In the 1920s, Joseph Stalin drove his fellow Bolshevik Leon Trotsky out of the inner circle of the Soviet government and then expelled him from the country, eventually having him assassinated in 1940. While Trotsky and Stalin did have genuine ideological disagreements, they agreed that the USSR should be autocratic, brutal, and ruthless toward dissenters. A myth nonetheless grew up that Trotsky embodied a more humane and democratic version of Communism—true only insofar as it’s difficult to be less humane than Stalin—and an energetic Trotskyite movement persisted in the West into the 1950s.

Alan Johnson follows what happened to Trotskyism in the years since and finds an ugly story of people eager to embrace with gusto any brutal dictatorship they could classify as “proletarian” or “anti-imperialist.” The Trotskyite impulse, as one writer described it, was to “act as attorney for some of the vilest regimes in the world.” To Johnson, there is a direct line from that attitude to those leftists today who don’t just defend Hamas, but enthusiastically celebrate the October 7 attacks:

So while the song may remain the same, a lot more people are singing it today. Just as in an earlier era, when the Trotskyists said palpably barbaric anti-working-class tyrannies were really “workers’ states” to be defended unconditionally against “imperialism”; just as when a wider revolutionary New Left said vicious reactionary sub-imperialist predators had really been “anti-imperialists” to be cheered on to victory; so today an even broader “left” is responding to the worst anti-Semitic pogrom since the Holocaust with calls for two, three, many October 7s, which they fantasize will be a global “intifada-revolution.”

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.