Israel, Ukraine and the Future of the West

• Determining America's Role in the World

As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, the fights there and around Israel are not regional struggles for territory, as the shortsighted cognoscenti would have you believe.

The great tragedy is that so many in Europe and on the American right refuse to understand what Russian ruler Vladimir Putin and Iran's dark-age theocrats are fighting for. These are wars for the soul of the West.

The Kremlin and the mullahs are the font for every totalitarian, Islamofascist, sadist and neo-Nazi dream on the planet. Each of those malevolent forces wants America (and the rest of the West) dead.

Blinded by an incomprehensible ignorance of Russian history, the political far right (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes) regard Mr. Putin - often seen standing next to the patriarch every Orthodox Christmas - as a civilizational warrior combating the woke forces of the hedonistic West.

Unfortunately, the patriarch is more likely than not on the payroll of the secret police, as was his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, who served the same purpose for the Romanovs.

While Mr. Putin mouths pieties about defending the family and Orthodox Christianity, he persecutes and imprisons Baptists, Jews, Catholics and homosexuals, and kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children who will never see their parents or homeland again.

He has unleashed traditional Russian savagery on the civilians of Ukraine; more than 15,000 Ukrainians have been killed since Russia's invasion. The Daily Telegraph aptly describes the Russian dictator as a "bestial enemy."

There is a straight line between the Kremlin and the jihadis. Mr. Putin's Goebbels-like flunkies often refer to Osama bin Laden as a "conservative revolutionist." As British editorialist Jake Wallis Simons notes, "Putin's Rasputin," Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, wrote that there was hope bin Laden's "values … can still arise."

As Mr. Simons concludes, this is "jihadism as orthodox cultural conservatism." Each night, while Ukrainians shelter in their freezing homes and bunkers, Mr. Putin rains down death with hundreds of Shahed drones gifted to him by his Shiite terrorist proxies in Tehran.

Meanwhile, in the past few months, the mullahs have butchered more than 45,000 of their own people -more than America lost in the Korean War.

History reminds the regime that the shah's downfall was consummated when the young people left their schools and universities and took to the streets. We have before us the opportunity - thanks to the Israel Defense Forces, President Trump's decisive action against Iran and the actions of the people of Iran themselves - to finish off this malevolent regime that has been at war with America since 1979.

In Ukraine, Mr. Putin has now reached the point where he can't replace the casualties at the front. Russia has suffered more than 1.2 million casualties, sacrificing a generation in pointless assaults reminiscent of the Somme and Passchendaele.

When the ground hardens this spring, the Ukrainians will be able to move, and a rout of the Russian army will no longer be unthinkable.

Western malaise has long refused to recognize evil as evil. Europe has wallowed in a pacifist dream, essentially saying, "Let the Americans do it." Yet with war and cultural jihadism on their doorstep, this is the last warning.

Israelis, Ukrainians and the young people of Iran stand in the breach against the forces of darkness. It is time to do as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did when he told President Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Give us the tools, and we will finish the job."

Then again, the Carlson right does not like Sir Winston either.

Even so, the question begs why do any of this? What is the point?

I am not a Balliol College Don or theologian. I am however a partisan of that civilizational continuum that emerged from Jerusalem, moved to Athens and Rome then to London and finally across the Atlantic to the young American Colossus.

In 1942, US Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall commissioned the great film director Frank Capra to produce a series of films for the American people entitled Why We Fight. One of the narrators was a thirty-year-old Captain of Cavalry named Ronald Reagan. The purpose of the film was to remind Americans that their unique history--the "Why" in the title-demanded that they sacrifice all to defend a free republic against monstrous tyrannies. In a country of 180 million almost two thirds of the people saw those films.

I think we should first discuss the Why? It begs the question that to defend an idea that began in the Judean Desert 3,000 years-the idea of the West- does the West even understand what the West is? How can one defend our civilization kinetically if it can't be defined much less defended rhetorically.

In 1886, a young Theodore Roosevelt warned, "Societies that cultivate patriotism in the present by keeping alive the memory of what we owe to the patriotism of the past fill an indispensable role in this republic. No country will accomplish very much for the world at large unless it elevates itself."

Donald Trump channeled Teddy in a remarkable and sadly forgotten speech delivered in Warsaw in 2017: "The defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail...the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive."

We are the heirs of Thucydides and Cicero, Constantine, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Locke, Burke and Jefferson. The late David McCullough noted that reverence for these giants: "…reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for…indifference to history isn't just ignorant, it's rude."

Ours is an expression of 3,000 years of memory-memory that began in the Judean Desert when Abraham stepped out of his tent-what G.K. Chesterton described as the "democracy of the dead" that "refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

Raymond Aron put it simply, "The westerner is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty it allows him to create, to criticize and the chance it offers to improve it". We are now told with unrestrained fury to reject our tether to that past. We are surrendering our posterity to what Professor James Hankins of Harvard calls: "..the devouring machine of ignorance and spite that in recent years has been cutting off the people of the West from their own history and making them ashamed of it."

Hankins continues: "We have seen spread through our schools and institutions, a malicious form of humility indistinguishable from self-hatred. This is the humility that humiliates, that seeks to blind Westerners to their magnificent traditions and rub their noses, like misbehaving dogs, in their worst offenses."

