False Confidence Against Jihadism | The American Spectator

This week, a Wall Street Journal editorial declared in its subtitle, “Restraining Israel has empowered the terrorists and deterred Arab states.”

They are right and this is why.

“Peace through strength” has been the most effective doctrine in foreign policy. Churchill often used this exact phrase in conversations or correspondence in the 1950s, and paraphrased it in public talks, most famously in the 1946 Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtain” speech:

From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength … and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.

Churchill believed in peace and appeasement, but only appeasement from a position of strength. He believed in and advocated for straight talk, person to person, to turn around the chill of the Cold War so that the world could be relieved of the threat of war at last. But he was under no illusions that talk with Stalin or his successors would result in changes in their behavior unless he and the West came to the talks from a position of strength, and not out of weakness, as supplicants for mercy.

Churchill’s opposition to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich had been preceded by years of strenuous criticism of the Baldwin government for allowing Germany to attain air superiority over England and agreeing to a treaty with Germany that diminished Britain’s naval advantage. When Munich rolled around at the end of the summer of 1938, England was in a position of pronounced weakness, especially with respect to the air, the most fearsome arm of war. It was not an opposition to appeasement per se, but of this attempt to appease out of weakness that led Churchill into such impassioned and memorable dissent against the policy of his own Conservative Party. It isolated him from power and he was exposed to the charge of being a warmonger. But his warnings reflected the truth, as Chamberlain himself admitted by taking Churchill into his cabinet as head of the navy the moment war broke out next September.

Churchill’s idea of peace through strength was taken as a motto by Ronald Reagan. He understood Churchill’s two-pronged approach and made it his own.

Like Churchill, his goal was peace. He wanted to speak directly to the Communist leader and turn the world away from needless division and threat of war.

Like Churchill, he knew that his talks would mean nothing if he did not come from a position of strength. He built up the American military in every way until the Soviets were no longer able to compete. And just like that, fruitful talks suddenly began. Even better, the Communist system that Churchill tried and failed to crush at birth after World War I came crashing down shortly after Reagan turned over the presidency to his VP.

So, peace through strength works and appeasement from weakness doesn’t. So how does that apply to Hamas and the other jihadists and Israel? Surely Israel is the stronger power, and from a position of strength, one can and should make meaningful concessions that can bring peace.

That question seems reasonable in the light of our confrontations with Hitler and Stalin.  We had to build up our military superiority before we could be taken seriously. We won because we could outproduce our opponents, beating Hitler and facing down Stalin once we caught on to his unlimited desire to expand. We destroyed Hitler. Our firmness and accelerating military advantage persuaded the Soviets that they could not win.

But there is another strength that we must reckon with here, one that figured in the fights against the Nazis and against the Soviets as well. It is the strength of the religious ideology of our opponents. In each case, the motivating power of an ideology that served as a new religion served a great role.

The appeal of Nazism was deliberately limited due to its racialism. It did not excite and motivate those it deemed subhuman. It could scare them and induce fear. A vast part of Churchill’s success as a leader was his ability to counter that fear by evoking the religion of the West against it — a powerful and effective call on the spirit of the civilization built on the free and inquisitive mind of Athens joined to the moral imperative and spiritual grandeur of Jerusalem. Churchill’s words brought out the lion heart of Britain and eventually of America. His religion was realistic enough to make the necessary common cause with Stalin to end the most immediately dangerous threat.

The appeal of Communist religion proves harder to beat. By the time of the Vietnam War, its message had penetrated America enough to overcome the military advantage we maintained in southeast Asia. We lost that war at home in the minds and hearts of our own people. But Reagan was able to reawaken the American spirit much the way Churchill had reawakened Britain’s. His political savvy and his ability to speak to people’s hearts reset the religious aspect of the struggle against Communism. Americans began to believe deeply in America again as the heir to a Western civilization that was the hope of the world.

