Israel continues to hit Gaza with air strikes in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attack that has so far killed 1,300 people in Israel and wounded thousands more. An additional 1,400 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Gaza is facing a “huge” humanitarian crisis, one United Nations official told The New York Times, as Israel has cut off electricity to the region, and hospitals there are running out of the fuel necessary to keep generators running. Food and water in the region are also quickly running out, the UN’s World Food Program warned. And as Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Israel today to underscore the United States’ unequivocal support for Israel, he also said that “it’s important to take every possible precaution to prevent harming civilians.”

Meanwhile, Hamas is holding hostage at least 150 civilians captured in the attack on Israel, including children and elderly people. Officials in Israel believe the hostages are being held inside Gaza’s network of underground cellars and tunnels, where they could still be harmed by Israel’s air strikes on Gaza. “This is without question the most difficult hostage situation Israel has ever faced in its history,” Michael Milstein, a senior analyst at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at Israel’s Reichman University, told the BBC.

Smoke rises over buildings in the Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza, on October 9, 2023. (Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency / Getty) A medical worker carries a child away from the wreckage of Israeli air strikes in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Belal Khaled / Anadolu Agency / Getty) Palestinians survey the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Photo by Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty) Onlookers watch the search for survivors in a destroyed residential building on October 10, 2023. (Fatima Shbair / AP) Palestinians search through the rubble of the Watan Tower in Gaza on October 8, 2023. (Reuters / Mohammed Salem) An injured Palestinian man in Gaza City on October 9, 2023 (Belal Khaled / Anadolu Agency / Getty) The aftermath of an Israeli air strike in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jabalia, north of Gaza City, on October 9, 2023 (Photo by Mohammed Abed / AFP / Getty) Palestinians evacuate the area near the destroyed Sousi mosque on October 9, 2023. (Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty) Destruction from Israeli air strikes in Gaza City, October 11, 2023 (Fatima Shbair / AP)

If 10/7 was Israel’s 9/11, as many of the country’s leaders have said, the meaning of the comparison is not self-evident. Its implications still have to be worked out, and they might lead to unexpected places.

The horror is comparable, but the scale isn’t. The 1,000 or more civilians butchered on Saturday by Hamas are, relative to Israel’s population, many more than the 3,000 killed in the United States by al-Qaeda; a proportionate number of dead on 9/11 would have been close to 40,000. Al-Qaeda, a transnational group based in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan, had the ability and will to strike terror anywhere in the world, but it could not destroy the United States. Hamas threatens Israel’s very existence—both in principle, according to the genocidal goals set out in its founding manifesto and subsequent statements, and also in practice, as an arm or ally of the more powerful entities in the region that share its aims, Hezbollah, Syria, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Facts like these suggest that the analogy has no more value than most historical comparisons.

And yet something makes Israelis reach back to September 11, 2001. The facts are different, but the feelings are the same: profound shock, unbearable grief, humiliation, rage, and solidarity. Shock because nothing this terrible had ever happened before, even to Israel. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like the George W. Bush administration, seemed to discount evidence of a coming attack—a failure of intelligence and preparedness that was, perhaps, at bottom a failure of imagination. Solidarity demonstrated in the spontaneous effort of ordinary Israelis, without waiting for official directives, regardless of ideological differences, to save and comfort one another. Ours didn’t last long; neither will theirs. May the memory endure as a reproach to the stupidity and tribalism that plague Israeli politics and ours.

“Let there be no doubt: The United States has Israel’s back,” President Joe Biden said on Tuesday at the White House. He reported having just told Netanyahu by phone, “If the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.” It sounded like unconditional support, a green light for Israel to respond as violently as the U.S. did after 9/11. But Biden also told Netanyahu, “Terrorists purposefully target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war. It matters. There’s a difference.” This sounded like a warning in the form of flattery: Democratic countries like ours don’t kill civilians—so don’t. NBC News later reported, “Biden was more direct than in previous calls that the Israeli military should take pains to avoid civilian casualties.”

At around the same time as the leaders’ phone call, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, was telling troops massed for an offensive on the Gaza border, “I have released all the restraints.” As he spoke of the accounts of murders and beheadings of children, women, and elderly Holocaust survivors, Gallant’s face was clenched with rage. He had already ordered “a complete siege” of Gaza that would cut off fuel, power, water, and food. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” the defense minister said. As of Wednesday, according to Palestinian and international sources, more than 1,000 people in Gaza were dead, the majority of them civilians, including entire families buried under the rubble of air strikes.

After 9/11, Israelis essentially told Americans, Now you know. In fact, most of us knew almost nothing and had to spend years learning by painful experience. If Americans now have anything useful to tell Israelis, it would be: Don’t. Don’t let your justified fury replace reason. Give vent to rage, but think coldly—avoiding civilian casualties is in your self-interest. Don’t storm into Gaza without a plan for afterward. Don’t imagine that overwhelming military force can solve an immensely complex historical and political problem. Don’t continue to ignore or inflame Palestinian grievances in the West Bank, even if they’re raised by people who celebrated Israeli deaths.

Don’t poison your national unity, as Bush did ours, by using the crisis for partisan advantage; Israel’s new unity government is a good sign. Don’t squander your moment of global legitimacy, or assume that the world’s support will last a day longer if news emerges of mass civilian deaths in Gaza, or believe that its loss wouldn’t matter. It matters that democratic countries, which have criticized the Jewish state but know the difference between Israel and Hamas, are now expressing outrage, just as the same countries’ support mattered when Ukraine was brutally invaded by Russia. “It was very important not to be alone,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday, extending his solidarity to Israel. This is more than the Netanyahu government, which has been carefully neutral on Russian aggression, deserves from Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is holding his cards close on Israel and Hamas. Zelensky understood, as Netanyahu didn’t, that Russia, Iran, and Hamas will land on one side, and Ukraine and Israel on the other.