Nowhere is this intersectional madness more apparent than in the case of Israel. When the left sees Israel and Hamas it sees Critical Race Theory.

Matthew Continetti argues that the Squad manifests an "…all-encompassing woke mindset that collapses individuals and events into a reductive binary of oppressor and oppressed. Black Lives Matter platforms are rooted in Marxist ideology, and they support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to delegitimize and ultimately destroy the Jewish state. The media ignore the oldest hatred, while editorialists preach a moral relativism between Hamas death cult murdering Jews and the Israel Defense Forces seeking to protect innocent lives.

As the Jewish people rose in response to the bloodiest event since the Holocaust, the world's oldest hatred - anti-Semitism - reared its head in places once thought unimaginable. In towns and on campuses even in America- Jews have been bullied and assaulted.

These are truly attacks on all of us. Western identity and America's foundation as the defender of equality and freedom is uniquely tied to the history of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. The same "woke" voices who decry the resilience of the Jewish people also have the United States in their sights.

The ancient hatred simmers under the veneer of European culture. Jews in Europe are fleeing violence in places once thought safe, like France and Italy, to the safety of the Israeli lifeboat. The exodus was starting in the United Kingdom with the prospect of the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn being given the keys to 10 Downing Street. It is now a torrent as police tell Jews to take off their Yarmulkas lest they offend the Islamists; the City Council in Birmingham ordered Aston Villa Football Club not to admit Jews to their grounds for a Europa League match against Maccabi Tel Aviv because the Jews cause trouble. West Europe is waltzing toward disaster humming the Polypheman dirge-"Eat Me Last".

America's founders bestowed upon their towns names like Hebron, Bethesda, Bethlehem and New Canaan, reflecting a deep respect for the Jewish people, faith, and their "Promised Land." In his 1790 letter to the Touro synagogue, George Washington signaled a new dawn for Western civilization - that those whose survival and perseverance laid the intellectual and spiritual foundation for western religion, literature and art, the renaissance and the enlightenment were welcome in a new land. He wrote:

'It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights…the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance…May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants - while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.'

Washington was not preaching mere tolerance; he was calling for revolutionary acceptance. The late Charles Krauthammer argued that to Washington America was the new Jerusalem, where peoples of the world could converge in peace, worship in freedom, and enjoy the greatest of unchartered rights - the right to be left alone.

Harry Truman took up Washington's charge that the United States was built upon the foundations of freedom erected by the Jewish people, saying:

"The fundamental basis of this Nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings that we get from Exodus, from Isaiah and Saint Paul."

Sadly, we have come a long way since Washington and Truman spoke these words, and William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower quoting the words of Jeremiah: "Come let us declare in Zion the word of God."

Since the re-establishment of the Jewish State in 1948, one force after another, from Nasserite Arabs to Persia's theocratic fanatics, has tried to push Israel into the sea. If Israel did not exist, the United Nations would go out of business. UNWRA is an active agent of Hamas. Forty percent of the General Assembly Resolutions in the last decade have been about Israel. Israel is the only permanent agenda item on the docket of the UN Human Rights Council-a council that says nothing when Bashir Assad kills 800,000 Muslims, when Pakistan forces one million Muslims back into the clutches of the Taliban and remains silent in seven languages while the Communist Chinese imprison one million Muslims in concentration camps worthy of Stalin-only when Jews are involved in conflict does the UN become interested. That Turtle Bay is now aided in its war on Israel by western European powers is a further obscenity.

The late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Lord Jonathon Sacks, had it right: "The Jewish people in its very being constitutes a living protest against a world of hatred, violence and war." Israel has now replaced the United States as the home of the largest Jewish community on earth because the Jewish State is not afraid to fight back.

Antisemitism is the godfather of racism and the pathway to tyranny-if you don't believe me visit the courtyard of the Great Synagogue in Budapest and stand before that weeping tree and ponder the horrors of the Nazis, the Red Arrows and the Communists. As the late Christopher Hitchens reminded us "Antisemitism is the common enemy of humanity and western man and for those reasons it must be fought against with every ounce of our being-particularly in its most virulent form-Islamic Jihadism."

Golda Meir warned us that when someone "tells you over and over again he wants to kill-believe him" and we had better believe the Mullahs and the Gaza obsessed Marxists. It is on Europe as much as the United States to rediscover our historic virtues and fulfill them or if not betray 3000 years of human progress.

"Who is in charge of the clattering train? The axles creak, and the couplings strain. For the pace is hot, and the points are near, and Sleep hath deadened the driver's ear: And signals flash through the night in vain. Death is in charge of the clattering train!"

So recited Winston Churchill as the tide of appeasement overwhelmed the traditional good sense of the British people, while Germany rearmed, and Hitler swallowed central Europe piece by piece. When the reckoning was finally tallied, over sixty million were dead. The great man lamented: "There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle… the malice of the wicked, was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous."

We have reached that point again. We still have time to stave off disaster by confronting the malice of the wicked before someone utters the most lamentable words in the English language-too late.

Robert Wilkie was the 10th United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He served as Under Secretary of Defense for Readiness and is a retired Colonel in the United States Air Force. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the Center for American Security. This speech was delivered at the conference in Washington on April 13 on "the Future of Israel" sponsored by Pepperdine University's Institute for Diplomacy, Security and Innovation