Trump 47, Israel, and the Future of the West

Although my first reaction to Trump as a political figure was that his aggressive posture reminded me of Mussolini, I was very soon attracted to what I saw as his near-unique intuitive hostility to what was then called the victimary and/or PC and has subsequently evolved into Wokeness. In the Chronicles on this subject before the 2016 election, I pointed out that among the many seekers of the Republican nomination, only he and Ben Carson, whom he included in his first cabinet, were sufficiently focused on combating this alarming trend in the Democratic party and the “liberal” West in general. Thus I am obviously happy to see eight years later that Trump’s perspective, so viciously contested by his political enemies during his first term, has now become the majority position, and that his initiatives to end the reign of DEI have met with surprisingly little overt resistance. I can only hope that his efforts to reverse the disquieting “march through the institutions” of this 21 st century avatar of the epistemology of resentment will have the time to be successful. Above all I hope that despite the efforts over the past four years to Wokize the entire government apparatus, including our armed forces, the US still retains enough societal, industrial, and military strength to deter its enemies from attempting a major coup “before it’s too late,” such as an invasion of Taiwan or, yet more dangerous, an EMP attack disabling our electric grid. Since WWI, the contest for world domination can be most simply described as opposing nations that embody what we can call “republican democracy,” in which there are truly alternative projects of government whose choice is decided in popular elections, to totalitarian autocracies. The French Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety) created in 1793 is the ancestor of all these modern tyrannies. The mark of all these regimes is that whatever ideology justifies their domination is best understood not primarily as a theory of government but as a pretext for taking and maintaining power. And whereas in the autocracies of the past, such as the Roman Empire, it was possible for concurrent factions to emerge and occasionally replace the current tyrant, in the modern era, particularly since the latter years of the 20 th century, autocracies have displayed remarkable longevity, irrespective of their frequent failure, whether or not deliberate, to improve the lives of the people under their control—Cuba being perhaps the most egregious example. This stability reflects the ever-more-powerful technologies by which centralized power can be exercised, a condition well anticipated in the pre-cybernetic era by Orwell’s 1984 , and most clearly exemplified today in China. Hitler may have been “worse” than Stalin, but even aside from the fact that he called himself as a “socialist,” today it seems clear that to emphasize the structural-political differences between them, or between them and Mao or the Kims or the Castros or Pol Pot or the Ayatollah or Chavez-Maduro, is to miss the point. If Hitler indeed stands apart as belonging in a different category of evil than these other regimes, the difference does not lie in the autocratic structure of his regime, but in his focus on exterminating the founders of the Western conception of the sacred: the Jews. And anyone who might have doubted this, whether or not—as all too many in today’s West seem happy to do—he approves of genocidal antisemitism, cannot avoid seeing the primary societal conflict of today as once more centered on the Jews. The nation of Israel is the critical point, the fulcrum of the opposition between the Christian nations of Europe and North America and what appears to be an emerging alliance between the two post-Christian heritages of Islam on the one hand and Marxism on the other. And the scandalous ambivalence of what I shall call the pre-Trump West toward Hamas’ barbarous massacre, filmed with pride by its perpetrators, is the sign of the West’s ambivalence toward the faith in human freedom and enterprise that had previously defined it. Thus Trump’s victory may well be the last good hope for the triumph—or at the very least, the survival—of the principle of a “free” society. To observe today the major nations of Europe: Great Britain, Germany, France—none are currently providing convincing demonstrations of the virtues of free elections. It is almost as if, given the results of its 2024 presidential race, the US were being asked, even begged by the remaining representatives of the political heritage of Western civilization from the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to provide a demonstration that there is indeed a “free world,” and that its capacity for political as well as economic and military action is indeed superior to that of the autocracies and démocratures that are gradually coming together in the BRICS alliance in the name of the “Global South.” To have “faith in democracy” should not be understood from the victimary-moral perspective that we must allow “victims” to have a voice in their destiny even if tyranny is really more efficient, but rather as affirming that the democratic-republican system is superior to the autocratic because it has more “degrees of freedom” with which to exploit the affordances that reality offers to human praxis —meaning that this freedom is, on