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Democracies overseas are under siege, and some Americans think the United States should stay out of those struggles. But supporting our friends and allies against barbarism is both in our national interest and part of our identity as a people.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What Hamas wants Black success, white backlash Newt Gingrich’s degraded legacy Judge Chutkan’s impossible choice

Wars of Conquest and Extermination

Last week, I mentioned the field of counterfactual history, the intriguing what-ifs about how great events could have turned out differently. One of the most celebrated of all such stories is a 1941 novel by the prominent science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp titled Lest Darkness Fall, in which a 20th-century archeologist named Martin Padway finds himself suddenly transported to sixth-century Rome. Padway knows he has arrived just before the final Gothic War, after which Europe would descend into the Dark Ages, and he uses his knowledge of history and technology to fend off Rome’s collapse. In the end, he secures a better future for Europe and perhaps the world: “Darkness,” the book concludes, “would not fall.”

Padway succeeds because he has the gift of hindsight. He knows with complete certainty what will happen, when, and why, and so he can intervene at key moments to avert disaster. In real life, the rest of us have to plod along in sequential time, doing our best with what we know at the moment.

But sometimes, history shows us the darkness in the distance. We are living through such a moment now. The conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are warnings of the darkness to come.

For many Americans, wars in faraway places seem to be only dangerous snares that might lead us into the jungles of Vietnam, the mountains of Afghanistan, or the sands of Iraq. Involvement seems pointless. Advocates of a more isolationist foreign policy quote what they see as a prescient warning from John Quincy Adams to stay out of the global fray: America, Adams said as secretary of state in an 1821 address to the House, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Wise words in 1821. Today, however, free nations cannot hope to keep their liberties safe in a hothouse while authoritarian tornadoes bear down on them. America and its allies might not want to go abroad looking for monsters, but sooner or later, the monsters will be looking for us. We all have every incentive, in the most personal and concrete way, to prevent such regimes from roaming the Earth at will.

Step back for a moment from the specific nations at war in Europe and the Middle East right now, and think about what kinds of conflicts we’re seeing.

In Europe, a giant, paranoid, nuclear-armed dictatorship has embarked on a war of conquest and genocide against its democratic neighbor. The aggressor, abandoning all pretenses, has simply declared that another nation should not exist and its people must accept their new masters or die.

In the Middle East, a militarized terrorist organization is undertaking a campaign of slaughter, with the intentional aim of inflicting gruesome torture and murder on as many people as possible.

Two wars: one of conquest, one of terror, both aimed at national extermination. As the Atlantic contributor and Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen has put it, these conflicts pit civilization against barbarians. If the barbarians win, they will inflict more devastation, expand their goals, and encourage other regimes to engage in similar barbarism. Over time, they will join hands and ally against us. They will have one another’s backs not because of any tripe about “honor among thieves” or Milton’s “firm concord” among devils damned but because they are not fools: They know that their survival depends on supporting one another in their crimes.

If these barbarians succeed, they could one day affect the lives of Americans in ways most citizens cannot imagine. They could control the passage of goods across the skies and seas; they could hold hostage U.S. citizens who dare to travel abroad; they could imperil American lives by denying access to any number of resources. And if we squawk about any of it, the nuclear-armed powers among them can threaten to immolate an American city as the price of resistance.

The safety and the security of the United States is the easiest case to make for maintaining our commitment to help Ukraine and Israel. But we should not fall back on such narrow definitions of utility and interest. If we are not willing to offer our help and support to Ukraine and Israel at this moment, what does it even mean to be an “American”?

Blood-and-soil nationalists would dearly love to have Americans think of themselves as people attached to only borders and dirt (and, for some, particular strands of DNA) rather than an idea. But “American” is not an ethnic identity. It is a choice, a bond to the Constitution and its ideals. America is not a defense compact or a customs union. It is a statement: Human beings have rights that can never be taken away, and our nation values and defends those rights.

For Americans to say that they will protect such rights only for ourselves is to betray a fundamental part of our identity as a nation and as a people. But what can the average citizen do? Stay engaged. Just a third of Americans can find Ukraine on a map; be an informed voice among your fellow citizens. Stay in touch with your elected representatives. Do not let the most irresponsible voices be the only voices. Members of Congress—and I speak from experience as a former staffer—do in fact pay attention to messages from their district.

And remember that voting matters. Poland on Sunday turned back an authoritarian challenge with an approximately 73 percent voter turnout. Meanwhile, the state of Louisiana just elected the far-right-wing lawyer Jeff Landry as governor with a turnout of about 35 percent, meaning that Landry will walk into office as the choice of 18 percent of Lousiania’s eligible voters.

We live in an exceedingly dangerous time. And yet we continue our childish bickering. We wring our hands over false choices. And, perhaps worst of all, some Americans seem interested only in how these crises can help in their grotesque and sometimes inane efforts to score political points. Darkness threatens to fall. But it can still be stopped, if Americans can summon the maturity and the will to embrace their responsibility as the leaders of the free world.

Related:

Against barbarism Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable.

Today’s News

A federal judge issued a limited gag order on Donald Trump, restricting his speech related to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of his alleged attempt to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. The Department of Justice has begun a federal hate-crimes investigation into the stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy and his mother in Chicago this weekend. The boy was killed, and his mother was wounded. The Biden administration agreed to a settlement that, if approved by a federal judge, would prevent federal authorities from separating migrant parents who violate immigration laws from their children for eight years.

