The world's two hottest spots require nerves of steel

 I've written before about how there are parallel phenomena - or perhaps mirror-opposite phenomena works better - on the post-American Right and Left regarding the two currently raging conflicts on the world stage.

The one with Israel at its epicenter, but which involves a considerably wider array of actors, including a malevolent and nearly-nuclear Iran, which is orchestrating a lot of what is happening, has US progressives calling for Israel to stop defending itself. The acceptance of - or at least lack of courage to confront - blatant Jew-hatred among progressives is a major factor.

The Trumpist Right is thumbs-down on supporting a country, Ukraine, that was invaded without provocation by its much bigger neighbor. Devoid of pushback, this move would set a precedent of the erosion of the post-1945 international order. It's about as insular  stance as one could take. Its main champions, such as JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, couch their argument in zero-sum terms, saying that sending missile-defense systems and fighter jets siphons off resources needed to protect the southern US border. The movement's Dear Leader, the Very Stable Genius, says that his charm and vision could convince Putin and Zelensky to reach a reasonable settlement within a day.

Actually, the current administration in Washington is calibrating its actual support in each case, rhetoric about resolute victory notwithstanding.

With regard to the Mideast, Antony Blinken continues to search for a workable ceasefire deal, even though Hamas has not sent a representative to the latest round of talks in Doha and Cairo. He even still speaks of a two-state objective. He and the administration he works for are trying to lean on Israel to keep the northern front of the multi-pronged jihadist threat from spiraling out of control.

It seems that ship has sailed:

The Biden administration may be encountering the limits of its ability to keep a lid on the looming hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah. The U.S. has had a number of naval assets parked off the coast of the Levant for months in an effort to deter Iran and its proxies — an exercise that has succeeded only in limiting exchanges of fire between the terrorist cadre and the IDF. But the outright confrontation the White House hoped to forestall may not be preventable for much longer.

“The only way left to return the residents of the north to their homes is via military action,” Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters on Monday. Gallant added that he had relayed the same message to his American counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Indeed, military action may be the only way for Israel to reclaim the territory in the country’s north that tens of thousands of its citizens evacuated shortly after the October 7 massacre and to which they have not yet been able to return. Joe Biden’s efforts to craft a cease-fire deal that would restore temporary calm to the region have all been rejected by Hamas, and as the New York Times wrote, summarizing remarks attributable to one of Gallant’s aides, Hezbollah “has decided to ‘tie itself’ to Hamas.” The time for half measures is coming to an end.

The risks of such an operation will be significant, and no president would want to court them in the absence of a viable alternative. Hezbollah has an arsenal of about 150,000 rockets and missiles, according to Israeli estimates, and it can field between 40,000 and 50,000 fighters. The Justice Department has previously identified alleged Hezbollah agentsoperating inside the U.S., and it was only last week that the DOJ charged a Pakistani national in connection with Iran’s reported interest in assassinating “a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil.”

To call what seems likely to happen Gaza redux doesn't quite convey the military power Hezbollah can unleash. 

Then there is the Iran factor. Hezbollah has a stronger ideological tie to Iran than that of Hamas. Not to mention that Iran is where those 150,000 rockets and missiles came from.

Iran is also a break-out state regarding you-know-what:

Its stock of enriched uranium, which was capped at 202.8 kg under the deal, stood at 5.5 tonnes in February, according to the latest quarterly report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog that inspects Iran's enrichment plants.

Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency's theoretical definition.

And now there's a development involving the country that figures into both of the hot-spot situations: Russia:

The US and UK are concerned that Russia has been helping Iran develop its nuclear weapons program in exchange for the recent delivery of ballistic missiles it was provided by Tehran for use in its war against Ukraine, according to a report Saturday that cited sources familiar with the matter.

The issue of deepening ties between Russia and Iran was a matter of concern during meetings between US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington, DC, on Friday, as well as during talks between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy earlier in the week.

According to the Guardian newspaper, however, the two countries aren’t just focused on the ballistic missiles supplied to Russia by Iran, but are also concerned about what Russia may provide in return.

Citing British sources familiar with the high-level talks last week, the news outlet reported that the two countries believe Iran may be working with experienced Russian specialists to streamline its manufacturing process as it grows its stockpile of enriched uranium and prepares to make its own nuclear weapons.