America should have its friend Israel’s back while conveying unpleasant truths to its face. After Saturday it’s clear that two things, apparent contradictions, have to be accepted at the same time: A group that seeks Israel’s destruction must be destroyed, and Israel’s cruel treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories only helps that group’s cause. It’s impossible for Israel to live in peace alongside Palestinians who will never accept its right to exist, and it’s impossible for Palestinians to accept a fate of permanent subordination. To address these together will require profound change from both sides. It’s beyond the ability and will of the current Israeli government, and on the West Bank, a sclerotic Palestinian government, weakened by its own corruption and by continued Israeli domination, is just as useless Perhaps, out of this horror, better alternatives will emerge.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers, what will America be like in 2050?

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

JP anticipates a decline in faith:

America in 2050 will be a lot less religious, and will have fewer church structures. I am 31 and work at a church. Many churches, including ours, are still running on the “old church model” (my term) that has been established over the last 300+ years: building large structures, asking for donations or passing the basket, and driving engagement by appealing to people’s sense of duty or obligation. We know that a transition needs to take place, because in the next 25 years, we are going to lose a lot of believers to old age. What will we do without these volunteers and donors? Churches will begin to feel less like large institutions, and more like small, tight-knit communities. As a result, religion, and especially Christianity, will have a much smaller impact on public discourse and culture.

Ian expects racial and ethnic integration:

Despite the ever-present racism and xenophobia, America will find itself more blended. The right will still be unwilling to admit that this diversity and blending has made our nation stronger, not weaker. But extremism on both the right and left will still make the most noise. Division and hatred inspire events that are newsworthy, and the media will make the most of it. People will see the folly of 24-hour networks that are more opinion than news.

Caro is 80 years old and pessimistic about the future:

I won’t be around to see 2050. I could be sad about that but I am not optimistic enough to believe things will be “better” than they are today as far as being a shining beacon of democracy.

Our country has prized independent thinking and living so much so that it treats innovation as the end, not the means. Innovation just happens (in cars, computers, global trade, wars) because it can, and without regard for the long-term good of Earth. We live with the consequences of our desires to create “better living” for just us humans and not the full environment we live in (take the microscopic plastic present on every part of the planet).

When people can’t cooperate in devising ways to cope, they seek protection of a power that doesn’t require cooperation. That is the scariest thing in my country that I see.

Ben’s outlook is sunnier:

I expect shifts in U.S. industrial policy ushered in during the last two years will have a profound effect on the size and shape of the U.S. economy. Renewable energy will become a much larger part of our industrial portfolio, which will have downstream effects.

Checks, cash, and other forms of “paper” monetary transactions will either be extinct or very rare. An 11-year-old today will be 38 in 2050; the likelihood that generation will ever write a check, own a landline, or pay for cable is vanishingly small. Therefore we can also expect that any existing cable-TV enterprises will only exist through a streaming service (which could manifest in a variety of forms) or otherwise cease to exist.

We will continue to see a backlash against big business and a continuing momentum for labor movements. I don’t see any way our children will embrace current-gen social media, data economies, and monopolies with the same naive enthusiasm as previous generations. We will all be “online,” but whatever “online” looks like will not be the same.

I see most of these developments as net positives. But I also think that there will be some pains our society will be healing from in 2050 that haven’t yet happened. If you follow the trajectory of American politics from the 90s to today, there is a pretty clear through line that suggests the GOP is going to cause—and experience—a lot more pain and chaos before they get better. It’s very difficult to see what their end state will be, but the logic of the MAGA movement is escalatory by nature. Things will keep getting worse until some calamity forces a shift. In an ideal world, that “calamity” could simply take the form of massive electoral defeats, but we are in no way guaranteed that outcome.

Abraham speculates about changes in land use:

The nation is poised to become a more densely populated and urbanized landscape, with real-estate prices in cities beginning to find stability. While cities today have relied on land-use regulations that date back decades, a shift toward more liberal land-use policy will take place, fueled by rising real-estate prices which will gradually affect a broader spectrum of the middle class. A significant pivot will be noticed when property values begin to impact particularly high-skilled professionals, such as engineers and attorneys. In response, local city councils are likely to modify many established development norms such as minimum lot sizes, the emphasis on single-family zoning, and parking standards.

Cities will become more internally focused. The era of regionalism will draw to a close, with local leaders putting an emphasis on retaining resources within their city limits. It will become evident to municipalities that subsidizing infrastructure to support long commutes or suburban residents is not efficient or sustainable. Instead, the spotlight will shift toward optimizing resources and infrastructure within city confines for the benefit and pleasure of its residents, and a serious focus on attracting even more residents. Cities will still be stratified economically, but a silver lining will emerge as construction and development projects are more easily greenlit, offering a semblance of relief.

On the other hand, residents of rural regions are set to face significant economic headwinds. As wealthier individuals, equipped with comprehensive remote-work options, opt to flee away from what they perceive as congested urban centers, they will migrate toward these “quieter” locales. This migration will amplify the demand in these areas, driving up property values. The prevailing land-use policies in these regions will remain largely centered on single-family residences. Limited employment opportunities combined with a deeply entrenched, well-financed resistance to change will further exacerbate the financial situation for residents here. Even as urban areas begin to achieve real-estate stability, suburban and exurban localities will experience heightened real-estate market pressures. The residents of these areas, particularly those without the means to adapt, will feel the economic strain even worse than they do today.

Dana expects huge catastrophes and heartening adaptations to them:

Sadly, I think the coastal cities will be underwater due to sea levels rising far faster than expected. Many species will be extinct. No more polar bears or penguins. Farmers will have robotic bees because the real bees will be dead.