Jihadists believe they can win this religious war. Never tempered by adversity to look more deeply in order to win adherents by persuasion only, they hold an atavistic belief that they have can triumph over their enemies be sheer force. They see our weaknesses, and they think them fatal. They who enforce uniformity in their own polis see our diversity as an exploitable weakness, whether in the violent debates of democratic politics or in the culture wars.

They believe their long history gives them the ability to play the long game, which we, accustomed to instant gratification in every aspect of life, have no way to understand, much less combat. They believe that our limited government and guaranteed liberties make us exploitable—we will hold ourselves to an inferior religion that will leave us vulnerable to their deliberate exploitation of our rule-based behavior. They believe they have calibrated their responses enough so that we will overlook their outrages, caught by our own silly rules and unable to see the bigger picture that their ideology provides.

As Churchill said in the Fifties, after seeing how the UN was working: “We cannot be content with an arrangement where our new system of international laws applies only to those who are willing to keep them.” For today’s enemies of the West, they trust we will not rise to the urgency of the moment and so bind ourselves to laws meant for civilizational peace. But for them, any and all laws apply to us only. They believe themselves free to do whatever —r ape women right and left, torture them, burn babies, slaughter children, brag about it on their iPhones and online.

And a mark of the success of their religious appeal was seen across the West on October 8, 2023, in the violent demonstrations all across the West in support of the October 7 orgy of rape and massacre.

They believe they are winning. They believe they are stronger. Gaza may be reduced to rubble, but they have claimed London as their own, and here in America, Dearborn and Minneapolis. And where bin Laden knocked down two skyscrapers and brought violent death to 3000 people going about their daily routines, it looks like a fan of theirs may win New York City for them.

They see in America that they controlled the vice-presidential choice of the Democrats in the last election and that the voices of the base and of the intersectional movement that drives the Democrats has adopted the jihadist cause as their own. (Not for an instant do Hamas or any other political Islamist move an inch to accept the tenets of the Left. They will maintain the hudna until they will no longer need them and then they will be thrown off the roofs or shot in the streets as well. Disgusting idiots, they think, but now indispensably useful.)

From our point of view, with which the jihadists are well acquainted, we think ourselves as holding all the cards. Therefore, we think generosity is required of us and it would be the proper and logical pathway to peace. They count on us thinking that, and their communications are meant to enhance our feelings that it would be proper — we owe it to concede and appease them. Thus, Mamdani’s pitiful sob story of a non-existent aunt who, in his story, being so afraid after 9/11 of the terrible New Yorkers who might do something to her because she wore a hijab that she stopped riding the subway.

Manipulation and contempt rolled up into one. In the eyes of the jihadists and their political supporters, we are a rotten and corrupt civilization, who would fall for a lie which doesn’t even allege an actual attack but fear of one. And we would count that as more important than the death of 3,000 ordinary citizens in a terror attack. Hamas and their fellows believe we would feel so guilty that we would not weep at all for the 3000 dead — at their suggestion, we’d chalk it all off to the wages of sinful colonialism.

Rather, in our corruption and weakness, we could not bear to think that an imaginary person might be afraid of us not liking someone for public Muslim observance and would be moved by Mamdani’s non-existent tears and dramatically executed sobs to embrace his cause and the jihad-approving imam that he embraced as a pillar of the community just the other day.

So, no, to those otherwise sober MAGA folks who think that the U.S. and Israel are dominating right now and now is the time for concessions — think again. That is not how Hamas thinks.

They think they have a winning hand and have suckered us into laying down a bet we can’t afford to lose. They believe we are appeasing out of weakness.

For those who earnestly desire peace — real peace, not submission to a totalitarianism just as vicious and wicked as Stalin’s or Hitler’s — it is time to ask once more: what would Churchill do?

The WSJ’s editorial board has this right. And though some of his supporters have pushed the other way, so far, that seems to be Trump’s inclination as well.

For that, I thank God.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

The West Learned From Defeat. So Must Islamic Civilization.

From Berlin to Gaza, the Cult of Death Marches On

We Must Have Diversity and Unity