In Ukraine, President Zelensky is cajoling, pleading and shouting at the West to allow Ukraine to fire Western-supplied long-range missiles at targets deep inside Russia. He seems to be getting Western leaders to take him seriously, but not enough to seal the deal:

Ukraine's hopes of being allowed to use Western-supplied long range missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory were put on hold once again on Sept. 13, after the leaders of the U.S. and U.K. stopped short of making the announcement Kyiv wanted.

Anticipation had been high ahead of meetings between President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington, but the White House dampened expectations even before the pair had finished talks.

"There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside of Russia," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

Ukraine was hoping for permission to use two Western-supplied long range missiles that it already possesses to strike military targets such as airfields located deep inside Russian territory.

With the bans in place, Kyiv says it cannot effectively defend Ukrainian cities from intensifying aerial attacks.

The two missiles are the U.S.-supplied ATACMS, a short-range supersonic tactical ballistic missile, and the U.K.-France-supplied Storm Shadow.

Both Storm Shadows and ATACMS were initially given to Kyiv on the provision that they only be used to strike Russian targets within Ukraine or in Russian-occupied parts of the country.

Western fears of escalating the war with Russia have been behind the restrictions.

Germany is saying outright that it won't even send the requisite missiles:

While Washington and London are facing pressure to allow Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia using the Western-made missiles already in the country, Berlin declines to even provide such missiles.

“Germany has made a clear decision about what we will do and what we will not do. This decision will not change,” Scholz said on Sept. 13, remaining adamant in his refusal to provide the country’s Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine.

His remarks came after U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmerstopped short of lifting restrictions on using Western-supplied long-range weapons on Russian soil during their meeting in Washington.

In the spring, Washington confirmed that it had begun providing Ukraine with long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). Kyiv had previously received missiles that could travel up to 160 kilometers, and the new batch consisted of advanced ones with a range of up to 300 kilometers.

But Berlin's transfer of Taurus missiles did not follow.

Prior, Germany followed the U.S. lead in handing over the first Patriot air defense system in early 2023 and the long-anticipated battle tanks.

When Kyiv launched a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast, the operation received endorsement from Berlin. Germany’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine is “free to choose” the weapons to use inside Russia for self-defense in compliance with international law.

Yet, Berlin continues to hold off Ukrainian requests to provide the last piece of the puzzle, the missiles that can target the Russian military in the rear.

"A nightmare scenario for Scholz is that Ukraine would use Taurus to strike politically sensitive targets inside Russia. Scholz fears that this could escalate the war and throw Germany into direct hostilities with Russia," Fabian Hoffmann, doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who specializes in missile technology, told the Kyiv Independent earlier this spring.

“Fundamentally, this means that Scholz is restrained by a lack of political will, which stems from a lack of trust in Ukrainian leadership to not break any promises.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that Germany’s refusal to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles is linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear saber-rattling.

“As I understand it, the chancellor says that Germany is not a nuclear state and that this (Taurus missiles) is the most powerful weapon system in Germany,” Ukraine’s president said in an interview with Bild.

The hesitancy to allow these Western allies to achieve total victory as quickly as possible is not without reasonableness. We've all seen the photos and videos of nuclear weapon tests, and even their use in a war situation, in August 1945. Humankind has imposed on itself an apocalyptic set of considerations from which there is no going back.

But this raises a basic question which humankind has always had to deal: Is the cost of doing what's right ever too high?

It's obviously the right thing to do to give both Israel and Ukraine what they need to defeat their enemies resolutely and in a minimum amount of time. The West could provide them what they need to do it. Right away. 

But how sure can we be that either the Putin-Medvedev regime or the theocracy in Tehran would find, not even a moral compass, but the degree of reason needed to see that an uninhabitable world is only hours away from the use of the unthinkable?

So what is to be done? Do we tolerate absolute evil, let precedents for unprovoked aggression be set, and accept a certain level of moral murkiness, just to keep the whole thing from being reduced to ashes?

Is not the correct answer of the same cloth as the firefighter who goes back into the house one more time before its burning frame collapses, in order to rescue a baby or pet?

Is not the eternal record book going to show that justice, love, and defense of life prevailed even as darkness covered the fallen world?

A lot of layers to this beyond military capability specs or political considerations. This gets to the thorniest dilemma those of our species ever face.