Interest will be removed from existing student loans, and college and grad school will be free. A quarter of the country will be dead or disabled due to having had COVID 12 to 20 times. All houses and buildings will test someone’s breath for two seconds and detect if there’s any contagious virus before allowing the person to enter. Medical technology will grow with the help of AI and quantum processing, so aging will be much better, cancer cured, and some people will have a life span up to 120. Ageism will cease to exist because people will look in their 30s even if they are 95. Everywhere, public and private, will have video and DNA surveillance so crime will become almost exclusively cyber.

The education pendulum will start swinging back to children actually being expected to learn, and parents being expected to be responsible for their children. Capitalism will no longer be unbridled greed, as everyone has to do their part for saving the planet. Items will be made to last for years or decades. Community responsibility, pensions, and companies caring about their employees will make a comeback. Racism will no longer exist, as proof of sentient alien life will change the world’s outlook as we all become earthlings. We’ll begin to try to bring back polar bears, penguins, bees, etc. as we finally understand what matters and that we’re (“we” being everything living) all in this together.

John sketches optimistic and pessimistic scenarios:

The race in America between our better angels and lesser demons may be close to the end. I believe we are in a constant race between our rational, entrepreneurial, scientific efforts to build a better union and country and the demons attempting to tear it all down. But I feel like some technology advances in the near term will determine if there is a winner of this race. From climate change to health care, we Americans have the tools to make the world a better place and keep America a great nation. I can imagine fusion power moving the curve on CO2 emissions. I can imagine AI causing all kinds of strife, but our society moderates the worst outcomes with some positive benefits. Tailored, genetic-based health care could greatly extend the lengths of good, healthy lives.

But ... if we don’t fix some serious problems, America is going to be smaller (due to sea-level rising), much hotter, even angrier somehow, and probably partitioned in some meaningful way. Again, I feel like it is a race, and I do not have the crystal ball to see the outcome.

Zack envisions his own retirement:

The year is 2050. I boot up my iPhone 11. Damn grandkids wouldn’t even know how to work a fine piece of technology like this. They just rub dopamine-infused goo directly on their brains (this goo has replaced entertainment entirely). I tap on the Atlantic app. I scroll past three pieces about how this upcoming election is The Most Important of Our Lives. I begin reading an article saying that November 2050 is set to be the hottest on record. “Bah, the weather is fine,” I say to myself in my fully underwater Palm Beach retirement community. The Amazon Alexa Surveillance Device is blasting my favorite oldies with only occasional ads. “Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet––350 SPF SUNSCREEN ONLY $75.99. STAY SAFE THIS WINTER. Give me everything you got for this wet—14 TIKTOK STARS WHO HAVE AGED TERRIBLY. CLICK HERE NOW.” My wife is in the kitchen cooking my favorite meal: high-fructose corn syrup. Life is good.

Paul is even more dystopian in his outlook:

Earth will be running out of drinking water. This will include the United States. Lack of water will cause food shortages. Neighbors will be fighting each other for food and drinking water. No one will offer any solutions before this happens because we are too self-centered. 2050 will be too late to change the results of climate change. Goodbye everyone.  

Thank goodness Eric was here to cheer me up:

The future of America is pretty bright, even if it doesn’t seem that way right now. That being said, we absolutely need to safeguard our assets if we want to flourish throughout the 21st century.

Demographically, we are in one of the better positions among developed countries. Looking at a Population Pyramid, the U.S. is in an excellent position now and toward 2050, especially compared to Europe, Russia, and East Asia. Where this could go wrong is if we Millennials don’t have children and we stop becoming one of the top destination choices for emigrants. As long as we prioritize high wages and economic growth, we will remain an attractive place for immigrants (and especially if we change existing policy to make it easier for highly skilled immigrants to come here). And if we keep our demographics from collapsing, we will continue to be the center of innovation in the world, and the strongest developed economy.

With the investments made now in renewable energy and the continuing investments in energy storage, the U.S. has a good chance of remaining the world leader in energy production. Where this could go wrong is if we regulate ourselves out of mining necessary minerals and new energy projects. I predict that as more people view climate change as a threat, the activist push for the government to prevent renewable energy-related projects on environmental grounds will start to dissipate.

Over the last century humans have shown amazing ingenuity in completely changing the world, and with more and more people getting educated and encouraged to innovate, I don’t see any reason why that would change. And as a lot of people are more aware of marginalized parts of our society and there is agreement on getting resources to those parts of society, we will continue to unleash all of our talent to solve our problems.

The only thing that can stand in the way of this is ourselves!

“Did they really decapitate babies?” my 14-year-old daughter asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a text message on her phone from a friend. “They’re saying they found Jewish babies killed, some burnt, some decapitated.” And I froze. Not because I didn’t know what to say—though in truth I didn’t know what to say—but because for a moment I forgot what century I was in. All of the assumptions I had made as a Jewish father, even one who had grown up, as I did, with the Holocaust just a few decades past, were suddenly no longer relevant. Had I adequately prepared her for the reality of Jewish death, what every shtetl child for centuries would have known intimately? Later in the day, she asked if, for safety’s sake, she should take off the necklace she loves that her grandparents had given her and that has her name written out in Hebrew script.

