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(OPINION) Zohran Mamdani has just been officially sworn in as the new New York City Mayor. He made history by being sworn in not with a traditional Bible, but using a stack of Korans. We’re going to talk about why this could be a major sign that America is shifting further from the course laid […]

Books ‘No Israel for Me’ A new book on October 7 reflects the best and the worst of Israeli society. (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images) While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, St Martin’s Press, 336 pages, $29.00 Why did Israel fail to prevent October 7?  A new book takes a crack at that question and should inform all serious discussions on the difficult matter going forward. While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East is damning of Israel’s strategic culture and intelligence apparatus but mostly avoids pinning blame on particular officials or agents. The Palestinian militant group Hamas’s barbaric attacks on October 7, 2023 traumatized Israelis, and the book’s authors—the veteran Israeli journalists Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot—don’t seem eager to transform the trauma into fuel for a scapegoating frenzy. There are minor exceptions to this gracious structural critique: For example, one Aviv Kohavi, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, gets a bruising he seems to deserve. After Naftali Bennett, the prime minister from 2021 to 2022, ordered the IDF and Shin Bet intelligence agency to draw up plans for assassinating Hamas’s leaders, Kohavi resisted. “Hamas is deterred, and there is no need to risk an all-out war with such an operation,” he said in one meeting. Fixated on the threat from Iran, Kohavi continued to oppose Bennett’s proposal and to challenge the politically weak prime minister. The episode exemplifies the book’s captivating, fly-on-the-wall narration of elite decision-making in Jerusalem. Katz and Bohbot also find myriad opportunities to criticize “Mr. Security” himself, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They fault Netanyahu for pushing controversial judicial reforms in 2023 that divided Israeli society and, they say, made the country more vulnerable to attack. They also propound a general view that Netanyahu, over the course of a remarkably long political career, hasn’t been hawkish enough; for example, he tolerated and indeed facilitated Hamas’s rise for reasons both hubristic and cynical. While Israel Slept reflects a longstanding siege mentality in Israel that October 7 understandably heightened and which the Gaza war and its related conflicts further intensified. In the last two years, the Israeli government has set out not only to exterminate Hamas—which would be difficult enough—but to neutralize all regional enemies and construct a Greater Israel whose territory exceeds even the current extralegal borders. Except for the few remaining leftists in Tel Aviv and in the pages of Haaretz, Israeli society, by and large, seems to approve of this endeavor. To be sure, we’ve seen significant Israeli protests against the Gaza war, but even the demonstrators didn’t wholly oppose the belligerence of their government in Gaza and beyond. Rather, they just wanted to get back the hostages held by Hamas, and a ceasefire was the only reliable way, in their view, that this could be accomplished. Katz and Bohbot too, though severely critical of the Netanyahu government and saddened by the human tragedy in Gaza, believe that Israelis face constant Islamist threats and must remain poised to inflict violence abroad. Indeed, this forward-looking vigilance motivated them to look backwards at the miscalculations that led to October 7. Early in the book, they write:  The war in Gaza is unlikely to be Israel’s last war, and as Iran continues to pursue a nuclear capability and stoke mayhem and chaos throughout the region with impunity, the question of the next battle is one of “when” and not “if.” Future governments in Israel will need to be reminded constantly of what went wrong in the lead-up to October 7 and how it cannot be allowed to happen again. Though framed here in defensive terms, Israel’s escalating militarism amounts to a bid for regional hegemony, a bid that is both unusual and potentially counterproductive. Unusual because Israel, a geographically diminutive country with a population of only 9.5 million, greatly depends on its superpower ally, the United States, for its military needs. And potentially counterproductive because Israel has been freaking out its Mideast neighbors while alienating most of the world, including America and the West. A decade or two hence, Israel may find itself a global pariah surrounded by hostile Muslim nations and without the backing of its erstwhile patron.  Katz and Bohbot don’t seem to appreciate this long-term risk of a hypermilitarized foreign policy, though they are certainly aware of the danger for Israel of losing America. Many right-wing Israelis, believing their government is unduly shackled by Washington, argue that Israel should “detox” from U.S. security assistance to gain true autonomy. And some left-wing Israelis and American Jews have argued the U.S. should slash support for Israel to rein in its military ambitions.  The authors offer a very different view, highlighting their nation’s continued dependence on America, which equips its military and bolsters its air defenses in ways Israel cannot soon replace by boosting domestic weapons manufacturing. The book’s concluding chapter, on how to prevent another October 7, offers several recommendations, perhaps most importantly: “Bolster the US–Israel Alliance.” No one, they write,  should be fooled into thinking that Israel can become fully independent anytime soon. With the general assessment predicting additional conflicts in the years to come, Israel needs to do more to shore up support in the United States before opening even a single production line. There’s the rub. Israel needs America to support its wars, and Americans increasingly believe that arrangement doesn’t serve their own interests. The geriatric U.S. political establishment remains fond of Israel, or at least frightened of the Israel lobby, but the American left has turned en masse against the Jewish