How will we proceed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday roundup

 A good book review, in my estimation, is one that holds up on its own as a great essay and also makes me want to read the book in question. Juliana Geran Pilon has succeeded on both counts with "Athens and Jerusalem Revisited" at Law & Liberty.  It's a review of Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein and Gil Student. They re-examine the ground plowed by Leo Strauss regarding how philosophy (symbolized by Athens) and faith (symbolized by Jerusalem are the two indispensable pillars of the Western outlook:

Modernity is supposed to have elevated reason at the expense of faith; if so, the results are dismal. University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss explained that Jerusalem and Athens—the former rooted in faith, the latter in reason—constitute the twin legacies of our moral civilization. But fully grasping their inseparability takes “going beyond the self-understanding of either,” and asking: “is there a notion, a word that points to the highest that both the Bible and the greatest works of the Greeks claim to convey?” Strauss was convinced that “[t]here is such a word: wisdom. Not only the Greek philosophers but the Greek poets as well were considered to be wise men, and the Torah [first five books of the Bible] is said, in the Torah, to be ‘your wisdom in the eyes of the nations.’”

Conceding that faith could not be scientifically proved, as Baruch Spinoza had contended (1632-1677), Strauss nonetheless rejected the rationalist Jewish thinker’s bold claim to have repudiated the Orthodox belief in God as Creator. In the preface to his celebrated 1930 book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, he argued that Spinoza would have had to provide rational “proof that the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.” Without such proof, one “cannot legitimately deny the possibility of revelation.” If knowledge requires reason, revelation can at least justify belief.

It wasn’t much. But it proved sufficient for one University of Chicago philosophy student, Jeffrey Bloom, for whom Strauss “’broke the spell’ of secularism, giving my inner skeptic permission to take the claims of Orthodox Judaism seriously.” He thus decided to reach out to Orthodox Jews to learn how they explained faith to themselves, with help from Jewish scholars Gil Student and Alec Goldstein. The three became co-editors of a remarkable collection of intellectually stimulating, often quite personal, attempts to convey the basis of their own spiritual beliefs. Titled Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai, it is bound to help others, both Jews and non-Jews, in their search for higher meaning in a cynical world.

I like this point of Bloom's and the artful way he makes it:

Dismissing ubiquitous calls for “moral revival” as little more than “paper airplanes launched at the advance of secularism,” Bloom charges that “there is little thinking in the public square about how one could actually move from a secular outlook to a religious one.”

Anesthesiologist Ronald W. Dworkin has a piece at Hedgehog Review entitled "Medical Humanities and the Specialist," in which he argues for doctors' need to immerse themselves in art:

All novelists try to get closer to truth, and they do somehow, but perspective matters, and no one perspective accomplishes everything. It is the same for doctors. Relying solely on the machine perspective would have caused me to miss my patient’s diagnosis of early sepsis. At other times, however, the machine perspective is the correct one. Reading literature has helped to keep my mind nimble and my eyes always to be shifting their angle of view.

Reading literature also reminds doctors to keep their scientific systems of thought at bay. Many medical specialists are tempted to dwell in the world of pure thought, accompanied by their formulas and abstract classification systems. I myself have daydreamed of giving anesthesia remotely from a Caribbean island, applying my algorithms and equations, turning my precise dials and squeezing my syringes, while my patients lie somewhere in the universe, reacting ideally, as science and engineering predict they will, every time. But I know I would injure my patients if I gave anesthesia in this way, and for the same reason that a politician who consults only magazines, statistics, and committees makes lots of mistakes. The medical specialist, like the politician, must remain in constant contact with the living world to achieve anything.

Oliver Traldi, writing at American Compass, gives us three criteria for determining whether to listen to an expert:

The public will never be able to assess the validity of expertise on a case-by-case basis. Trying yields widely varied conclusions and thus eliminates any common starting point from which to conduct public debates—roughly the situation today. Assessing apparent expertise requires knowledge of a field’s inner workings, something almost no one has the time or inclination to learn. From the outside, it is difficult to infer what dogmas might contaminate a discipline’s standard training or what pressures might distort processes of hiring, promotion, and socialization. However, some general heuristics and defaults might provide a basis for at least some agreement.

First, a simple conflict-of-interest standard would make sense. Look at what people gain from giving their views, and from whom they gain it. Someone who stands to gain more personally from one view than from another should not be entitled to deference when offering the former. That does not mean the view is wrong, only that it must be defended on its merits rather than based on the identity of the speaker. A supporter of Joe Biden who declares that an embarrassing trove of Hunter Biden emails is fake may very well be correct and is entitled to make the case, but his listeners are similarly entitled to doubt his cogency or his sincerity. A supporter of Joe Biden who studies poisonous spiders for a living should be deferred to when he warns that the spider on your arm is poisonous.