The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians last Saturday broke something in me. I had always resisted victimhood. It felt abhorrent, self-pitying to me in a world that seemed far away from the Inquisition and Babi Yar—especially in the United States, where I live and where polls repeatedly tell me that Jews are more beloved than any other religious group. I wasn’t blind to anti-Semitism and the ways it had recently become deadlier, or to the existential dread that my family in Israel felt every time terrorists blew up a bus or café—it’s a story whose sorrows have punctuated my entire life. But I refused to embrace that ironically comforting mantra, “They will always want to kill us.” I hated what this tacitly expressed, that if they always want to kill us, then we owe them, the world, nothing. I deplore the occupation for both the misery it has inflicted on generations of Palestinians and the way it corrodes Israeli society; when settlers in the West Bank have been attacked, it has pained me, but I have also felt anger that they are even there. In short, I wasn’t locked into the worldview of my survivor grandparents and I felt superior for it.

But something in me did break. As I was driving on Tuesday, I heard a long interview on the BBC with Shir Golan, a 22-year-old woman who had survived the attack at the music festival where more than 250 people were killed, her voice sounding just like one of my young Israeli cousins. She described, barely able to catch her breath, how the shooting had started and how she’d begun to run. She’d found a wooded area and tried to hide. “I got really into the ground,” she said. “I put the bushes on me.” Covered with dirt and leaves, she’d waited. A group of terrorists had shown up and called for anyone hiding to come out. From her spot under the earth, she’d seen three young people, whom she called “children,” emerge. “I didn’t go out because I was scared. But there were three children next to me who got out. And then they shot them. One after one after one. And they fell down, and that I saw. I saw the children fall down. And all that I did was pray. I prayed to my god to save me.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Against barbarism]

I pulled my car over because my own hands were shaking as I listened. She then described waiting, hidden in the dirt under bushes for hours, until she saw the terrorists begin to light the forest on fire. “I didn’t know what to do. Because if I’m staying there, I’m just burnt to death. But if I go out they are going to kill me.” She crawled over to where she saw dead bodies and lay on top of them, but the heat soon approached, so she found more bushes to hide in until she could run again. Burnt bodies were everywhere, and Shir looked for her friends but couldn’t find them, couldn’t even see the faces of those killed because they were so badly burned. “I felt like I was in hell.” She finally escaped in a car.

Her story flung me back to my grandparents’ stories. My grandmother hid in a hole for a year in the Polish countryside, also under dirt, also scared. My grandfather spent months in Majdanek, a death camp, and saw bodies pile up in exactly this way. Stories are still emerging of families burnt alive, of children forced to watch their parents killed before their eyes, of bodies desecrated. How was this taking place last Saturday?

But these stories aren’t what broke me. What did was the distance between what was happening in my head and what was happening outside of it. The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering, whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur. They are supposed to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is first a child in distress regardless of country or background. But I quickly saw that many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian—templates made of concrete. The break was caused by this enormous disconnect. I was in a world of Jewish suffering that they couldn’t see because Jewish suffering simply didn’t fit anywhere for them.

The callousness was expressed in so many ways. There were those tweets that did not hide their disregard for Jewish life—“what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers”—or the one that described the rampage as a “glorious thing to wake up to.” There was the statement by more than two dozen Harvard student groups asserting, in those first hours in which we saw children and women and old people massacred, that “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” And then there were the less explicit posts that nevertheless made clear through pseudo-intellectual word salads that Israel got what it deserved: “a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia.” I hate to extrapolate from social media—it is a place that twists every utterance into a performance for others. But I also felt this callousness in the real world, in a Times Square celebratory protest promoted by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, at which one speaker talked of supporting Palestinians using “any means necessary” to retake the land “from the river to the sea,” as a number of placards declared. There were silences as well. Institutions that had rushed to condemn the murder of George Floyd or Russia for attacking Ukraine were apparently confounded. I watched my phone to see whether friends would write to find out if my family was okay—and a few did, with genuine and thoughtful concern, but many did not.

I’m still trying to understand this feeling of abandonment. Is my own naivete to blame? Did I tip too far over into the side of universalism and forget the particularistic concerns to which I should have been attuned—the precarious state of my own tribe? Even as I write this, I don’t really want to believe that that’s true. If I can fault myself clearly for something, though, it’s not recognizing that the same ideological hardening I’d seen on the right in the past few years, the blind allegiances and contorted narratives even when reality was staring people in the face, has also happened, to a greater degree than I’d imagined, on the left, among the people whom I think of as my own. They couldn’t recognize a moral abomination when it was staring them in the face. They were so set in their categories that they couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult that claimed to speak in that people’s name. And they couldn’t acknowledge hundreds and hundreds of senseless deaths because the people who were killed were Israelis and therefore the enemy.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: What happened to empathy?]

As the days go on, the horrific details of what happened—those babies—seem to be registering more fully, if not on the ideological left than at least among sensible liberals. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling of aloneness. Does it take murdered babies for you to recognize our humanity? I find myself thinking—a thought that feels alien to my own mind but also like the truth. Perhaps this is the Jewish condition, bracketed off for many decades and finally pulling me in.

When news broke of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 that took 49 lives (compare that with the 1,200 we now know were killed on Saturday), it caused a sensation throughout the world. “Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob,” The New York Times reported. “The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.” In response to that massacre, the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews to the United States began in earnest; the call of Zionism as a solution also sounded clearly and widely for the first time.

In his famous poem about the massacre, “In the City of Slaughter,” the Hebrew writer Haim Naḥman Bialik lamented, even more than the death, the sense of helplessness (“The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending / Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal”), the men who watched in terror from their hiding places while women were raped and blood was spilled. I can’t say I know what will happen now that this helplessness has returned—if I’m honest, I also fear that Israel’s retaliation will go too far, that acting out of a place of victimhood, as right as it may feel, will cause the country to lose its mind. Innocent lives in Gaza have been and will be destroyed as a result, and competing victimhood is obviously not the way out of the conflict; it’s the reason that it is hopelessly stuck. But in this moment, before the destruction of Gaza grabs my attention and concern alongside fear for my relatives who have been called up to the army, I don’t want to forget how alone I felt as a Jew these past few days. I have a persistent, uncomfortable need now to have my people’s suffering be felt and seen. Otherwise, history is just an endless repetition. And that’s an additional tragedy that seems too much to bear.