state, and younger generations on the American right are turning as well. Alarmed by this development, the Israeli government and American Zionists have ramped up their propaganda efforts, but the ship of U.S. public opinion may already have sailed. American liberals cannot abide the horrifying images from the Gaza war, which was not so much a war as a brutal, unrelenting assault by the region’s most powerful military on its most vulnerable population. And American conservatives increasingly cannot reconcile the contradiction between America First ideology and unconditional U.S. support for a small, non-Western country in the Middle East. Unfortunately, many anti-Israel conservatives have become unmoored from reality, and also from anything resembling actual conservatism. Some are spreading and apparently believing a host of bizarre conspiracy theories about the Jewish state, including the idea that Netanyahu had foreknowledge of October 7 and permitted Hamas’s atrocities for political gain. The conspiracists’ latest fever dream pertains to the assassination in September of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who many internet personalities speculate was killed by Israel—despite being a passionately pro-Israel Christian Zionist. While Israel Slept lays out the actual, somewhat boring sources of the failure to prevent Hamas’s attacks: deficiencies of HUMINT, i.e., human intelligence, including a dearth of Gazan informants; over-confidence in border fortification technologies; and the strategic miscalculation of assuming that Hamas hoped to avoid a big war. A kind of willful blindness—and wishful thinking—infected the minds of Israel’s strategic planners in the years leading up to October 7. Whenever an intel report warned of a looming attack, some higher-up or other would perceive a disjuncture between the evidence of Hamas’s activities and the government-approved concept of Hamas’s intentions—and disregard the evidence to save the concept. “We have strong criticisms of Israel and do not hesitate to convey them out of deep concern for our country and its future,” Katz and Bohbot write. I do not doubt them. The authors manifestly love their country, and they hate its enemies, and they have written their book to help ensure Israel wins and its enemies lose. Such sentiments of local attachment and national solidarity unite virtually all Israelis and motivate a critical mass of them to serve the common good.  In that respect, Israel stands as a counterpoint to America and the entire West, which has lost not merely its confidence but its very recognition of itself as a distinct people whose rapid demographic replacement portends civilizational doom. One reason for older conservatives’ continued affection for Israel may be the perception that it retains the kind of grounding ethnic and spiritual kinship that the West, in the era of mass migration, has lost. And one reason for liberals’ hostility to Israel may be their pathological resentment of exclusionary, ethnic forms of political togetherness, at least among people who look white. Intriguingly, the exhaustion and ethno-amnesia of Westerners are contrasted with the unapologetically Jewish state of Israel in Submission, a 2015 novel by the semi-nihilistic French writer Michel Houellebecq. In the book, an Islamist party wins the presidential elections and passes sweeping reforms affecting everything from gender relations to foreign policy to control of the Sorbonne, where the protagonist-cum-narrator, François, teaches literature. As the political crisis intensifies, François’s Jewish girlfriend Myriam and her parents decide to flee Islamic France and emigrate to Israel. Kissing Myriam goodbye, François whispers the novel’s most memorable line: “There’s no Israel for me.” Westerners enjoy key material advantages over Israelis, not least of which are significantly larger populations, territories, and economies. But spiritually, the 21st century Westerner is homeless and solitary, a deracinated hairless ape, an “individual.” Israelis fear another October 7, another Holocaust, a nuclear Iran. But only Westerners truly stare into the abyss. The post ‘No Israel for Me’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s new film Cover-Up is more than a documentary about the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh—it is an inadvertent chronicle of the pathologies of American empire. As a foreign policy analyst who has long advocated for realist restraint in U.S. international engagement, I find this film both vindicating and deeply troubling. It documents, through one journalist’s extraordinary career, the pattern of deception, overreach, and institutional rot that has characterized American power projection for over half a century. What makes Hersh’s reporting invaluable from a realist perspective is that it consistently exposed the gap between stated intentions and actual policy outcomes. CIA domestic surveillance, the My Lai massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, Abu Ghraib—each revelation demonstrated what realists have long understood: that idealistic rhetoric about spreading democracy and protecting human rights often masks cruder calculations of power, and that unchecked executive authority in foreign affairs inevitably leads to abuse. The documentary’s treatment of Hersh’s Cambodia reporting is particularly instructive. Here was a case where the American government conducted a massive bombing campaign against a neutral country, killing tens of thousands of civilians, while lying to Congress and the public. This wasn’t an aberration, but the logical consequence of what happens when a superpower faces no effective constraints on its use of force abroad. In exposing the scandal, Hersh also documented how empire actually functions when stripped of its legitimating myths. Where Cover-Up excels is in revealing the architecture of official deception. Watching archival footage of government officials denying what later became undeniable, one sees the machinery of the national security state at work. These weren’t rogue actors—they were operating within institutional incentives that reward secrecy, punish dissent, and systematically mislead democratic oversight. From a realist standpoint, this raises fundamental questions about American foreign