America Can No Longer Wait to Put Its Own House in Order

The monstrous killings of October 7 were a flash of lightning that illuminated a landscape Israel and its allies could previously ignore. Killing Jews was both an end in itself as well as a strategic action backed by Iran that was meant to create a cascade of chaos that could lead to the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the United States from the Middle East. Alas, it was not the only such challenge in recent years.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was, similarly, an act of hatred against the Western liberal order led by the United States as well as a strategic action meant to demonstrate the inability of NATO to take effective action and thereby open the way for further Russian expansion. The actions ordered by Xi Jinping to increase its military pressures on Taiwan and the countries of the East and South Asia are more coldly strategic than those of Iran and Russia, but he is also determined to eliminate the military role of the United States in the western Pacific and East Asia that underlies our economic relationship with Asia. Taken together, these three fronts reveal the possibility of an upending of the world order that makes our lives possible. Defeat at the hands any one of these nations increases the threat to the United States and to Israel.

The urgent problem for Israel is to ensure its survival. The problem for American friends of Israel, meanwhile, is to figure out how to handle all three of these problems at the same time. As the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza goes forward, we cannot lose sight of the global problem. Fifty years ago, in October 1973, when Henry Kissinger was briefed on the simultaneous Egyptian invasion of the Sinai and the Syrian invasion of the Golan Heights, his first question was “What are the Russians doing?” Today, we must look around and pay attention to what the Iranians, Russians, and Chinese are doing.