"But Saturday’s slaughter made clear—and not for the first or the hundredth time—that this isn’t a political conflict. It is an existential one. And it isn’t only between Israel and Hamas. It is between the vast majority of the Palestinian people, and the entirety of the Palestinian leadership, who actively seek Israel’s physical annihilation and the genocide of world Jewry, and the Jews, who seek to live in peace and freedom in the Jewish State of Israel."
The salient point that must be understood is that this is not simply terrorism (Hamas, Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, et.al.) but state-sponsored terrorism (Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, et.al.). Look at the scatological protests in the US, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East supporting the attack on Israel and the killing of innocents. Americans, especially American Jewry must understand that Biden and Obama and their Administrations by supporting these state and terrorist entities are also enemies of the United States.
The world today is precariously endangered. William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, and Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. have been American presidents. Their State Departments and National Security teams have been, by in large, incompetent and pathologically stupid. We’ve had a Christopher, an Albright, a Powell, a Rice, a Clinton, a Kerry, and an Antony John Blinken. That begs the question, who has been educating these people, at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Denver University?
The misfeasance of the past 31 years of American Diplomacy, minus the Trump Years, has been an embarrassment. But more importantly, the tumult and upheaval that sweep the world brings death and destruction to the innocent. Their records of failures are not individual acts of misjudgment but repeated acts of institutional incompetence that manifest themselves in indefensible ignorance. In other words, realpolitik surrenders to the capriciousness of individual hubris. The consequences of limiting your circle of advisers to a small, relatively inexperienced coterie, with no creditable foreign policy experience, and a dubious record for wisdom, can prove disastrous. Again, who has been educating these people, at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Denver University?
The brilliant historian Rebecca West proffered when writing about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on June 14, 1914, that it defied understanding. Speaking about the Archdukes' visit to Bosnia, she wrote, "To pay that visit was an act so suicidal that one fumbles the pages of the history books to find if there is not some explanation of his going ..." The Archduke's assassination is viewed by many as the "spark" that ignited WWI. However, the truth is that Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold Berthold and Austrian Chief of the General Staff Franz Graf Conrad von Hötzendorf were together the true instigators of WWI, along with Germany's Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, who strong-armed the Austrian's Emperor Franz Joseph I and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, respectively, to approve the Schlieffen Plan (in which Germany would stage an attack on France by marching west through the neutral territory of the Netherlands and Belgium), thus igniting histories most catastrophic war.
The aforementioned portrayal of the events that precipitated WWI is proffered so as to fully appreciate the precarious nature of the global political order. These men were prepared to sacrifice world order to their interests of playing war games to settle old scores. Unlike WWII where events clearly forecasted the coming catastrophe, the First World War began almost as a lark that was forecast to be over in months, but certainly not the beginning of the nightmare it became. The insightful illocution of the brilliant poet Robert Burns says it well:
I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men,
Gang aft a-gley,
Now, what are we to make of the world today? There is no question that 'time marches on -- time waits for no man'. However, when and how it marches is not always in a straight line and with a precise timetable. Will there be WWIII or the Second American Civil War? What spark will ignite the world today? What black swan will arise? The prediction of future events is work for an augur, not an analyst. However, today more than ever, we need an American Foreign Policy that understands the deadly seriousness the world has become, that the defense of the American people, the welfare of our troops, and the free world cannot be predicated on social justice and politically correct baloney.
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it," Albert Einstein
