A Pearl-Harbor Moment for the Nation

Sometimes your enemies end up pushing you onto the right path forward even despite the fact that they only really wish to do you harm. The best example of that, and one I’ve written about in this space many times, was Japan’s decision to launch an unprovoked attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was a despicable act, one that cost the lives of more than 2400 American servicemen and women. And yet, for all the attack was unconscionable and reprehensible, it is also true that it was that attack that finally brought the United States into the Second World War. Not that we responded to the Japanese attack by also declaring war on Germany. We declared war on Japan on December 8, the day following the attack in Hawaii. The Germans, supporting their Japanese allies, then declared war on the United States on December 11. And only then, albeit later that same day, did our nation enter the war against Germany.

How many survivors of the Shoah owe their lives to the American decision to enter the war? All of them! (Or surely most. For a fictional, but fully believable and totally engaging, imagining of an alternate universe in which World War II finally grinds to a halt without either side ever really defeating the other, I recommend Robert Harris’ terrific first novel, Fatherland. Trust me, it doesn’t end up well for the Jews.) We take pride in the part our nation took in the defeat of the Nazis, but enjoy less—a lot less—remembering that we basically entered the war because we had no choice, because not even the most ardent American isolationists, pacifists, and non-interventionalists were in favor of the U.S. not responding to a declaration of war made against it. And all that being the case, it doesn’t sound unreasonable to say that, at least in a certain sense, those who lived on in the post-war era as citizens of the democratic republics of Western Europe and an independent Great Britain and the Jews who survived and all the others whom the Nazis hadn’t gotten around to murdering yet—they all owe their post-war existence to the Emperor of Japan, the single individual ultimately responsible for Pearl Harbor. (Emperor Hirohito approved the plan to attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 1 and then again on the day of the assault itself; it would certainly not have taken place if he had opposed the plan. Still, the specific degree to which he was responsible for the carnage remains at least slightly a matter of scholarly debate. For an interesting appraisal on the emperor’s role in the attack, I recommend the short essay about Robert Citino posted on the website of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, to see which click here.)

And that brings me to the story in the paper the other day that Russia is using Iranian-made drones to murder Ukrainian civilians. Was it just a month or two ago that President Biden and other administration officials were still speaking encouragingly and optimistically about how reaching a kind of “deal” with Iran would slow down—or at least would possibly slow down—that nation’s entry into the club of nuclear-armed nations? That any such deal would inevitably lead to Iran acquiring the ability to create—and to manufacture and store—nuclear weapons hardly seemed worth discussing. Like President Obama in 2015, the President’s idea seemed to be that since we can’t possibly really keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, we might as well settle on the far lesser accomplishment of slightly slowing them down. (Of course, unlike President Obama, who promised unequivocally to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and then tried to sell the Iran Deal of 2015 as the accomplishment of that goal, no administration official today even bothers attempting to promise any such thing. Instead, they seem to be working on the theory that the American people will agree that something, even a small bit of something, is better than nothing.) Will the talks in Vienna go anywhere? Just a week ago, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell made the public comment that he did not see any hope for a renewed agreement with Iran. He didn’t explain his pessimism, but it seems inextricably tied to the discovery that Iran is actively sending weaponry to Russia that the Russians are using to murder civilians in the large cities and smaller towns of Ukraine.

I am of two minds regarding the Iran Accord, and have been since President Obama, knowing he would never get the requisite congressional approval, presented it to the world as a “deal” rather than a “treaty.” On the one hand, Iran is in the hands of fanatic Islamicists who are wholly open about their wish to obliterate Israel by killing all of its Jewish citizens. (That the kind of attack they threaten would undoubtedly also kill its Muslim and Christian citizens doesn’t seem to be an issue. I suppose the Christians, in the mullahs’ eyes, would be collateral damage and the Muslims would be martyrs.) Nor are they anything but aggressive and openly hostile to our nation. So concluding a deal—or whatever—that will lead inexorably to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is anathema to me, something that I think should and even must be opposed vigorously by all decent-minded people. On the other hand, President Obama’s argument that delaying their entry into the club is better than not delaying it—in the hope, vain or not, that the people will eventually rise up, throw their totalitarian masters out, and either create a Western-style democracy or bring back a descendent of the Shah (or both)—is not fully without merit. And the beginnings of such a people’s uprising appear to be making themselves known the streets of Iran. So perhaps I was a bit hasty in waving away that argument in 2015.

But that was then. And now we are in a different universe of discourse. Yes, the Iranian street is seething. But Iran itself continues to be implacably hostile to the West, and especially to our nation and to Israel. If they had tactical nuclear weapons, would they use them against their own people in the event of a real armed uprising? I think they would. And even if murdering civilians in Ukraine is different than killing citizens of your own country, how is it different from using those same drones—except with nuclear payloads—against civilians in Tel Aviv? The game has heated up considerably, but only good will come from the world seeing the Teheran-Moscow alliance for what it is: a union of like-minded zealots whose respect for human life is nil, who will do anything at all to accomplish their political goals, and whose ideational framework (both politically and morally) is the precise opposite of our own.

The October 17 drone attack on Kyiv was only the beginning, I fear. American sources seem certain that Tehran is also going to supply the Russians with surface-to-surface missiles that the latter can use against Ukraine’s cities. The more liberal Arab states—and particular the partners to the Abraham Accords and Saudi Arabia—are watching closely, waiting to see if our nation is prepared to treat Iran not as a partner-in-dialogue with ourselves and the states of Western Europe, but as a partner-in-aggression with Russia in the effort to win the war with Ukraine by murdering its civilians and terrifying those left alive into submission.

The part about the negotiations with Iran that no one ever says out loud is the assumption that we can somehow curry favor with the Islamic Republic by entering into deals with them because, at the end of the day, we can all be sure that Israel will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power. That kind of wink-wink hypocrisy seems craven to me. The time clearly has come now—now that the Iranians are facilitating the murder of children in the streets of Kyiv—for a kind of Pearl Harbor moment in which we abandon the fantasy that we can do the right thing merely by being vaguely supportive of our allies (and “vaguely” is not even really the word for it—Pearl Harbor came a year and a half after France, our oldest ally of all, had fallen to the Nazis) and embrace the notion that regimes that foster violence against the innocent and that are motivated by the basest of motives—prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism, greed, and chauvinism—are not to be placated or bought off, but opposed strongly, implacably, and unequivocally.