policy. If our interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere were justified through systematic deception, what does this tell us about the nature of these enterprises? Realism suggests that states act according to their interests, but when those interests must be concealed from the public through elaborate cover-ups, we must question whether these policies serve genuine national interests or merely the institutional imperatives of the national security bureaucracy. The film’s examination of Hersh’s Abu Ghraib investigation is devastating. What began as a story about individual soldiers torturing prisoners became, through Hersh’s reporting, an indictment of a policy apparatus that had systematically authorized abuse. The documentary shows how torture wasn’t an accident of war. Rather, it was deliberate policy, approved at the highest levels and then denied when exposed. This validates a core realist insight: hegemonic projects, particularly those involving regime change and nation-building, create perverse incentives that corrupt institutions and individuals. The George W. Bush administration’s Iraq war, launched on false pretenses and executed with imperial hubris, produced precisely the kind of moral catastrophes that realists warned against. The documentary is less successful in addressing the legitimate controversies surrounding Hersh’s later work, particularly his reporting on Syria and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As someone who believes the U.S. should be far less involved in Middle Eastern affairs, I’m sympathetic to questioning official narratives. However, the epistemological challenges of relying on anonymous sources while contradicting extensive documented evidence deserve more rigorous examination than this film provides. This isn’t to dismiss Hersh’s skepticism toward official accounts—realists should always question the state’s narratives about its foreign adventures. But the documentary would have been strengthened by a more thorough engagement with these critiques. Even iconoclasts must be subject to scrutiny, especially when their reporting has significant geopolitical implications. What Cover-Up illuminates, perhaps unintentionally, is the deterioration of the institutional ecosystem that made Hersh’s journalism possible. The New Yorker’s willingness to support lengthy investigations, to back reporters against government pressure, and to publish material that angered powerful interests—these conditions were products of a specific historical moment. Today’s fragmented media landscape, where institutional backing has weakened and partisan sorting has intensified, makes such work increasingly difficult. This matters because realist foreign policy critique depends on investigative journalism to pierce official narratives. Without reporters like Hersh, the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes easier to maintain. The decline of this form of journalism coincides with—and perhaps enables—the persistence of failed policies in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and beyond. The most powerful moments in Cover-Up are the intimate ones: Hersh describing meetings with sources who risked their careers and freedom to expose wrongdoing, the personal toll of challenging the national security establishment, the isolation that comes with being proven right in ways the powerful never forgive. These moments humanize what could otherwise be an abstract discussion of policy failures. But they also highlight something crucial: Individual courage, while necessary, isn’t sufficient. Hersh exposed My Lai, yet the war continued for years. He revealed CIA abuses, yet the agency faced minimal accountability. He documented Abu Ghraib, yet the architects of the Iraq war faced no consequences. This pattern suggests systemic dysfunction that transcends individual malfeasance. From a realist perspective, Cover-Up offers a sobering lesson: American foreign policy has been consistently characterized by overreach justified through deception. Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or countless covert operations, U.S. policymakers have systematically misled the public about the nature, costs, and outcomes of military interventions. This isn’t a partisan critique—the pattern spans administrations of both parties. It reflects structural features of how American power operates: an imperial presidency with minimal congressional oversight, a national security bureaucracy with institutional interests in threat inflation, and a foreign policy establishment committed to global primacy regardless of costs or consequences. Hersh’s greatest contribution, documented powerfully in this film, was in providing the empirical record that supports a realist critique of American foreign policy. His reporting demonstrated that idealistic justifications for intervention—spreading democracy, protecting human rights, combating terrorism—often mask more cynical calculations and catastrophic failures. Cover-Up is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand American foreign policy in the post-World War II era. It’s not a perfect documentary—the pacing occasionally lags, and it’s insufficiently critical of some of Hersh’s more controversial recent work—but its core achievement is significant: It documents how one journalist, through dogged investigation and institutional support, repeatedly exposed truths that powerful interests desperately wanted hidden. For realists who have long argued for restraint in American foreign policy, this film provides historical validation. The pattern Hersh documented—overreach, deception, failure, cover-up—has repeated itself with depressing regularity. The question is whether contemporary institutions still possess the capacity to hold power accountable in the way that Hersh’s reporting once did. In an era when American foreign policy debates remain dominated by interventionist assumptions, Cover-Up serves as a crucial reminder of where such thinking leads. It deserves the widest possible audience, particularly among those who shape and influence U.S. foreign policy. The lessons it documents remain urgent and, tragically, largely unlearned. The post Cover-Up Is an Indispensable Chronicle of American Overreach appeared first on The American Conservative.