President Joe Biden’s core foreign-policy argument has been that his steady engagement with international allies can produce better results for America than the impulsive unilateralism of his predecessor Donald Trump. The eruption of violence in Israel is testing that proposition under the most difficult circumstances.

The initial reactions of Biden and Trump to the attack have produced exactly the kind of personal contrast Biden supporters want to project. On Tuesday, Biden delivered a powerful speech that was impassioned but measured in denouncing the Hamas terror attacks and declaring unshakable U.S. support for Israel. Last night, in a rambling address in Florida, Trump praised the skill of Israel’s enemies, criticized Israel’s intelligence and defense capabilities, and complained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to claim credit for a U.S. operation that killed a top Iranian general while Trump was president.

At this somber moment, Trump delivered exactly the sort of erratic, self-absorbed performance that his critics have said make him unreliable in a crisis. Trump’s remarks seemed designed to validate what Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that focuses on the Middle East, had told me in an interview a few hours before the former president’s speech. “This is the most delicate moment in the Middle East in decades,” Murphy said. “The path forward to negotiate this hostage crisis, while also preventing other fronts from opening up against Israel, necessitates A-plus-level diplomacy. And you obviously never saw C-plus-level diplomacy from Trump.”

[Franklin Foer: Biden will be guided by his Zionism]

The crisis is highlighting more than the distance in personal demeanor between the two men. Two lines in Biden’s speech on Tuesday point toward the policy debate that could be ahead in a potential 2024 rematch over how to best promote international stability and advance America’s interests in the world.

Biden emphasized his efforts to coordinate support for Israel from U.S. allies within and beyond the region. And although Biden did not directly urge Israel to exercise “restraint” in its ongoing military operations against Hamas, he did call for caution. Referring to his conversation with Netanyahu, Biden said, “We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law.” White House officials acknowledged this as a subtle warning that the U.S. was not giving Israel carte blanche to ignore civilian casualties as it pursues its military objectives in Gaza.

Both of Biden’s comments point to crucial distinctions between his view and Trump’s of the U.S. role in the world. Whereas Trump relentlessly disparaged U.S. alliances, Biden has viewed them as an important mechanism for multiplying America’s influence and impact—by organizing the broad international assistance to Ukraine, for instance. And whereas Trump repeatedly moved to withdraw the U.S. from international institutions and agreements, Biden continues to assert that preserving a rules-based international order will enhance security for America and its allies.

Even more than in 2016, Trump in his 2024 campaign is putting forward a vision of a fortress America. In almost all of his foreign-policy proposals, he promises to reduce American reliance on the outside world. He has promised to make the U.S. energy independent and to “implement a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods and gain total independence from China.” Like several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, Trump has threatened to launch military operations against drug cartels in Mexico without approval from the Mexican government. John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in the White House, has said he believes that the former president would seek to withdraw from NATO in a second term. Walls, literal and metaphorical, remain central to Trump’s vision: He says that, if reelected, he’ll finish his wall across the Southwest border, and last weekend he suggested that the Hamas attack was justification to restore his ban on travel to the U.S. from several Muslim-majority nations.

Biden, by contrast, maintains that America can best protect its interests by building bridges. He’s focused on reviving traditional alliances, including extending them into new priorities such as “friend-shoring.” He has also sought to engage diplomatically even with rival or adversarial regimes, for instance, by attempting to find common ground with China over climate change.

These differences in approach likely will be muted in the early stages of Israel’s conflict with Hamas. Striking at Islamic terrorists is one form of international engagement that still attracts broad support from Republican leaders. And in the Middle East, Biden has not diverged from Trump’s strategy as dramatically as in other parts of the world. After Trump severely limited contact with the Palestinian Authority, Biden has restored some U.S. engagement, but the president hasn’t pushed Israel to engage in full-fledged peace negotiations, as did his two most recent Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Instead, Biden has continued Trump’s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and surrounding Sunni nations around their common interest in countering Shiite Iran. (Hamas’s brutal attack may have been intended partly to derail the ongoing negotiations among the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia that represent the crucial next stage of that project.) Since the attack last weekend, Trump has claimed that Hamas would not have dared to launch the incursion if he were still president, but he has not offered any substantive alternative to Biden’s response.

Yet the difference between how Biden and Trump approach international challenges is likely to resurface before this crisis ends. Even while trying to construct alliances to constrain Iran, Biden has also sought to engage the regime through negotiations on both its nuclear program and the release of American prisoners. Republicans have denounced each of those efforts; Trump and other GOP leaders have argued, without evidence, that Biden’s agreement to allow Iran to access $6 billion in its oil revenue held abroad provided the mullahs with more leeway to fund terrorist groups like Hamas. And although both parties are now stressing Israel’s right to defend itself, if Israel does invade Gaza, Biden will likely eventually pressure Netanyahu to stop the fighting and limit civilian losses well before Trump or any other influential Republican does.

Murphy points toward another distinction: Biden has put more emphasis than Trump on fostering dialogue with a broad range of nations across the region. Trump’s style “was to pick sides, and that meant making enemies and adversaries unnecessarily; that is very different from Biden’s” approach, Murphy told me. “We don’t know whether anyone in the region right now can talk sense into Hamas,” Murphy said, “but this president has been very careful to keep lines of communication open in the region, and that’s because he knows through experience that moments can come, like this, where you need all hands on deck and where you need open lines to all the major players.”

