Today the superiority of America and its Israeli allies is growing ever greater. The campaigns of the qualitative arms race become increasingly more effective compared to the indoctrination of new Nazis. Hundreds of Talpions can trump millions of Brown Shirts or jihadi youth.
However, there remains an acute danger. Countering the ever-growing American and Israeli lead in new technologies are widespread abolitionist attitudes toward nuclear weapons. Together with hostility toward anti-ballistic missiles, opposition to weapons in space, resistance to civil defense, and blindness to the urgent need for technological answers to nuclear terror, a suicidal pacifism in the United States endangers not only Israel’s survival but America’s as well.
Echoing the equally corrosive influence of levelers in economics, these attitudes in the West could so inhibit the development of new counter-weapons that a mere quantitative buildup of old weapons systems cobbled together from Western schematics could prevail. A window of opportunity may be opening for rogue powers that can acquire even primitive nuclear weapons. The archaic tools of quantitative competition could trump the superior capabilities of Israel and the West.
Under these conditions, no other single international issue is as important as the nuclear threat to Israel. The case of Israel gives the lie to every notion of unilateral disarmament, every illusion that the adversaries of the West are open to negotiation, every scintilla of belief that our enemies desire peace rather than destruction. Israel is not only a major source of Western technological supremacy and economic leadership — it is also the most vulnerable source of Western power and intelligence. It is not only the canary in the mine shaft — it is also a crucial part of the mine itself.
Over the course of decades, Israel and the United States have made every possible overture toward Israel’s enemies, lavishing them with funds, relinquishing land, endorsing statehood. If the Arabs or Iranians desired peace, they would long ago have achieved it. There would be a Palestinian state thriving next to Israel. But instead, Israel faces a global mobilization against its very existence. In a world of nuclear weapons, the continued determination to destroy Israel represents a direct threat to New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as well.
In the conflict with the jihadists, inapplicable today are the lessons of the Cold War, in which we carefully learned to live with a nuclear USSR until communism and its empty economy cracked under the pressure of U.S. military advances. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union learned to live with nuclear weapons by developing a carefully negotiated set of protocols, both in their rhetoric and in their military movements. In relation to Israel, Iran and other jihadist movements are brutally breaching any conceivable definition of protocols. When high officials in major countries announce their intention to use nuclear weapons to “destroy” a nation, they must be addressed in a way unnecessary when they threatened “merely” driving that nation into the sea. All the qualitative resources of the West — all its current military powers and sources of new technology creation — must be brought to bear on the threat.
The defense of Israel must not be reactive. Indeed, it probably cannot even be public. It must mobilize all our resources of intelligence, technology, and surprise. And most important of all, it must succeed.
Like the Germans and Japanese in World War II, our adversaries will not wait for the West to prepare. They will attempt, as they did on 9/11, to achieve surprise. With no qualitative capabilities to cultivate, they know that time is their enemy. Whether against the United States or Israel, they must launch their blows as soon as they are ready.
By eliciting the early declarations and announcements of Iran and other jihadist states, Israel has performed an enormous service to the West. When they can, these countries will obviously assault the Great Satan as well as the Minor Satan. The Israel test makes the challenge clear. It signals the real predicament of the West.
The predicament of the West is the plight of the world and all its people. The defense of Israel is vital to the defense of the world economy. People are all we have. They are the ultimate resource and the most precious one. Only in peace can they thrive and reproduce.
An inescapable fact of life is that people — and peoples — vary tremendously in their talents and capabilities, and moral integrity, their understanding of the threats against them, their moral courage to face those threats and thus in their capacity to sustain life on earth against nihilist movements such as the jihad. People differ hugely in their ability to conceive the algorithms of economic advance and military defense. Shaped by baffling mixtures of genes and culture, history and faith, civics and law, nations and individuals show a broad spectrum, from an animus for land and blood to an inspiration for creativity and peace.
Just as free economies are necessary for the survival of the human population of the planet, the survival of the Jews is vital to the triumph of free economies. If Israel is subjugated or destroyed, we will be succumbing to forces targeting capitalism and freedom everywhere. We will be willfully allowing a fatal triumph of the barbarian 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 The Rational Optimist, without technological innovations, “we’d have needed about 85 earths to feed 6 billion people… if we’d gone on as 1950 organic farmers without a lot of fertilizer, we’d have needed 82 percent of the world’s land area for cultivation, as opposed to the 3 8 percent that we farm at the moment.” Many of the enabling technologies, from desalinization to targeted irrigation, originated in Israel or were critically advanced there. The United States contributed the world’s most potent agricultural machinery and fertilization tools. The universe is hierarchical, and economic freedom is what makes it possible for some humans to climb the hierarchies of knowledge and build systems to sustain life for all other human beings.
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.