After North Korea’s missile test last week, it now seems likely that Pyongyang is capable of successfully firing a nuclear-armed ballistic missile at the continental U.S. From this development, Evelyn Gordon draws some conclusions about Iran:

North Korea has proved, if anyone still had any doubts, that sanctions and negotiations alone can’t stop a determined dictator from acquiring nukes. By contrast, the jury’s still out on military action. It has only been tried twice, both times by Israel: in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007. And it’s still too soon to say conclusively that it worked. But at least so far, neither country has nuclear weapons.

Moreover, many of the arguments against military action are fatuous. Take, for instance, . . . the argument that military action does nothing but buy time. That’s far from self-evident. Some countries might conclude that the effort of rebuilding their nuclear program only to be bombed again isn’t worth it. But even assuming otherwise, buying time has also proved to be the most that, for their part, sanctions and negotiations can achieve. . . .

There is, of course, one serious reason for avoiding military action: fear of painful retaliation. . . . Low-cost military action was eminently feasible when Iran’s illicit nuclear program was discovered fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, that’s no longer true (which is a damning indictment of three successive Israeli governments). Eleven years ago, when Israel fought a month-long war with Tehran’s Lebanese proxy, Hizballah fired around 4,000 rockets and killed 163 Israelis. Today, Hizballah has upward of 150,000 rockets, including many with longer ranges, heavier warheads, and greater accuracy. Moreover, back then, Syria had no interest in joining the war, whereas today it might have little choice. . . .

Thus, preparing a military option on Iran starts with taking steps to make this option less dangerous, and therefore more feasible. Those preparations must start with making serious efforts to push Iran out of Syria, curb Iran’s conventional-missile program, and persuade Europe to . . . outlaw Hizballah (rather than only its “military wing,” as if this were somehow distinct from its political wing). Most likely, any military action will end up being Israeli rather than American. . . . But America must begin working now to make Israeli military action feasible at a reasonable cost. For as the North Korean failure shows, only military action is likely to stop Tehran from following in Pyongyang’s footsteps.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”