Weakness breeds aggression, and like the tottering international system represented by the League of Nations after World War I, today’s world order, grounded on the Pax Americana and the maritime democracies, is under severe strain. Once again, predatory dictatorships are testing their reach, most notably in Eastern Europe, where Russia is attempting to destroy Ukraine, and in the Middle East, where Iran aims to wipe out Israel.
These regimes, while partners and allies in every way, have attempted to delude the more witless among their enemies in the West into seeing these conflicts as distinct. Blindness is costly, and Western nations cannot indulge these lies. The collapse of over 50 years of Assad family rule must be a signal to wake up to the full scope and nature of the assault on our world order.
In Europe, generations of peace that survived the superpower tensions of the Cold War were ended in a flash by the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, possessor of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. When the Russian president called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” he warned us where he was going — if only we had been brave enough to listen. In 2008, he showed that his revisionism was not confined to words when he invaded the Caucasus nation of Georgia, carving off great chunks of it as the tiny puppet states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In 2014, Putin pulled off the same maneuver against Ukraine by seizing much of the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk and reorganizing them as pro-Russian “allied nations.” More brazenly, he grabbed the strategic Crimean Peninsula and annexed it to Russia outright. In 2022, Russia launched an all-out assault on what remained of Ukraine. Thanks to the valiant resistance of Kyiv’s leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, and no small amount of support from the West, Putin’s attempt to erase one of the major states of Eastern Europe has failed, for now. However, the puppet republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as two other Ukrainian oblasts, have been absorbed into the claimed “Greater Russia.” Iran has militarily supported Russia’s attack, as the invaders’ most feared weapon has become the Iranian Shahed-type “suicide drones.”
In the Near East, the ayatollahs of Iran have been stretching their tentacles for years. In 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed to wipe Israel “off the map.” When Tehran’s closest Arab ally, the Assad regime in Syria, first tottered under a massive civilian revolt in the early 2010s, the Iranian regime acted brutally to shore it up, ordering its proxy militia in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to intervene against the Syrian people. When even this proved insufficient to end the popular rebellion, Russia launched a massive intervention in Syria, using its own armed forces to crush the rebels’ momentum and trap Syria in a civil war lasting over a decade.
Considering Tehran’s attacks on Ukraine and Russia’s on the Syrian opposition, it should be clear that Russian and Iranian aggression is the same phenomenon and that the perceived separation exists only in the minds of certain clueless Western journalists, academics, and diplomats. So, too, with the assault on Israel. While Iran’s arming of, training for, and coordination of the attacks by Hamas on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, are well-known, Russia’s participation in the assault is less widely understood. Yet, the brutal massacre of about 1,200 innocent people in Israel and the kidnapping of another 254 was made possible by Russian intelligence collaboration with Hamas, as Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has publicly disclosed.
Today, both aggressors are reeling as their violence has exceeded their reach. Nowhere is this clearer than in the long-simmering conflict in Syria. Anti-government forces have now defeated former President Bashar Assad’s regime, overwhelming all of the country’s major cities in two weeks of lightning warfare. The linked responses of the aggressor powers during Assad’s endgame have been telling. With Hezbollah decimated by its losses in attacking Israel, Iran pushed its Iraqi proxies to join the fight instead and threatened to send its own forces to Damascus. Meanwhile, Russia used its air force to bombard rebel positions and even hospitals in northern Syria.
The free nations of the world have the same enemies, and the same weapons systems and diplomatic support are needed to sustain their continued survival in the face of the dictator powers’ assault. Yet, oddly, Ukraine and Israel don’t always have the same friends. In particular, feckless elements of the Western Left have stood by the aggrieved nation of Ukraine in the face of the Russo-Iranian assault but have called for the genocide of Israel and the Israeli people, aligning with Russo-Iranian aims.
While international conflict experts recognize that the dictatorships’ assaults on Ukraine and Israel are essentially the same war, allies of the aggressors have brazenly tried to argue that the Hamas terrorists in Gaza are the “Ukraine” of the Middle East, an argument that falls flat in Kyiv itself, which is more clear-headed by necessity. At Princeton University, for example, the cowardly Ukrainian Society has bent over backward to declare itself “neutral” on a student referendum that would boycott and sanction U.S. defense companies that are critical to the defense of both Israel and Ukraine.
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Just as in the dark years leading up to World War II, belligerent regimes bent on ending peace and stability are taking every opportunity to threaten, subvert, and wage outright war on the international system. Perhaps the most significant advantage our generation has over the interwar innocents who sleepwalked into global conflagration is the glaring example of their mistaken course.
Unlike Neville Chamberlain, the deluded pacifist prime minister of Britain who shook hands with Adolf Hitler and declared “peace in our time” a year before the Nazis invaded Poland, we must echo the words of English soldier-statesman Algernon Sidney. Later carved into the great seal of the commonwealth of Massachusetts by revolutionary hero Paul Revere himself, they boldly declare, in Latin, no less, “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.”
Sarah Idan is a secular Muslim who represented Iraq in the 2017 Miss Universe pageant. After posting a photo of herself and Miss Israel during the pageant, she received death threats, and she and her family were forced to flee Iraq.