Carl Schmitt left modern political theory with an uncomfortable truth: Politics, at bottom, has nothing to do with legal arbitration, procedural rules, or economic trade-offs. It comes down to a single distinction: friend and enemy. Political survival means knowing exactly when a threat stops being manageable and becomes existential — knowing who stands beside you, and who wants you erased.
Liberal democracy was never built to accept that crucially important insight. It trades the hard choices of survival for parliamentary debate, legal maneuvering, and the language of human rights, as if every conflict could be settled with a trade deal or a joint statement. The trouble starts when a liberal order runs into an opponent who rejects those rules outright, one who takes the friend/enemy divide with absolute, near-religious seriousness. At that point the system seizes up. It can’t even name what it’s fighting, blinded by its own procedures while the enemy operates on pure conviction.
Underneath this is a case of historical amnesia. Western elites prefer the softer story — that liberalism won the 20th century on the strength of moral authority and international law.
The real story is messier. It wasn’t committee rooms in Geneva that built the post-1945 democratic order, it was hard power. Nazism and classical fascism weren’t argued out of existence. They were crushed by industrial-scale force, total occupation, and unconditional surrender. The Cold War ended much the same way, not through polite dialogue but through nuclear deterrence, forward-deployed armies, and a plain and clear willingness to use force. Liberal institutions flourished because a wall of raw, non-liberal power stood behind them the whole time. That fact has gotten buried under European complacency and American self-doubt. By hiding behind international law, the West has forgotten something basic: Its security was bought with blood.
The force testing this weakened civilization isn’t confined to any one hostile capital. Tehran is just one node in a much wider front of anti-civilizational hostility. Destroying Israel has become the rallying point that everyone in that coalition can agree on — the lowest common denominator uniting groups that otherwise share almost nothing. Neo-Nazis, Marxist academics, far-left “watermelon” activists, and the full spectrum of radical Islamists, black robes, white garments, turbans, headscarves, hold wildly incompatible visions of the world. Yet somehow they converge on the same goal: erasing the Jewish state. This was never really a border dispute. Israel draws fire because it plants Western sovereignty and power in the middle of the region. An attack on Israel is, in practice, a proxy war against the foundations of Western civilization itself.
Historian Ernst Nolte gestured at this dynamic decades ago with his idea of an Islamic third fascism, a fusion of Western self-loathing and radical religious millenarianism. When an adversary treats your very existence as a crime, liberal compromise stops being pragmatic and starts being suicidal.
And yet here we are in August 2026, more than a thousand days past Oct. 7 and just after Operation Epic Fury tore into the Islamic regime’s infrastructure. And the West still hasn’t grasped the size of the front it is facing. Washington hesitates, micromanages every move, and lurches between brief shows of force and domestic politics demanding some hollow “deal.”
Isolationists, meanwhile, keep pushing for a full withdrawal from the Middle East. Walking away now would amount to a geopolitical suicide note, handing the anti-Western coalition a winning hand and letting it choke off global energy corridors, gut regional security, and set off a nuclear arms race with no ceiling.
Israel doesn’t have the luxury of Western self-deception. Living right next to this layered threat, it operates in something close to a Schmittian state of exception, acting with sovereign authority out of sheer necessity. It names its enemy. It holds security control over Gaza, carves out buffer zones in southern Lebanon, and strikes deep into hostile territory regardless of what the diplomats say. None of this is optional. Israel is making the harsh calls required to survive against forces openly committed to wiping it out, carrying a burden the West once understood and can no longer stomach: fighting an existential threat on existential terms. Right now, Israel functions as the main wall between a comfortable, half asleep West and a broad anti-Western bloc. If the free world makes it through this century, the credit won’t go to U.N. resolutions or diplomatic communiques. It will go to the fact that Israel stood at the gate, accepted the friend/enemy distinction as fact, and fought while everyone else slept.
Israel is the canary in the coal mine. Israel is the distant early warning signal. Israel is where the rubber meets the road. If Israel goes, so goes Western civilization. On the other hand, Israel isn’t going anywhere. It has been around since 1948 and has suffered more foreign attacks than you can shake a stick at. Ditto for the Jews. They comprise, oh, 0.2% of the world’s population, and are always on the verge of extinction. Not quite yet. They have been around for some 3,500 years and show no indication of disappearing.
WHILE WASHINGTON HESITATES, ISRAEL IS BLOCKING CHINA AND IRAN IN AMERICA’S BACKYARD
Israel’s enemies are the enemies of the civilized world. And the sooner the latter realizes their plight, the sooner they will be able to save themselves. Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have recently signed a mutual defense pact with one another. It is not at all a declaration of war against the only Jewish state on the planet. But if it were, they will rue the day they took any such action. Five nations invaded Israel in 1948, and they failed. The Jewish state is a lot more powerful now than then. Did any other nation win an entire war in a mere six days?
Israel is the mouse that roared. It is roaring on behalf of much of the remainder of the world. Not all of it, but much of it. Israel is Mighty Mouse, which overcame all the cats in the comic book series.
Walter E. Block, Ph.D., is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Hushang Manuchehri is an independent writer.