Substacks

Israel—and America—Have No Choice but to Act Niall Ferguson

Published

9 months ago

October 27, 2023

(Photo by Ismael Adnan via Getty Images)

Zugzwang is one of the ultimate challenges for a chess player. In zugzwang, a player is in a situation where any move can only weaken one’s position and carries the risk of checkmate—but not moving isn’t an option. Beyond the intrinsic horror of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it is now obvious that the attack was designed to provoke Israel into reacting. The extent of the zugzwang is increasingly clear, and Israel has few good options. Nor does the United States.

No one should have been surprised by the attacks on Israel by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Over the last year, there have been more than a dozen public meetings between Iranian officials and the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and PIJ. Enormous quantities of men and matériel have moved from Iraq into Syria, with other matériel arriving by land and air to Lebanon. Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the common thread of the region’s so-called “Axis of Resistance,” have worked to build and consolidate enormous bunkers and fortifications across Syria along with Hezbollah. Some anticipated another Lebanon War, others expected another Gaza War, and others expected a Third Intifada. The only thing few—if any—expected was a design to drag Israel into all these battles and several more at once.

The Imperative to Act

In the aftermath of October 7, Israel must strike back. Propelled by nationwide rage, a new government of national unity in Jerusalem has vowed to destroy Hamas. If that is the true goal, a ground operation in Gaza is necessary. Such an operation began in Israel on Friday night. The very nature of urban warfare means that it will have an enormous human cost and an uncertain duration. And this is not just urban warfare: there are two Gazas—the aboveground and the underground network of tunnels where Hamas’s men and weapons are stored.

And time is not on Israel’s side. International support is already waning, and nowhere more than in the Arab world. Egypt and Jordan, Israel’s most important security partners in the region, have already accused Israel of planning the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Worse still, the operation will tie down a significant portion of Israel’s manpower and assets. Israel will, as a result, be especially vulnerable to the risk of overextension.

Gaza isn’t the only problem. There is also the West Bank, where unrest is already growing and where the Palestinian Authority is at risk of collapse. Then, to the north, Hezbollah has its vast arsenal of rockets, drones, men, and missiles in Lebanon, while on the Syrian border tens of thousands of Iraqi militants have amassed with the goal of “liberating” the Golan. Thousands more Iranian-made drones and ballistic missiles are spread out across dozens of bases in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. For that reason, Israel now relies on American support. Jerusalem is likely waiting for the last of American reinforcements—including another carrier strike group—to arrive in the region prior to launching its attack. But is there an alternative?

The Cost of Inaction

Israel cannot not move—the essence of zugzwang. Those calling for a cease-fire do not seem to understand the existential implications of October 7, or the fact that 224 people, including many children, have now been held hostage by Hamas for three weeks.

Allowing Hamas to maintain its Islamist dystopia in the Gaza Strip after the October 7 massacre would leave Israel in a state of permanent fear. Several hundred thousand Israelis are already internally displaced from the north and the south. They will not return to their homes until it is truly safe to do so. Worse still, inaction would grant Iran’s Axis of Resistance a proof of concept, emboldening their belief that Israel’s days are numbered. Talk of a cease-fire or “pause”—already the favorite term at the United Nations and among European social democrats—is equally delusional. Despite the enormous humanitarian disaster that is unfolding in Gaza, inaction would allow Hamas and its allies to regroup and reorganize, all the while worsening an already damaged image of Israeli deterrence.

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, its enemies have relied on attrition tactics to stretch the country’s capabilities and intensify periods of political crisis. Since Egypt-backed Palestinian militants raided the Sinai in the 1950s, the goal has been to undermine Israeli domestic confidence, to drain the country economically, and to wear out its military resources. Five out of Israel’s nine biggest wars began as wars of attrition and ended with large-scale reprisal operations. In all but one of these cases, Israel sought to break a pattern of near-daily attacks through a decisive offensive action. The same pattern is repeating itself today.

Yet decisive action is difficult when the goal is effectively a regime change in Gaza, the possible destruction of Hezbollah, and retaliation against attacks from Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Even with complete American support, Israel must wage a campaign of months, possibly even years, to achieve such an ambitious objective.

Aron Nimzowitsch, one of history’s greatest chess players, famously quipped that “the threat is stronger than the execution.” The concern is that the coming Israeli response—when the threats of the last three weeks have to be executed—will lead to a loss of control and ultimately defeat.

The Cost of Action

The prospect of a multifront war means that Israel would be hard-pressed to attack Iran itself. The United States has the ability to attack Iran. The question is if it has the will to do so. Right now, it seems the answer is no.

It is telling that the Biden administration did not meaningfully retaliate to more than a dozen attacks by Iranian proxies in a single week, causing over 30 American casualties. Only on Friday did U.S. forces launch two air strikes against facilities used by the IRGC and its proxies in eastern Syria. But these were billed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as “precision self-defense strikes” because, in Austin’s words, “The United States does not seek conflict and has no intention nor desire to engage in further hostilities.”