[Read: ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades’]

In multiple national polls, Republican and Democratic voters now express almost mirror-image views on whether and how the U.S. should interact with the world. For the first time in its annual polling since 1974, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs this year found that a majority of Republicans said the U.S. would be best served “if we stay out of world affairs,” according to upcoming results shared exclusively with The Atlantic. By contrast, seven in 10 Democrats said that the U.S. “should take an active part in world affairs.”

Not only do fewer Republicans than Democrats support an active role for the U.S. in world affairs, but less of the GOP wants the U.S. to compromise with allies when it does engage. In national polling earlier this year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about eight in 10 Democrats said America should take its allies’ interests into account when dealing with major international issues. Again in sharp contrast, nearly three-fifths of GOP partisans said the U.S. instead “should follow its own interests.”

As president, Trump both reflected and reinforced these views among Republican voters. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Paris climate accord, and the nuclear deal with Iran that Obama negotiated, while also terminating Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks. Biden effectively reversed all of those decisions. He rejoined both the Paris Agreement and the WHO on his first days in office, and he brought the U.S. back into the Human Rights Council later in 2021. Although Biden did not resuscitate the TPP specifically, he has advanced a successor agreement among nations across the region called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Biden has also sought to restart negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, though with little success.

Peter Feaver, a public-policy and political-science professor at Duke University, told me he believes that Trump wasn’t alone among U.S. presidents in complaining that allies were not fully pulling their weight. What makes Trump unique, Feaver said, is that he didn’t see the other side of the ledger. “Most other presidents recognized, notwithstanding our [frustrations], it is still better to work with allies and that the U.S. capacity to mobilize a stronger, more action-focused coalition of allies than our adversaries could was a central part of our strength,” said Feaver, who served as a special adviser on the National Security Council for George W. Bush. “That’s the thing that Trump never really understood: He got the downsides of allies, but not the upsides. And he did not realize you do not get any benefits from allies if you approach them in the hyper-transactional style that he would do.”

Biden, Feaver believes, was assured an enthusiastic reception from U.S. allies because he followed the belligerent Trump. But Biden’s commitment to restoring alliances, Feaver maintains, has delivered results. “There’s no question in my mind that Biden got better results from the NATO alliance [on Ukraine] in the first six months than the Trump team would have done,” Feaver said.

As the Middle East erupts again, the biggest diplomatic hurdle for Biden won’t be marshaling international support for Israel while it begins military operations; it will be sustaining focus on what happens when they end, James Steinberg, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. “The challenge here is how do you both reassure Israel and send an unmistakably tough message to Hamas and Iran without leading to an escalation in this crisis,” said Steinberg, who served as deputy secretary of state for Obama and deputy national security adviser for Clinton. “That’s where the real skill will come: Without undercutting the strong message of deterrence and support for Israel, can they figure out a way to defuse the crisis? Because it could just get worse, and it could widen.”

In a 2024 rematch, the challenge for Biden would be convincing most Americans that his bridges can keep them safer than Trump’s walls. In a recent Gallup Poll, Americans gave Republicans a 22-percentage-point advantage when asked which party could keep the nation safe from “international terrorism and military threats.” Republicans usually lead on that measure, but the current advantage was one of the GOP’s widest since Gallup began asking the question, in 2002.

This new crisis will test Biden on exceedingly arduous terrain. Like Clinton and Obama, Biden has had a contentious relationship with Netanyahu, who has grounded his governing coalition in the far-right extremes of Israeli politics and openly identified over the years with the GOP in American politics. In this uneasy partnership with Netanyahu, Biden must now juggle many goals: supporting the Israeli prime minister, but also potentially restraining him, while avoiding a wider war and preserving his long-term goal of a Saudi-Israeli détente that would reshape the region. It is exactly the sort of complex international puzzle that Biden has promised he can manage better than Trump. This terrible crucible is providing the president with another opportunity to prove it.

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Reality TV is not generally known for its wholesome content. An exception might be a new show called The Golden Bachelor. A variation on the popular original, in which a single young man is courted by several attractive, eligible women, The Golden Bachelor features a retired restaurateur named Gerry Turner, who is considering marriage to one of 22 aspiring women 60 or over (he is an athletic, tanned 72, and hasn’t lost a single hair). The show creates a spectacle because, despite the fact that more Americans are getting married later in life, this potential match is much older than what is typical.

But this raises a question I commonly hear from my 20-something students, as well as from anxious parents (closer to my age) of single adult children: What is the ideal age to wed, in order to achieve happiness and marital success? Philosophers have weighed in on this. In his Politics, for example, Aristotle offered this advice: “It is fitting for the women to be married at about the age of eighteen and the men at thirty-seven or a little before.” Social scientists see it differently. A researcher at the Institute for Family Studies offered a more social-scientific estimate of the optimal age for getting hitched: 28 to 32 for both partners. This is the “sweet spot,” where divorce within the first five years of marriage is lowest.

[From the October 2023 issue: George Eliot’s subversive vision of marriage]

Naturally, this finding might provoke angst among those who would like to be married but have passed the “ideal” window. But it shouldn’t. By looking at why the 28-to-32 bracket appears to work best, we might be able to re-create those conditions for almost any age—even 72.

The average age of marriage in the United States has been rising for years. In 1980, the average meant that a man married at 25, a woman at 22. Today, those numbers are 30 and 28, respectively. There are still outliers on the low end—two of my kids married in their early 20s—but I meet many more young people on the other side of today’s averages, who say they have no plans to marry before their mid-30s or even later.

Is this aging trend good or bad for marital happiness? The raw data are not very encouraging: Marital satisfaction is falling as marriage age rises, according to statistics collected over the past half century by the General Social Survey that I analyzed. Following a gradual but significant downward trajectory, the percentage of married Americans who say they’re “very happy” with their union has fallen from more than 67 percent in the early 1970s to about 60 percent today.