Tucker Carlson, in a recent interview with The American Conservative that sparked significant controversy, was right to insist that Christianity rejects collective guilt at the level of individual moral judgment. But when reflecting on the supposed phenomenon of “rising Islamophobia,” he made a fundamental and dangerous mistake by attempting to translate that moral axiom into political principle. Individual morality cannot be policy. States do not govern souls; they govern populations. Immigration, war, and internal security are necessarily decided at the group level, taking into account statistical risk, historical experience, and civilizational compatibility. Emotional language about “hatred” of one group or another is irrelevant to these decisions. A state that governs as a confessor rather than as a sovereign will not survive. This category error runs throughout Carlson’s argument and is most clearly exposed in his assertion that he does not know anyone “who’s been killed by radical Islam” in the last twenty-four years. Public policy cannot be made on the basis of personal acquaintance. Islamic threats are not evenly distributed. They strike first at journalists, soldiers, aid workers, police, dissidents, and civilians unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. The absence of Carlson’s personal proximity to violence is not evidence of its irrelevance; it is possibly evidence of insulation. But in this case, even the claim itself is false.          In 2014, Steven Sotloff, a freelance journalist who had written for The Daily Caller—which Carlson co-founded in 2010—was captured by ISIS in Syria and publicly beheaded. Sotloff was not a soldier. He was not a combatant. He was a young American reporter working in the orbit of Carlson’s own media enterprise. His murder was part of a deliberate campaign of ideological terror carried out in full view of the world. That Tucker overlooked, or perhaps forgot, the murder of Sotloff only reinforces the danger of basing national policy on anecdote, memory, or emotional framing.  Terrorism itself is not even the core issue of Islamic extremism. Civilizations rarely collapse from spectacular violence alone. They erode through demographic pressure, parallel legal systems, self-censorship, intimidation, and the gradual replacement of one moral order by another. The grooming gangs of Britain and the increases in rape rates across Europe due to Islamic immigration speak plainly enough. Which brings us to the very question Carlson glosses over: Islam itself. Whatever Western civilization and Christian charity are, they are not Islam, much less Islamic extremism. Western civilization emerged from Christianity’s separation of God and Caesar, the primacy of individual conscience, and the subordination of political authority to constitutional law. Islam is a comprehensive civilizational system that fuses religion, law, and governance. It places the community above the individual, religious law above secular authority, and collective obligation above personal conscience. Collective punishment is not an aberration within Islam; it is embedded in its jurisprudence and historical practice. Apostasy and blasphemy are criminal. Loyalty is owed first to the ummah, the community of believers, not to the nation-state. These are not extremist distortions; they are mainstream doctrines openly taught in Islamic law. Their application on American soil, being revealed concurrent with Tucker’s words, is self-evident in the fraudulent predations of the Somali population of Minnesota. None of this is a moral condemnation of individual Muslims. It is a structural observation about the belief system that is Islam and the political implications of that system. Confusing those two categories is how serious analysis becomes impossible. Carlson treats any discussion of group behavior as though it were an accusation of inherited guilt. That is false. States routinely make, and should make, group-based judgments because groups behave differently. Insurance companies do it. Militaries do it. Epidemiologists do it. Immigration policy has always done it. Only in the late-modern West has acknowledging the obvious reality of group differences been declared immoral. The United States historically succeeded in part because it selectively admitted people from cultures that could be absorbed into an Anglo-American civic framework that encompassed secular law, free speech including sacrilege, religious pluralism, and loyalty to the nation over sectarian identity. These are all concepts Carlson claims to value. Large-scale Muslim immigration has repeatedly failed this test in Europe and is beginning to fail it here. How and why is he glossing over such an obvious pattern? There is a final irony that deserves to be stated plainly. For decades, Americans were sent abroad to fight men animated, in large part, by Islamic extremism. Now, having declared those wars misguided or immoral, we are told that adherents of that same ideology should be welcomed wholesale and treated as future citizens without discernment. Even if the wars were wrong, it does not follow that the ideology was benign, or that importing it strengthens the nation. The American people—and yes, we are a people—can hold two truths at once: that every human soul has dignity, and that not every belief system is compatible with the American way of life. Christian charity governs how individuals treat one another. Our statecraft should govern whether a people endure and thrive. Carlson’s confusion of Christian morality with the necessities of statecraft is a category error that could easily doom the nation. The lessons of Europe are writ large. We import extremist adherents of Islam at our own risk. The post Carlson’s Christian Charity Is Not Statecraft appeared first on The American Conservative.