Israel’s Attack Restores the Credibility of the West A blow for the good guys in Cold War II. Co-authored with Harry Halem and Marcus Solarz Hendriks.
https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/israels-attack-restores-the-credibility
Early Friday morning, Israel launched a historic wave of attacks against Iran—the latest phase of the Israel-Iran war that effectively began on October 7, 2023.
Israel’s Operation Rising Lion included both air strikes and a wave of Mossad-run assassinations across Iran that effectively decapitated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Israel Defense Forces claim to have executed hundreds of strikes spread over five waves in the first phase of the operation, targeting Iran’s military infrastructure, its nuclear sites, and its command structure. As many as 200 fighter jets were involved. The Israelis built a drone base inside Iran to strike the enemy from within, as if to say: Anything Ukraine can do, we can do better.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei declared that Israel would receive a “bitter, painful” response and that has now begun. As of this writing, Israelis were in their bomb shelters. At least one missile has exploded in downtown Tel Aviv.
How to interpret this seismic event—and unfolding war?
The alarmists are already penning their op-eds prophesying World War III. The BBC and most European media will doubtless portray Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a callous warmonger—as opposed to his nation’s Bismarck. The professional Middle East experts will churn out the usual pablum about avoiding a wider conflagration, despite the fact that those experts almost all failed to foresee the beginning of that conflagration on October 7.
Ignore all of them.
One better way to look at what we are watching is simply that Netanyahu is fulfilling his historical mission. He long ago vowed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons on the grounds that this would be the precursor to a second Holocaust. Few believed he would actually resort to war to deliver on this vow. But he has.
But widen the aperture beyond Israel. It is illuminating to put this latest Israeli coup in the broader context of the global war we’ve been in since 2018: Cold War II.
At the core of Cold War II is the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China, the biggest economic rival the United States has ever faced, which is catching up rapidly in terms of both technology sophistication and military capability. In his first administration and again in his second, Trump has used the blunt instrument of tariffs as well as export controls to try to contain China’s rise, with limited success.
Under the presidency that was nominally Joe Biden’s, his handlers and advisers made a series of poor foreign policy decisions that eroded American deterrence and allowed the formation of an Axis of Authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. As in Cold War I, so in Cold War II: Regional hot wars serve as proxies for the larger superpower conflict. One of those wars has been in Ukraine; the other began in October 2023 in Israel.
The new Axis has three democratic states in its collective sights: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The trilemma for the United States is that it seems difficult, if not impossible, to defend all three of these at tolerable cost.
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