Events are moving fast. Seven days ago, as I write, Israel had not yet launched its first attacks on targets in Iran. Seven days from now, things may well have changed — significantly.
In such times, a historian’s perspective may be helpful. Fortunately, the two most eminent English-language historians (pace, Tucker Carlson) have weighed in with analysis.
“There are some moments in history,” writes Andrew Roberts, author of deeply sourced and bestselling biographies of Winston Churchill, George III, and Napoleon, in The Free Press, “when a sudden act of opportune ruthlessness readjusts the world toward a safer path.” He cites Francis Drake’s fireship attack on the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Winston Churchill’s agonizing decision in July 1940 to destroy the French navy lest it fall into the hands of Hitler’s Nazis.
Roberts salutes Benjamin Netanyahu for ordering Israel’s multipronged and astonishingly sophisticated attacks on the mullah regime in Iran. He contrasts this with Barack Obama’s “adamant and repeated refusal to help the Iranian opposition” and his “cringing, appeasing … neither joint … nor comprehensive” 2015 nuclear agreement.
Echoing Netanyahu, he writes that “we should believe the threats of dictators.” Donald Trump, he concludes, “should act with Churchillian ruthlessness” and use America’s bunker-buster bombs and destroy Iran’s as yet untouched Fordow nuclear operation.
Ferguson makes reference to his fellow British historian Niall Ferguson and his “Axis of Ill Will” — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Ferguson elaborates on these at much greater length in The Free Press and in an interview last month with Noema magazine editor Nathan Gardels.
There, he advances two propositions disregarded by most American analysts. One is that this Axis has been waging a Cold War II against the United States and its allies since around 2018. The other is that Trump “is a pacifist at heart who prefers trade wars to real wars.” That helps account for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s initial insistence that Israel acted on its own last Friday and Trump’s statement that gave them a 60-day warning, “and today is day 61.”
Ferguson, currently writing the second volume of his authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, puts this in a longer perspective. He rejects Gardel’s view that Trump is dismantling what Gardels calls “a liberal international order of free trade and trusted alliances across a unified West.”
Instead, America was operating since 1945 as an empire, enlisting Europe as a useful partner on Berlin in 1957-62 and on deploying Pershing missiles in 1979-83 and surviving “a window of great danger” in the Vietnam years by Kissinger’s playing off China against Russia. Then, having won Cold War I in 1989-91, we relaxed, hoping Russia and China would move toward democracy. Alas, that allowed room for Vladimir Putin to revive Russia, Xi Jinping to inflame Chinese nationalism, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to keep pursuing genocide against Israel.
Now we’re facing Cold War II, with Xi’s China a more formidable competitor than Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia. The Biden administration’s “disastrous failure of deterrence” in the Afghan withdrawal of August 2021 led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Hamas’s assault on Israel in October 2023.
In Ferguson’s view, Netanyahu “had to act” after the International Atomic Energy Commission censured Iran for expanding its nuclear weapons program and because Iran had been weakened by Israel’s destruction of the attack power of its allies Hamas and Hezbollah. And now Trump, who has proclaimed many times, going back to 2011, that Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, seems poised to act as well.
Neither Russia, whose maximalist demands on Ukraine Trump has declined to take seriously, nor China, which has emerged as the chief target of Trump’s tariff war, seems to be giving any support to Khamenei and his dwindling regime. As Trump pointed out to CNN’s Dana Bash, “They didn’t die of COVID.”
While many on the Left like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and some on the right like former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson oppose any U.S. military action against Iran, polling earlier this year showed supermajorities of voters favor the destruction of Iran’s “nuclear weapons facilities.” The upshot is that the final public verdict on any actions will come not in this week’s polling but over the long term.
But the vibes are running against characterizing Israel as an exploitative colonial settlement and Iran’s mullahs as oppressed victims. As Ferguson accurately notes, “the Great Awokening,” a powerful force five years ago, has inspired “a profound backlash, just a repudiation of those ideas by ordinary Americans.”
No better reflection of this backlash than Monday’s New York Times editorial, headlined as “advice to voters” on the June 24 Democratic primary for mayor of New York.
Remember that James Bennet lost his job as the New York Times’s editorial page editor in 2020 for printing Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) call for deploying the National Guard in response to violent rioting following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The same newsroom personnel who demanded Bennet’s scalp a month later also drove out New York Times staffer Bari Weiss, who co-founded The Free Press, which published Roberts’s and Ferguson’s articles cited here.
This year, the New York Times editorial declined to endorse a candidate for mayor, but urged New York City Democrats not to give any of their five votes in the ranked choice primary to left-wing Councilman Zohran Mamdani. He has zoomed to second place in polls, behind former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, with a series of charming video ads and what the New York Times characterizes as “an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.”
These include a rent freeze (“could restrict housing supply”), government-run grocery stores (“as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector”), and cuts in the police department (“little concern about the disorder of the past decade”). Mamdani, a Muslim, in a Bulwark interview published Monday, declined to criticize the slogan “globalize the intifada,” which he said meant standing up for Palestinian rights.
Mamdani won his city council seat in a primary in riot-torn June 2020, beating a Greek-surnamed incumbent in formerly ethnic Astoria, Queens, filled up this century with young low-income whites, college grads, and perpetual students within an easy subway commute of Manhattan. Mamdani’s own resume includes rap musician and foreclosure prevention counselor.
As my study of the New York Times’s excellent election graphics shows, that’s the “barista proletariat” constituency that elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson in 2023. His lax policies on crime and his hugely generous contract with former teacher union colleagues have left his job approval as low as 14% this year.
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“A neoconservative,” said the late Irving Kristol, “is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.” Some angry MAGA figures have been calling Trump a neoconservative for his insistence that Iran not get nuclear weapons, and in their view, Netanyahu is a neoconservative too, and so are the great majority of Israeli voters.
The New York Times editorial page, which used to excoriate Rudy Giuliani’s and Michael Bloomberg’s policing policies, seems, with perhaps a side glance at what’s happening in Chicago, to have been mugged by reality too, and is perhaps now following Weiss’s lead. Events have been moving fast — and, as Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson suggest, some history is being made, or remade.