By Noah Rothman
Thursday, October 12, 2023
On the morning of October 7, a barbarian horde of Hamas terrorists cascaded into Israel from the Gaza Strip determined to commit as many atrocities against Israelis as possible. What followed was a grotesque attack on civilization itself — the most audacious act of genocidal violence against Jews since the Holocaust.
Hamas’s reavers executed senior citizens at bus stops. They shot wildly into passing cars. They infiltrated an open-air concert and massacred hundreds of its fleeing attendees. They burned people alive in their homes. They walked from house to house, methodically assassinating anyone they found. They cut the throats of civilians, raped young women and girls, and slaughtered whole families. They filmed parents soaked in the blood of their own children as they begged for the lives of their surviving young. They paraded the mutilated bodies of their victims before cheering crowds of onlookers in Gaza. The attackers took hostages — citizens from all over the globe, including Americans — whom they threatened to execute, one by one, in public and on camera, if their unacceptable demands went unmet.
As of this writing, more than 1,200 people have been murdered in this attack, and that toll is sure to climb as more bodies are discovered. At least 2,900 more are wounded, many critically. Their survival is not assured. More than 1,500 Hamas terrorists participated in this savage attack, the scale of which demonstrates the level of planning involved. The murderers invaded Israel in trucks and motorcycles, by sea via inflatable fast boats, and from the air using motorized paragliders — a multiaxial attack that took months to prepare and could not have been hidden from senior Hamas leadership. But it’s unlikely that Hamas acted alone.
Citing advisers to the Syrian regime and sources in Hamas and Hezbollah, the Wall Street Journal revealed that “officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps” had “worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land, and sea incursions.” Beyond providing logistical assistance, Iran allegedly maintained some operational control over Hamas’s thugs. “Iranian security officials . . . gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut” just five days prior to the attack, the Journal’s report continued. The precise role Iran played in the run-up to this attack is still unclear. It is patently obvious, though, that Tehran sought to advance its geopolitical interests through the mass execution of Israeli civilians.
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime sustain the existence of Hamas — an organization whose stated purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state and the murder of its citizens. Iran provides the organization with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding, and Hamas is just one of at least 19 Tehran-backed militant jihadist groups on Israel’s borders. The most well-heeled and best equipped of them, Hezbollah, stands ready to intervene in Israel’s war against Hamas in the country’s south by executing a second invasion, in Israel’s north. Were Iran to sanction a second front in Israel, the Islamic Republic’s strategic objective would be clear: Bog down Israel and the United States, by proxy, in a brutal and fraught war of attrition. As one “senior intelligence source” told Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin, “Iran’s goal is to draw the U.S. into a broader conflict.” When Hamas terrorists, Hezbollah mercenaries, and Iranian theocrats chant “Death to America” after murdering Israelis, they’re not confused.
Israel has many more friends in the West than it once did, but Iran and its terrorist proxies can rely on their own global alliance structure. Tehran isn’t the only American adversary that believes it benefits from atrocities against Israelis. On at least two occasions since Moscow embarked on its war of territorial conquest and subjugation in Ukraine, the Kremlin has welcomed high-level delegations of Hamas terrorists. We know those meetings came at Russia’s request, though their precise nature is unclear. It’s hardly unfounded speculation, however, to conclude that Vladimir Putin’s government shares the interests of its allies in Iran. They both hope to scuttle the prospect of a U.S.-brokered normalization of relations between Israel and the most powerful of the Middle East’s Sunni states, Saudi Arabia. Forestalling that rapprochement secures Iran’s interests in its region as well as Russia’s interests in the Middle East and Europe.
Moscow’s brazen effort to shatter the Ukrainian nation and absorb as much of it as possible into the Russian Federation has stalled for now, at least — a condition attributable to both the incredible resolve of the Ukrainian resistance and the material support Kyiv has received from the West. But Russia, too, has come to rely on a coalition of anti-American regimes.