Second, political stances should be inherently suspect. Experts can offer knowledge useful in evaluating the values-laden tradeoffs of politics and public policy, but that expertise does not make their judgment superior to that of any other citizen, and certainly not the democratic determination of a large group of citizens. This is not to say that no one can be a moral expert, only that technical expertise is not moral expertise. Plenty of people defer to religious leaders, community leaders, and even political leaders when it comes to questions of what to value and how to act. But in doing so, we should be aware that our moral experts will not be our neighbor’s. Identification of moral experts often depends on prior moral and political convictions, and disagreement on who the experts are will tend to mirror disagreement about the underlying issues.

Third, we should be far more skeptical of claims of knowledge-that expertise than of knowledge-how. In the latter case, people’s claims of expertise can be substantiated by their ability to deliver objective results. The surgeon with a track record of successful surgeries is easily distinguishable from the charlatan with none. Knowledge-that experts, by contrast, are laying claim to the truth. Sometimes they have it, and are guiding us as reliably as a pilot. Other times they are simply taking us for a ride.

As a historian, one of my favorite times and places  to learn more about is 1660s London. At Ordinary Times, L.D Burnett makes that the subject of an essay, focusing particularly on John Dryden:

. . . Dryden almost singlehandedly invented criticism—both literary criticism and cultural criticism—as both a genre and a paying job. 

Dryden’s works—his poetry, his plays, and his reflections on them—made the case and argued the case for the writer as cultural critic, responsibly and deftly wielding his pen to tell his age the truth about itself. “Using the epic past and his own poetic imagination to illuminate present realities was Dryden’s special gift,” Winn writes. “It sets him apart not only from the smoothly empty Waler and the pungently specific Marvell of the ‘Painter’ poems, but from the greatest poet of his century as well”—that is, unquestionably, Milton (177). 

While Milton made “glancing references” to recent inventions and current events here and there in Paradise Lost, “Milton’s choice of an epic mode deliberately limits such direct commentary on his own times.” Dryden, by contrast, preferred a “heroic” to an “epic” mode of poetry, “In Annus Mirabilis,” Dryden’s stirring poem about the disastrous year of plague, war, and fire, “he teaches us how to see the events of 1666 as both ‘Epick’ and ‘Historical’; his poem is both effective propaganda for the court and a moving vision of human suffering and triumph.” (177-178)

Throughout his career, Dryden straddled the shifting line between poet and pamphleteer, between aesthete and activist. Writing in conversation with his moment, rather than in an attempt to escape it, invigorated Dryden’s work, as did writing in conflict with other playwrights and poets whose different political commitments showed up in and showed through their own aesthetic choices.

Burnett discusses the fact that Restoration England was a time and place of lots of sexual mischief and interpersonal intrigue, not only in the theater and literature realms, but most of public life. During the pandemic, I reread The Diary of Samuel Pepys, which is basically a chronicle of 1660s London. His depictions of the plague and fire are cinematic in style. He also writes of going out on the town - dinner and a play - and seeing women he happened to know to be mistresses of Charles II. As I say, quite a juicy period.

At the American Enterprise Institute website, Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel J. Abrams warns that intolerance - ironically among those hustling "diversity" - continues to metastasize. 

Kat Rosenfield makes a similar point in her essay "The Paranoia Driving Office Politics" at UnHerd: 

A slip of the tongue? Ha! The only thing that slipped was the mask you’re wearing. That sound could only come out of your mouth if that word, in all its hateful and hideous glory, was already in your head.

Perhaps this is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which art and politics and opinions are increasingly seen as indistinguishable from one’s essential self. Matters of taste, or personality, now get swept up under the banner of capital-I-identity; you don’t just laugh at the sexist joke, you are the sexist joke. Even the silliest iterations of this phenomenon, like the obsession of certain young people with niche sexual and gender identities demarcated by bespoke pronouns and colourful flags, speak to a broader cultural impulse to make sense of things — and of other people — by slapping labels on them. Meanwhile, the idea that a person might contain self-contradictory multitudes, or that his taste in comedy, art, cuisine or decor says very little (if anything) about his character, cannot be borne in our present environment. The inscrutable nature of other people’s hearts is not an enticing mystery, but a source of horror: they could be hiding anything in there. The problem with this, of course, is not just that too many good people are saddled with permanent reputations for badness as a result of something as silly as a tweet, but that the cheapening of “badness” as a concept makes the perpetrators of actual evil much harder to identify.