But the analysis of data from the National Survey of Family Growth that examine age at marriage and likelihood of divorce reveals a more complicated story: The failure rate falls as people marry later in their 20s, but then it starts to rise again. After the 28-to-32 sweet spot, the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent each year. (In case you are wondering, the IFS researcher’s excellent analysis of data from 2011 to 2013 controls for demographic variables such as education, religion, and sexual history.) The average age of marriage happens to be optimal, although this almost certainly won’t remain the case as the average age continues to rise.

[Read: Seven books that explore how marriage really works]

Surprisingly little research has looked at exactly why marriages tend to struggle when they start earlier or later, so I looked at indirectly associated studies to find clues. One helpful line of research comes, believe it or not, from the success rate for different kinds of business formation.

Consider start-ups. According to a study published in 2006 in the journal Strategic Organization, one factor predictive of success is the level of experience—a feature of maturity—of the founders. Having taught social entrepreneurship and worked with nonprofit start-ups for many years, I can confirm that when founders are green, they are enthusiastic but tend to make errors that people with a little more experience would probably avoid.

So it is with marriages, I suspect: A bit of experience with life and relationships may increase the chances of success for the co-founders of a marriage start-up. (Notably, such experience might not include cohabitation before marriage: The sociologists Lyman Stone and W. Bradford Wilcox have shown that living together actually predicts longer-term lower marital success in the United States.)

On the other side of the age sweet spot, we find adults who might have a little too much experience, or who are entrenched in the ways of single life, making a shared life difficult. This risk sounds quite similar to the problems seen with a different kind of corporate arrangement: mergers, which usually seem logical but are rarely successful. A 2011 article in Harvard Business Review reported that 70 to 90 percent of mergers and acquisitions failed to live up to financial expectations.

[Read: The case for dating a friend]

This was because long-standing corporate cultures are very hard to integrate, with the result that productivity and morale fall off after a merger. One company might have a warm, convivial culture, whereas the other is formal and hierarchical, for example. Mixing them can be difficult to impossible. This could be analogous to two independent 30-somethings—with established habits, tastes, beliefs, and careers—trying to become a single married unit.

The sweet spot for a durable romantic partnership, then, is a new venture between two mature co-founders who are not so set in their ways that they act like entrenched corporations. Although this typically implies a particular age band, it doesn’t have to. Even people who have passed the 28-to-32 window can benefit by resisting the characteristics of a merger. Here are three practices they might keep in mind.

1. Bank on the partnership.
In a corporate merger, there must be financial integration. The same goes for a marriage: Maintaining separate finances lowers the chances of success. Keeping money apart might seem sensible in order to avoid unnecessary disagreements, especially when both partners are established earners. But research shows that when couples pool their funds and learn to work together on saving and spending, they have higher relationship satisfaction and are less likely to split up. Even if you don’t start out this way and have to move gradually, financial integration should be your objective.

2. Forget 50–50.
A merger—as opposed to a takeover—suggests a “50–50” relationship between the companies. But this is rarely the case, because the partner firms have different strengths and weaknesses. The same is true for relationship partners. I have heard older couples say that they plan to split responsibilities and financial obligations equally; this might sound good in theory, but it’s not a realistic aspiration. Worse, splitting things equally militates against one of the most important elements of love: generosity—a willingness to give more than your share in a spirit of abundance, because giving to someone you care for is pleasurable in itself. Researchers have found that men and women who show the highest generosity toward their partner are most likely to say that they’re “very happy” in their marriage.

Of course, generosity can’t be a one-way street. Even the most bountiful, free-giving spouse will come to resent someone who is a taker; a “100–0” marriage is surely even worse than the “50–50” one. The solution is to defy math: Make it 100–100.

3. Take a risk.
A common insurance policy in merger marriages is the prenuptial agreement—a contract to protect one or both parties’ assets in the case of divorce. It’s a popular measure: The percentage of couples with a “prenup” has increased fivefold since 2010.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The type of love that makes people happiest]

A prenup might sound like simple prudence, but it is worth considering the asymmetric economic power dynamic that it can wire into the marriage. As one divorce attorney noted in a 2012 interview, “a prenup is an important thing for the ‘monied’ future spouse if a marriage dissolves.” Some scholars have argued that this bodes ill for the partnership’s success, much as asymmetric economic power between two companies makes a merger difficult.

To have a successful romantic partnership at any age, the trick is to act like a mature start-up, not like a merger. Being a business-school professor, I did consider some other corporate models as I thought about other ways to succeed in love. In truth, though, I couldn’t find any that seemed promising.

Acquisition? That sounds weirdly transactional. And I have never had someone tell me, “I lured my spouse with money, and we lived happily ever after.” Hostile takeover? I haven’t found reliable data on the success of marriages that start out as extramarital affairs, but the premise seems pretty improbable. Whether you are 22 or 72, the best approach to a successful love start-up is one in which co-founders see each other as equals and walk confidently into the future together in a spirit of generous, golden collaboration.

Jockey Frankie Dettori tells the BBC he is postponing his retirement to ride in the United States next year.

This week, a teenager might open up their TikTok feed and immediately be served a video about a hairbrush that promises to gently detangle the roughest of tangles. Or a clip about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s rumored romance. Or the app could show them a scene from the Israeli Supernova music festival, where on Saturday a young woman named Noa Argamani was put on the back of a motorcycle as her boyfriend was held by captors.

Footage from Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, and the retaliatory strikes it has prompted, is appearing in social-media feeds across the world. Videos about the conflict have drawn billions of views on TikTok alone, according to The Washington Post, and queries related to it have appeared in the app’s trending searches. Hamas reportedly posted the murder of one grandmother to her own Facebook page.

