With the winds of war again blowing in Europe, David Horovitz recalls two interviews he conducted: one two years ago with the Jewish comedian-turned-Ukrainian-president Volodymyr Zelensky, and one last week with the Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid. Both conversations, for Horovitz, emphasized something essential about Israel’s situation:

My heart goes out to Ukraine’s president today, bracing for a possible Russian invasion, defiant, championing his country’s sovereignty and integrity, massively outgunned, uncertain of the potency of international support. And I note something else he said in our interview, his possibly envious, certainly admiring observation that “there are many countries in the world that can protect themselves, but Israel, such a small country, can not only protect itself, but, facing external threats, can respond.”

Lapid, [meanwhile], has been walking the tightrope between expressing principled opposition to a Russian invasion and ensuring the wellbeing of Israelis and Jews in Ukraine, on one hand, and trying, on the other, not to alienate a Russian president with whom Israel has a complex, critical relationship—both because of Moscow’s Middle East presence and influence, and because of Russia’s significant Jewish community.

“This is very 20th century, one country invading another,” said Lapid of the crisis, initially taking the dispassionate historical view. . . . But soon enough in our conversation, he reflected on the Israeli implications. I put it to him that it seemed like the world was doing nothing to protect a sovereign country.

If we thought the danger of despotic regimes remaking the world map was “very 20th century,” along comes Russia to slap us back to our senses. And if we thought the oft-declared imperative that Israel be able, always, to defend itself, by itself, was mere outdated rhetoric, the vulnerability of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, and his admiration for our country, underlines its critical relevance.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.