There’s a paradox here: that in a moment where social media gives us unprecedented access to other people’s thoughts, we have become consumed by fear of all the things they might be thinking but not expressing. There’s a pervasive sense, perhaps owing to the inherent performativity of the medium, that signs of virtue cannot be trusted, but hints of vice should be treated with deadly seriousness, investigated, and prosecuted where possible. In the age of oversharing, it is the things we supposedly do not mean to reveal that are the most revealing.

And then there is my recent piece at Precipice entitled "Is Our Headlong Plunge Into Uncharted Territory Really Something To Celebrate?" The subtitle is "There Is Indeed A Basic Architecture To The Universe, And We're Flouting It."

 

 

Western civilization is a unique blessing to humankind

A subject that finds its way into a variety of comment threads here at LITD is the indispensability of Western civilization. The view that it offers our species nothing of particular value relative to other civilizations is sometimes put forth. While all viewpoints, respectfully expressed and cogently argued, are welcome here, this one concerns me, as it points to the fading of the very idea of a Western civilization.

Most colleges and universities don't give a diddly that such is the case. The most prominent exception to this is Hillsdale College in Michigan, which not only requires such subjects as the study of the Constitution for any and all majors of those on its campus, but makes lecture series on that and other subjects that will enhance one's grounding in Western thought - ranging from C.S. Lewis to Shakespeare to an overview of Judeo-Christian theology to a compare-and-contrast look at ancient Athens and Sparta to the Federalist Papers - available for the general public to take for free.

The school's president, Larry Arnn, is deeply concerned with the increasing ignorance among Westerners of their own heritage:

America’s lack of civic and cultural knowledge is an existential threat, says Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn in his introductory lectureto the college’s free online lecture series, “History 101: Western Heritage.”

“We’re living in a time as if some blight has come across the earth,” Arnn says. “Something fantastic, something deep, something old, something elevated, something high is basically being obliterated.”

He points to the constant litany of public surveys stretching back decades that keep showing large percentages of Americans cannot say when Abraham Lincoln lived, who Joseph Stalin was, or what century the Civil War took place. Pointing this out has become a sort of cottage industry of reoccurring bestsellers such as E.D. Hirsch’s 1984 “Cultural Literacy,” Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and Allan Bloom’s 1987 “Closing of the American Mind.” Despite constant re-acknowledgement of this phenomenon, however, it not only persists but has worsened.

While the oldest data is not as plentiful as today’s, sociological surveys such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1837 “Democracy in America” and Hirsch’s careful documentation of available evidence for the twentieth century, as well as other surveys of original material, all indicate a marked decline in public knowledge since the founding era. Arnn argues that this decline directly reduces Americans’ ability to fulfill our duties as citizens to govern ourselves.

He says a “virus has come among us,” a virus in the form of the idea that “the things in the past have been superseded, they’re not valuable, they’re obsolete.” While this may be true of some things, particularly technological advancements, he says this is not true of many things, particularly truths about human nature that over time Western culture has uncovered and handed down.

What, in a nutshell, are the unique Western contributions  to general human understanding? There are two.

One is the distillation of the conversation begun with Greco-Roman models of government that has led to the conclusion that representative democracy is the form best suited to maximizing ordered liberty.

The other is the process, begun in ancient Israel, by which humanity arrived at the most accurate understanding of God's nature and our relationship to Him to be found among the world's religious traditions.

Arnn uses two cities as shorthand for this:

Western civilization’s centuries of dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem — two historic cities that represent reason and faith, respectively — establish universals about human nature that Americans once again need to draw upon to make key decisions about our future.

As the Christmas season proceeds to its climax, and as we all brace for the cacophonous rancor that is going to characterize  the sociopolitical landscape in 2018, we do well to rededicate ourselves to prioritizing this heritage we're blessed to be recipients of.

And, of course, over the next couple of days, to particularly focus on the central event that ties together both of the above-mentioned contributions, and the various strains within them. It's also the central event in the history of our planet. I speak, of course, of the 33-year period in which the Son facet of the triune God dwelt among us, was unspeakably brutalized and killed by those who feared the light he radiated, and rose to defeat the darkness pervading the hearts of those who wounded and killed him. (That would be all of us, every day.)

From Western civilization, we get the understanding of grace and freedom, God's two greatest gifts to us.

Thank you, almighty Lord!

Now the Left is going to try to make the term "the West" into some kind of code for bigotry

I'd seen Peter Beinart's Atlantic piece about Trump's speech in Poland in my first round of news-and-opinion perusal this morning, and had resolved to blog about it when I got the opportunity. Now, at 12:30, I'm ready, and I see that it has come to the attention of some others as well.