Equally revealing is the White House’s continued prevarication about the extent of Iran’s involvement on October 7. The administration’s repeated suggestion that it was little more than an enthusiastic bystander is impossible to reconcile with the evidence that, for example, 500 Hamas terrorists got specialized combat instruction at Iranian facilities as recently as September. This is Iran’s war. But this administration refuses to acknowledge as much for fear that it will be compelled to act.

But even “precision self-defense” action has a cost—namely, that it emboldens rather than impairs the enemy. Should the war nevertheless escalate, the United States could face a massive wave of attacks against its military assets in the region, forcing it to choose between effective capitulation or another “forever war” in the Middle East.

Moreover, given the deep reluctance of the United States to do anything that might be interpreted as escalation, Iran may well seize the moment finally to test a nuclear weapon. That would be a sort of regional “checkmate.” The latest estimates suggest that Iran would need only around four weeks to acquire enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb and would only need around six months to prepare a test—just in time for the eve of the U.S. presidential election.

The Failure to Deter

Deterrence is not the Biden administration’s strong suit. The debacle of its withdrawal from Afghanistan was a signal to the world’s bad actors that America was indeed “back”—that is, the America that had abandoned South Vietnam to its fate. Far from deterring Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine, Team Biden lifted the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, reduced weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and effectively pledged that the most they would do if Moscow stepped up its aggression against Kyiv was to impose more sanctions.

The same can be said of the decision to drop the Trump administration’s quite successful strategy of militarily containing Iran between Israel and the Arab states—the approach which produced the Abraham Accords—in favor of a doomed attempt to resuscitate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. Far from deterring Tehran, this encouraged it to continue funding its malignant proxies in the region and ensured it had more funds available to give them.

No one can read the mind of Xi Jinping, but there should be no doubt that China is watching all this and calculating. With crises afoot in Eastern Europe and now the Middle East, the Pentagon’s nightmare is a third crisis in the Far East, the region where the stakes are highest. It is not hard to imagine a Chinese blockade of Taiwan—perhaps with January’s election there as the pretext. The United States, which no longer has the vast military-industrial complex of the first Cold War, would be torn between three simultaneous conflicts, each making demands on a finite stockpile of weapons and munitions.

The New Axis

More than two decades ago, David Frum dreamt up an “Axis of Evil’’ for George W. Bush’s post-9/11 State of the Union address. It was a fiction. Today’s Axis, by contrast, is real. Without Xi’s approval and substantial economic support, Putin would not have risked his invasion of Ukraine. It was no accident that the two men were together in Beijing just over a week ago, their 42nd meeting in ten years, as Xi proudly pointed out. Iran, which sells weapons to Russia and oil to China, is the third active member of this new Axis. North Korea, also supplying Moscow with munitions, makes four.

While the United States has many more allies in Europe and in Asia, and its alliance network responded well to the attack on Ukraine, there is much less transatlantic unity on the question of Israel and the Palestinians. And in the event of a showdown over Taiwan, it is hard to know how many allies Washington could really count on.

As is painfully clear from the print version of Jake Sullivan’s Foreign Affairs article—which went to press before the October 7 attacks on Israel—the national security adviser was hoping the Middle East would stay “quieter than it has been for decades” while he focused on containing China. Biden’s approach, wrote Sullivan, “returns discipline to U.S. policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And it is bearing fruit.” Strange fruit, indeed.

Israel’s zugzwang does not mean its defeat. As in chess, however, sacrifice will be necessary for Israel to escape it. A ground operation in Gaza will likely lead to a Third Lebanon War. Israel will truly find itself “fighting for the homeland,” in the parlance of Israeli commentators. Victory would bring security, at least for a time. But it would come at an enormous human and political cost.

A Concerted Response

A more optimistic view is that with unequivocal and effective support from the United States, Israel may find a way to take advantage of Iranian hubris—Tehran’s growing belief in Israel’s imminent defeat. Iran could end up sending its prized proxies into battle, only to have them crippled by a concerted American and Israeli response. Severing the tentacles of the Islamic Republic’s “octopus” would not only allow Israel to come out stronger, but would go some way toward winning back the long-lost confidence of America’s regional partners, particularly in the Gulf.

The problem for Israel is that, unlike chess, this is a multiplayer game. And the main player on Israel’s side, the United States, does not yet appreciate that it too is under zugzwang. Israel and America have to act. And they have to act together. The alternative is victory not only for Hamas, not only for Iran, but also for the new Axis the Western world confronts.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the author of DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @nfergus. Jay Mens is a senior analyst at Greenmantle, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, and Ernest May Fellow for History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

7 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

14 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641