Moscow has received hundreds of attack drones from Iran over the course of the war. It has also sought, though Western officials cannot yet confirm that it has received, ballistic missiles, helicopters, and radar systems from Iran in exchange for Russian fighter jets. A surge in rail traffic into Russia from North Korea has convinced Western observers that Pyongyang has acquiesced to the Kremlin’s request for the Soviet-era weapon platforms and ordnance stockpiles in the DPRK’s possession. And, according to European sources, China’s support for Russia’s war has been exposed by both the Chinese components in Russian weapons and the Chinese military hardware Ukrainians are recovering from their battlefields. China’s role in exacerbating geopolitical instability at America’s expense is not limited to the killing fields of Ukraine.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would not have leaned so heavily on a U.S. congressional delegation to China to lobby Beijing for diplomatic assistance in resolving the crisis in Gaza if the People’s Republic didn’t “have influence with Iran in many different ways.” In a meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, American elected officials reportedly impressed on him the importance of containing the growing “conflagration” in the Middle East. But would that truly be in China’s interest? A confrontation in Gaza that restores the “Palestinian question” to the central place it once occupied in regional diplomacy would suit the Chinese Communist Party just fine.
The CCP would like nothing more than to supplant U.S. influence in the region. In March, Beijing brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia an agreement that restored their bilateral diplomatic ties seven years after the two states had severed relations. China is Iran’s largest trading partner and the source of nearly a quarter of its weapons imports. Beijing and Tehran have reportedly agreed to conduct joint military exercises and training, just as China and Russia have increased their joint military activity. A conflict that polarizes the Middle East against America benefits Beijing.
The enemies of the United States do not observe the careful distinctions between them that advocates of a humbler American foreign policy often emphasize. Sunni terrorists and Shiite regimes are not at one another’s throats when they share a common enemy. The nominally Marxist regime in Beijing has no problem joining hands with an Islamist theocracy. Decades-old historical grievances deter neither Iran nor China from supporting Russia’s murderous military campaigns on Syria’s eastern plateau and the steppes of Ukraine. They are united in their foremost goal: ending the age of American dominance. Challenges to American hegemony anywhere are challenges to it everywhere. America’s enemies recognize that, even if its friends do not.
As Americans are forced to witness a growing number of attacks on Western supremacy, they have also been treated to horrific glimpses of what a post-American world would look like. Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians was an act of unspeakable brutality, but one that looked familiar to observers of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Both conflicts are typified by atrocities committed by the aggressor. The use of rape as a weapon of war, the summary execution of civilians, and the ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of territory feature as prominently in Russia’s war as they did in Hamas’s incursion. The mechanistic barbarities that shocked the conscience when it was the Islamic State committing them have become all too horribly commonplace. ISIS was, in that regard, not an aberration but a leading indicator. The terrorist group’s rise and fall was a civilizational struggle. The enemies of modern civilization continue to reject the conventions to which the civilized adhere.
We should have enough honesty with ourselves to speak plainly about the challenges that we will soon confront and the consequences of failure. The post-American world would be a Hobbesian world, and we must resist it. The first step on a path back to sobriety is to recognize that a coalition of anti-American states is congealing into a formidable alliance. The second is to arrest the march of this new axis toward direct conflict with the Western powers, by restoring a resolute strategy of deterrence.
There is still time to do that, but it will require us to make hard choices and confront undesirable trade-offs. The United States must recommit to building an indigenous defense industry to rearm its besieged partners and make its allies into impregnable fortresses. That is not an entirely Keynesian project — the free market and private enterprise are vital force multipliers. But ensuring competitiveness in the defense industry demands a streamlining of the acquisitions process that has been complicated by lawmakers’ parochial political priorities over the years. It will also require a bigger American defense budget. That will be a tough pill for many to swallow.
The United States is $33 trillion in debt — obligations that grow every year and will balloon as rising interest rates compel the doling out of an ever greater percentage of tax receipts to creditors. If America has its priorities right, it will commit to a painful recalibration and reformation of its primary debt-drivers: popular domestic entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That process will hurt. It will be demagogued by America’s most cynical ladder-climbers. It will cost some honest lawmakers their political careers. Americans don’t want to believe that the peace and prosperity they now enjoy will end if we can no longer defend it from our enemies. But it will.
Many will reject this diagnosis and its prescriptions. They will placate their constituents, promise them peace in perpetuity at little cost, and castigate the clear-eyed who see the gathering storm clouds on the horizon. But they will be wrong. The Pax Americana is ending. We squandered it indulging in the fantasy that the gravest threat to the country was the other party. We owe it to future generations to shore up the geopolitical order we long took for granted. The world is becoming gravely dangerous. The time to confront that danger is now.
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