Hamas reportedly captured about 150 hostages, and has threatened to execute them. Some schools in Israel and the United States have asked that parents preemptively delete social-media apps from their children’s devices in order to protect them from the possibility of seeing clips in which hostages beg for their lives. “Together with other Jewish day schools, we are warning parents to disable social media apps such as Instagram, X, and Tiktok from their children’s phones,” reads one such statement, posted by The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern. “Graphic and often misleading information is flowing freely, augmenting the fears of our students.”

Parents have good reason to be concerned. Psychologists don’t fully know how watching graphic content online can affect kids. But “there’s enough circumstantial evidence suggesting that it’s not healthy from a mental-health standpoint,” Meredith Gasner, a psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me, citing research on the viral videos of George Floyd’s death in police custody.

Of course, kids have long been at risk of encountering disturbing or graphic content on social media. But the current era of single feeds serving short videos selected by algorithms, sometimes with little apparent logic, potentially changes the calculus. Firing up TikTok feels like pulling the lever of a content slot machine; every time a user opens up the app, they don’t necessarily know whether they’ll find comedy or horror. Lots of kids are pulling the lever many times a day, sometimes spending hours in the app. Nor is this just a TikTok problem: Instagram and YouTube, among other platforms, both have their own TikTok-like feeds. Much of the material on these platforms is benign, but on weeks like this one, when even adults may have trouble stomaching visuals they encounter, the idea that children are all over social media is particularly unsettling.

If hostage videos appear, the social-media platforms are hypothetically in a position to prevent them from going viral. A spokesperson for TikTok did not respond to a request for comment, but the platform’s community guidelines forbid use of the platform “to threaten or incite violence, or to promote violent extremism,” and the website says that the company works to detect and remove such content. Instagram, for its part, also moderates “videos of intense, graphic violence,” and has established a special-operations center staffed with experts to monitor the situation in Israel, a spokesperson for Meta said in an email. Both platforms offer safety tools for parents. Still, social-media platforms’ track record when it comes to content moderation is abysmal. Some videos that are upsetting to children may find their way onto the apps, especially those posted by reputable news outlets.

I talked to eight experts on children and the internet who told me that deleting social-media apps unilaterally might not work. For one, TikTok and Instagram videos are often cross-posted on other platforms, like YouTube Shorts, so you’d have to delete a lot of apps to create a true bubble. (And even so, that might not be impenetrable.) Kicking your teen off social media, albeit temporarily, may also feel like a punishment to your kid, who did nothing wrong.

But that doesn’t mean that parents are helpless. A better approach, experts told me, is for parents to be more open and communicative with their kids. “Having that open dialogue is key because they’re not really going to be able to escape what’s going on,” Laura Ordoñez, head of digital content and curation at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that advocates for a safer digital world for kids and families, told me. Even if children can avoid videos of violence, the realities those videos represent still exist.

Families with a direct connection to the region may have a tougher time navigating the next few days than those without one. And age matters a lot, the experts said. Younger kids, particularly those in second grade or below, should be protected from watching upsetting videos as much as possible, says Heather Kirkorian, the director of the Cognitive Development and Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. They’re too young to understand what’s happening. “They don’t have the cognitive and emotional skills to understand and process,” she told me.

At those younger ages, parents can realistically bubble kids from certain platforms and sites. Though that’s not to say they won’t hear about the war at school or have questions about it. When discussing with younger children, experts advise talking in kid-friendly language and, when appropriate, letting them know that they personally are safe. If the child is under 7, Ordoñez advises using “very simple and concrete explanations” like “Someone was hurt” or “People are fighting.” She also recommends that adults avoid watching or listening to news in front of children, who may overhear material that upsets them.

For older children, quarantining them from life online is rarely plausible. If you do delete TikTok from their phone, kids may just download it again or find another way to view it—by, say, using another kids’ device or a school computer. As Diana Graber, the author of Raising Humans in a Digital World, pointed out: “The minute you tell a child you can’t look at something, guess what they’re going to do?” Experts told me that a more productive approach is to ask kids questions about what they know, what they’ve seen, and how they feel. Warn them that the content they encounter may upset them, and talk to them about how it might affect them. Graber notes that a lot of kids these days are fluent in the language of mental health. If you’ve seen graphic content on your feeds, you can assume that your kid might see it, too. Julianna Miner, the author of Raising a Screen-Smart Kid, notes that “it’s important to give your kids a heads up” and to “prepare them for what they might see.” After that, you can “give them the choice of logging off or changing settings or taking some steps to potentially limit the types of things they could be exposed to.” This way, you’re on the same team.

In tense moments like this one, kids—like everyone else—are likely to encounter misinformation and disinformation, some of which began circulating even as the attacks were first being carried out. Bloomberg reported that a video from a different music festival in September was making the rounds on TikTok and had gotten almost 200,000 likes. For this reason, Sarita Schoenebeck, a professor at the University of Michigan who directs its Living Online Lab, recommends reminding kids that we don’t always know whether what we see online is real or fake.

In general, experts advise that parents should personalize their approach to their children. Some are more sensitive than others, and parents know their kids and what they can handle best. More broadly, monitor for signs that they’re upset. That might look different depending on the child. One good rule of thumb Schoenebeck gives when advising parents about whether kids are ready for smartphones is to think about how well your child is able to self-regulate around technology. “When you say, ‘Oh, time to turn the TV off!’ or whatever, are they able to self-regulate and do that without having a fit?” she asked. Are they capable of doing a dinner without phones or do they sneak a peek under the table? The same questions may show how ready they are to self-regulate their social-media use in upsetting times.