balance, a very good thing. But how can we know if this is truly the case? Isn’t China’s military and economic power proof that a well-managed tyranny can be just as or more efficient than any democracy? For one thing, democracies are less capable of keeping secrets, and thus easier for tyrannies to exploit by means of industrial and military espionage, thereby annulling the advantage inherent in the freer interaction between their citizens. But such weakness is a symptom of democracies that have come to see themselves as nations of usurpers and exploiters rather than as agents of human progress. We would hope that a democracy that has retained or restored its confidence in the superiority of its political system, as the US under the new administration promises to be, will be able to defend itself against all forms of unfair competition. The European press still sees Trump’s MAGA policies more as a reassertion of American dominance over the West than as setting an example for European and Asian free societies to emulate. But we can expect that if these policies are implemented with the appropriate respect for America’s allies, US leadership will ultimately provoke more emulation than hostility, leading the international situation away from potential conflict to a gradually more integrated and interactive—and freer—world economic order. In this regard, it is disappointing that Trump’s accession has taken place in the context of a hostage agreement that, despite his previous threats to wreak havoc on Hamas if they failed to release the hostages, is even less favorable than the cease-fire agreement in the fall of 2023. But if we assume that this agreement is the last of its kind, and that the current conflict can be ended without either Hamas or the PA retaining power in Gaza, Islamic neo-jihadism, like Western Wokism, may begin to “wither away.” However patient the Islamists may be, they need to feel they are making progress—and until now, the history of the Middle East has provided at least as much encouragement as disappointment to those who maintain Islam’s promise of eventual world conquest. (See in particular Ran Baratz’ “What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military?” , which develops the idea also expressed by Daniel Pipes that despite its striking military successes, Israel has remained ambivalent with respect to the fundamental purpose of war—the achievement of victory.) Putting aside what is hopefully not a fatal weakness, the simple fact that the right of the Jews to a state of their own, a right gained as a consequence of history’s most serious attempt to eradicate the Jewish people, has become the central issue for the future of the West and of what can still be called the “free world” is a sign of an emerging awareness that the defense of Hebrew monotheism as the root of the Western sacred—and of what we should see as its primary anthropological intuition—is fundamental to the continued existence of the democratic-republican political system of the “free world.” By seeking to destroy the Jewish nation not merely as a current but as a historical entity, Islamism as a world movement hopes on the contrary to demonstrate that both Judaism and Christianity are, as the Koran affirms, ultimately destined to be transcended in an Islamic Aufhebung . In this regard, any hostility to Islam on the part of the autocracies descended from the French Revolution via Marxism is simply overlooked, as the example of the West’s lack of attention to the plight of the Uighurs in China makes clear. The key battle remains that with the Judeo-Christian West, and thus in the first place with the Jews of Israel. And given the failure of world Christianity to defend the lives of the thousands of Christians massacred by Muslims in Africa and elsewhere, coupled with the ambivalence at best of most of the Western powers toward Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, it would seem that with few exceptions—of which the only clearly significant one is that of the United States under its new administration—the nominally Christian West is standing back and letting the “Abrahamic” issue be decided by whether or not Israel can beat back its current Islamic challenge. If this analysis is correct, then the survival of the Judeo-Christian West to sustain its “mostly peaceful” competition with the avatars of its Marxist autocratic-revolutionary spin-off depends on the ability of Israel to inflict on its jihadist enemies an unambiguous defeat that will assure its ability to retain permanent dominance in its region. Hopefully Israel is finally learning that “mowing the grass” is no longer sufficient: it must soundly defeat Hamas in order best to deter similar challenges in the future. My hope is that a successful conclusion of this conflict will serve as a lesson to the West that unless it is able to defend its founding people against Islamism, it cannot hope to remain the world’s dominant culture. A West that cannot assure the survival of the Jews is one that has rejected its history, and thereby stands defenseless against the reinvention of history by revolutionary governments, whether Islamic or Marxist. In a word: if the “free world” has lost the will to defeat those who claim that Jerusalem has always been a Muslim city, it cannot hope to overcome the true believers either of Islam or of “Xi Jin-Ping thought.” Enjoy this column? Yes No Δ