Noah Rothman at Commentary makes a number of points I was going to put forth:

“The West is not an ideological or economic term,” wrote the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “The West is a racial and religious term.” “The ‘south’ and ‘east’ only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders,” Beinart insisted. “They only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if by ‘West’ you mean white, Christian hegemony.” This is true only if we accept Beinart’s premise; that the West is only a racial and religious affiliation and not a set of political traditions. If we see the West as a champion of individual liberty, freedom of worship, reason and rationality, and republican governance—not to mention a bulwark against the forces of reaction, totalitarianism, and theocracy—Beinart’s definition is both narrow and incoherent.

Notice how disingenuous Beinart is in formulation his position. For one thing, he makes a point of using a couple of George W. Bush speeches as points of comparison, and then tries to say that just because Trump couched his remarks in geographical terms, he was somehow minimizing Christianity's universal message, or speaking of some different definition altogether:

To grasp how different that rhetoric was from Trump’s, look at how the last Republican President, George W. Bush, spoke when he visited Poland. In his first presidential visit, in 2001, Bush never referred to “the West.” He did tell Poles that “We share a civilization.” But in the next sentence he insisted that “Its values are universal.” Because they are, he declared, “our trans-Atlantic community must have priorities beyond the consolidation of European peace. We must bring peace and health to Africa. … We must work toward a world that trades in freedom … a world of cooperation to enhance prosperity, protect the environment, and lift the quality of life for all.”

In 2003, Bush returned, and in his main speech didn’t use the terms “West” or “civilization” at all. After celebrating Poland’s achievements, he said America and Europe “must help men and women around the world to build lives of purpose and dignity” so they don’t turn to terrorism. He boasted that America was increasing its funding to fight global poverty and AIDS because “we add to our security by helping to spread freedom and alleviate suffering.” And he said “America and Europe must work closely to develop and apply new technologies that will improve our air and water quality, and protect the health of the world’s people.”

Bush’s vision echoed Francis Fukuyama’s. America and Europe may have been further along the road to prosperity, liberty, capitalism, and peace than other parts of the world, but all countries could follow their path. And the more each did, the more America and Europe would benefit. In deeply Catholic Poland, Bush sprinkled his speeches with religious references, but they were about Christianity as a universal creed, a moral imperative that knew no civilizational bounds. By contrast, when Trump warned Poles about forces “from the south or the east, that threaten … to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition,” he was talking not about Christianity but about Christendom: a particular religious civilization that must protect itself from outsiders.

Beinart employs the baggage of Trump's protectionist bluster in previous speeches to say that in this speech, his use of the word "defend" is fraught with paranoia:

When Bush spoke in Poland, America’s leaders still mostly discussed globalization as a process by which America improved the rest of the world. Trump generally discusses globalization—the movement of both goods and people—as a process by which the rest of the world cheats, weakens, and threatens America. In his two speeches in Poland combined, Bush used variations of the word “defend” five times. Trump used them 21 times in a single speech.

But the point here is not tariffs or intellectual property theft, it's a maniacal ideology enshrouded in a particular religion. A little further on, Beinart realizes he has to cover that base, and says this:

Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. 

Well, no, Peter, the jihadists don't have the resources to storm the meeting places of Western legislatures and declare coups d'etat, but we are already seeing a mindset spread that posits that frequent terrorist attacks are just something we're going to have to live with. There's a one-word encapsulation for that: demoralization. And it goes hand-in-hand with the acquiescence that accommodates sharia law and the performing of genital mutilation in doctors' clinics in Western nations.

The reason Trump mentioned the geographic angle is that it is from the south and east that immigrants, including no small number of individuals sympathetic to jihad, are poring into European nations.

Islam is not a Western religion, and making a high priority of "inclusivity" does not serve the cause of preserving Western values.

And let's add this fact to the mix: there are Western nations far removed from the geographic concentration of such countries. Israel is a Western nation. Japan, while by no means completely Western, has a great number of Western features: a basically free-market economy, a representative democracy form of government, and a balance between fealty to tradition and openness to advancement that ensures societal stability.

The extent to which Trump has thought any of this out is something we can't ascertain to any appreciable degree. Steven Miller wrote the speech. But neither is Trump some kind of white supremacist who secretly signals supremacist designs through his public remarks.

Rest assured, the way the term "the West" was used in the Poland speech is the way it's used by all serious people who understand that, yes, it must be defended: A body of thought distilled from a centuries-old conversation whose participants indeed did come from geographically Western nations, such as Greece, Italy, France, England, Germany, The United States, and Poland.