masses that may well end by demoralizing and destroying the United States as well. There are certainly abundant examples that this is already taking place. Any global regime of UN redistribution of resources and suppression of the creators of wealth will doom the globe to a slow retreat to a radically smaller population of far more primitive peoples.
If we have a free, competitive, and collaborative world economy, however, some people and countries will far outperform others. Their outperformance is what makes it remotely possible to feed the current six billion inhabitants of the planet. As Matt Ridley observes in his recent book
Economists and politicians talk of natural endowments, energy supplies, landmasses and sea-lanes, choke points and channels, money supplies and trade balances and capital investment. Environmentalists prattle on about global warming and other alleged planetary disorders. Law professors talk of constitutional penumbra and class action suits and the “freedom to choose.”
None of these concerns can hold a candle in importance to the talents of a country’s human beings and their commitment to the discipline and devotion to innovation that drive the global economy. What permits the human race to thrive and prosper is the willingness to unleash and affirm the genius of a statistically small number of people: to embrace the encouragement of learning and discovery and collaborate with it rather than succumb to envy and suppress its achievements. The twentieth century was shaped, animated and endowed largely by a tiny cohort of the earth’s population — the Jews. In much of the world, for the majority of the history of the world, they were suppressed and constricted by various dictatorial regimes, some of which they supported. But the achievements of the twentieth century are heavily attributable to the rising prevalence of capitalism in the West and its ability to accommodate the genius of the Jews. Without them, the world would be radically poorer and its prospects for the future would be decisively dimmed.
All around the globe today, however, the leaders of nations and international organizations, prestigious academics, and passionate writers denounce the very countries in which Jews are allowed to create and succeed. These leaders claim to be anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, anti-American, or anti-capitalist, but the distinctions dissolve in the crucial fact of their naked anti-Semitism.
People who obsessively denounce Jews have a name; they are Nazis. The Palestinian Arab leaders have shown themselves to be mostly Nazis. Anyone who believes these men should command a nation-state ensconced next to Israel is delusional. There is only one answer to the claims and demands and threats of such people and that answer is “no.”
The leaders of Iran are proud Nazis. Anyone who believes that the West can stand aside and conduct amiable negotiations while they acquire access to nuclear weapons is a gull who has failed to learn anything from the history of the twentieth century. The president of Syria is equally obsessed with Jews and Israel. The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia in their madrasahs around the globe are cultivating new armies of young Brown Shirts. The civilized world must show enough courage of its quondam convictions to answer all the neo-Nazis with a resounding “no.”
In the United States, however, most elite opinion believes that this is exactly the moment in human history when disarmament is a desirable option, a moment for intensified concessionary diplomacy in the Middle East, a moment when the supreme issue for domestic and international attention should be “climate change.” Such beliefs place the very survival of the United States into question.
The Holocaust threat only begins with Israel. The entire West is vulnerable to the jihad. It can be stopped only through a combination of recognition, resolve and technology. On the front lines, Israel must face the menace earlier than the United States. Israel has already demonstrated the effectiveness of civil defense programs against missile attacks. By fleeing to underground shelters, by distributing gas masks to every man, woman and child, Israelis have incurred only a handful of deaths from thousands of hits on Israeli towns. The Israelis have maintained military forces that long succeeded in holding the jihad at bay.
The Israel test forces the capitalist world to recognize the necessity of armament and civil defense. Today the nuclear threat seems chiefly addressed to Israel. But increasing steadily is the potential for importing nuclear weapons into American cities, exploding them offshore near American ports, or detonating bombs above America’s critical electronic infrastructure. The United States must mobilize all its capabilities of intelligence and defense against these threats.
The Israel test impels us to forgo the illusion of opting out of the arms race. All too many Americans still subscribe to the “strangest dream” school of international relations, as I called it after singing along to an Ed McCurdy song with Joan Baez at Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge as a college student in the 1960s: “
The song and the sentiment are as infectious and deadly as the Oxford peace movement that anesthetized Britain before World War II, as the Peace Now mantra that inebriates Israel and many American Jews who believe themselves to be “supporters” of Israel, as the campaigns for nuclear disarmament that seduce American liberals. The single greatest domestic threat to the United States is not the jihad but the peace movement. Countries that fail to meet the challenge of qualitative armament, of military technology, end up at war.
Ronald Reagan’s best moment was his commitment to build anti-ballistic missiles. His worst, most self- indulgent, and foolish moment was his speech advocating the destruction of nuclear weapons. Regardless of any caveats he included, the speech was a horrible blunder that played into the hands of America’s enemies and is still a major weapon in their portfolios. It was his strangest dream moment, and if it were to come true, it would doom the country that he loved.
Now, entirely unsurprisingly, President Barack Obama also is entertaining this fatuous dream. At moments of particular weakness, he speaks of nuclear disarmament. Within a week of assuming office he spoke of destroying 80 percent of America’s nuclear stockpiles. He contemplates abandoning missile defense. His chief asset in making such proposals is his ability to cite Reagan as a precursor on the road to disarmament. To the extent he pursues it, Obama will jeopardize the very existence of this country. With nuclear weapons in the hands of others and without anti-missiles and lacking, too, other advanced technologies, the United States cannot survive as a free country. Arms races are the inexorable burden of all free peoples.
No major nation in history has succeeded in preserving its integrity and sovereignty without meeting the challenge of ever-advancing armaments. For Israel, the issue is obvious. Without maintaining leadership in military technology, the country has no chance at all of survival. But many American intellectuals still imagine that the United States is different, that it is possible or desirable for us to negotiate an “end to the arms race.”
Our enemies will always want to end the arms race because they know only free nations can win it. The crucial test of American leadership is to see through the constant stream of proposals for technological disarmament. All our enemies want to confront us without our qualitative superiority.
An end to the arms race would deprive the capitalist countries of their greatest asset in combating barbarism. The result would bring no relief from military competition but rather its transformation. Arms rivalry would shift from qualitative goals that favor free countries such as the United States and Israel toward quantitative rivalry that will favor our barbarian enemies.
AFTERWORD
In the current arenas of controversy, where Israel is a foreign policy issue, a legalistic argument and a historic debate, I am presenting it chiefly as a test. It begins for everyone as a personal test. It is a test that
