in kind, the religiously-minded rulers of Iran boast that their own destruction and that of most of their country would be a small price to pay for an achievement that would earn them all the eternal gratitude of Allah. Do they really mean it? If their own behaviour and that of some of their fellow believers is anything to go by, many would welcome a chance to play what, for them, would be a glorious part in the great religious drama that they and others like them think gives meaning to their worldly existence.
For Israel, what Trump called the “12-day war” was a spectacular success which, according to some who take it for granted that the nuclear programme is dead, could have longer-lasting effects than the “six-day” one of 1967 which left her Arab foes battered but by no means down and out. There can be no doubt that, in military terms, the Jewish State is by far the most powerful in a singularly bellicose region in which old-fashioned feelings about such matters are very much alive. In Europe, unarmed countries have little to fear; in other parts of the world, they are liable to be crushed and those who live in them slaughtered.
All Israel’s inhabitants know that, unless their neighbours fear the IDF, they could very quickly become the victims of a murderous attack on a far bigger scale than the one that, on October 7, 2023, started the chain of events that led to the war in Gaza, the neutering of Hezbollah, the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny in Syria and the destruction of much of Iran’s military capacity. Situated where she is, Israel knows that even a feeble attempt to respect the rules set by the progressive establishment in the West would be tantamount to signing her own death warrant. Hard as it is for many to understand, most Israelis are well aware that in their part of the world, ethical standards are much the same as they were thousands of years ago and that it would be foolish to pretend that this is not the case. Peaceful coexistence may be a splendid idea, but a civilised community cannot be expected to live amicably alongside ones which share the values of the Islamic State and the Iranian mullahcracy.
This is something most Westerners would still prefer to overlook, but after decades of telling themselves that they had left behind the bad old days in which people killed one another for nationalistic or even, hard as it was to imagine, religious reasons, they are gradually learning that in much of the world what were allegedly yesterday’s rules still apply. To live in peace you have to let your enemies know that if they attack you, they will be roundly defeated. In the last few months, Israel has severely mauled many of her enemies but suspects that the Iranians, after being humiliated on the conventional battlefield, will continue their holy war against the “Zionists” by resorting to terrorism and stirring up anti-Semitism in countries with large, and increasingly influential, Muslim minorities that enjoy the support of the anti-Western Left.
After contributing in a striking manner to Israel’s partial military victory over Iran, Trump reprieved the ayatollahs’ regime because he and most of his compatriots have no desire to see the United States involved in another “forever war” in the Middle East and know that “nation-building” following “regime change” would require a far greater effort than they are prepared to make. This may seem fair enough, but as long as there are many bright, courageous and competent people out there who loathe Israel, the United States and Europe so intensely that they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives attacking them, Western powers will have little choice but to intervene sporadically in order to eliminate the threats they are certain to pose. Far from helping to calm things down, the well-meaning passivity that most Western leaders seem to think appropriate is far more provocative than are displays of military might, with flag-waving onlookers cheering columns of soldiers as they march through the streets of their capital cities.
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