Evening Read

Daniel Ebersole / Nobel Prize Outreach / Reuters

Why Children Are Everywhere in Louise Glück’s Poetry

By Walt Hunter

Louise Glück, the American poet and Nobel laureate who died last week, was repeatedly drawn to stories about families. Her last published book was a short novel about twins in their first year, Marigold and Rose. And children appear throughout her 1975 book, The House on Marshland, in which she developed her instantly recognizable intimate voice. By placing children and mothers, in particular, at the center of her poems, Glück explored a world made of equal parts myth and reality, sketched out by her precise, timeless language.

When I learned that Glück had died, I found myself drawn first to “The School Children,” which begins with a trip to school.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Animals are avoiding us. How Starbucks perfected autumn Photos: Evacuation of Gaza City

Culture Break

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Read. “She Who Remembers,” a new short story adapted from Jesmyn Ward’s forthcoming novel, Let Us Descend.

Watch. The first Saturday Night Live episode (streaming on Peacock) since the end of the writers’ strike, hosted by Pete Davidson. He might be the comedic hero we need right now.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Wadea Al-Fayoume, 6, was killed by a man police say targeted him because he was Muslim and Palestinian American.

“Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre?” That was the question posed by the headline of a Vanity Fair exposé published in October 2014. The investigative report laid out a sophisticated plot by the Islamist terror group to kill and kidnap Israelis on the Gaza border. The plan: to use underground tunnels to infiltrate nearby civilian enclaves on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, when the communities would be at their most vulnerable. As one intelligence source put it, the operation had two goals: “First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip.” The Israel Defense Forces subsequently confirmed this reporting to other media outlets, but not the specific date.

The tunnels were real. But at the time the massacre-that-wasn’t received little additional media coverage. It seemed too cinematic and convenient. Maybe it was a Hamas pipe dream that was never operational. Or maybe it was a worst-case scenario concocted by the Israeli security services and leaked to the media to justify their own ever-expanding countermeasures. Years passed without a mass border incursion, the tunnels were gradually detected and blocked, and I came to the conclusion that the skeptics were right about the plot being too lurid even for Hamas.

I was wrong. Last week, Hamas executed something quite like the attack on the Gaza border that it had planned all those years ago. Instead of tunneling underground on Rosh Hashanah, it invaded aboveground on another Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah. Some 1,500 terrorists stormed nearby civilian communities by land, air, and sea. They murdered babies in their cribs, parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents. They burned entire families alive. They decapitated and mutilated their victims. They wore body cameras and documented their destruction as though it were a video game. They executed a grandmother in her home and uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page. They deliberately targeted elementary schools. They kidnapped toddlers and a Holocaust survivor. They paraded a battered, naked woman through the streets of Gaza like a trophy. All told, they murdered more than 1,300 Israelis, almost all civilians, and abducted some 150 others, including babies and the elderly. The death toll continues to rise as rescue workers recover more remains and reassemble mangled corpses for identification.

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Somehow, few saw this eruption of inhumanity coming. Several months ago, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, then the European Union ambassador to the Palestinians, performed what he called Gaza’s first paragliding flight to advocate for a future where “anything is possible in Gaza.” Hamas terrorists would later use paragliders to massacre more than 250 civilians at an Israeli music festival, which is presumably not what the envoy had in mind. And he wasn’t the only one naive about the Hamas regime’s intentions.

The consensus was that Hamas was a mostly rational actor that could be reasoned with. To hawks, although the group was an anti-Semitic Iran proxy, it could be deterred through political and economic incentives, because it felt responsible for the welfare of the Gazan people. To doves, Hamas was a quasi-legitimate national resistance movement whose occasional bouts of violence were simply intended to draw attention to that struggle.

Successive Netanyahu governments and security officials, far less sympathetic to the Gazan plight, nonetheless spent recent years lifting economic restrictions on the enclave, granting thousands of work permits for Gazans, and transferring hundreds of millions of Qatari dollars to Hamas in exchange—they thought—for relative quiet.

But it turned out that Hamas wasn’t being pacified; it was preparing. The group was less committed to national liberation than to Jewish elimination. Its violence was rooted not in strategy, but in sadism. And in retrospect, well before the Rosh Hashanah plot, the signs of Hamas’s atrocious ambitions were all there—many observers just did not want to believe them. What Hamas did was not out of character, but rather the explicit fulfillment of its long-stated objectives. The shocking thing was not just the atrocity itself, but that so many people were shocked by it, because they’d failed to reckon with the reality that had been staring them in the face.

First, there is Hamas’s notorious charter, a Frankensteinian amalgam of the worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the modern era—the very same that have motivated numerous white-supremacist attacks in the United States. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” the document opens. “It needs all sincere efforts … until the enemy is vanquished.” The charter goes on to claim that the Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.” According to Hamas, the Jews were “behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about,” as well as World War I and World War II. The charter accuses Israel of seeking to take over the entire world, and cites as proof the most influential modern anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian fabrication that purports to expose a global Jewish cabal.

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” Hamas declares in its credo. “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews.” In case anyone missed the point, the document adds that “so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” In 2017, Hamas published a new charter, but pointedly refused to disavow the original one, in a transparent ruse that some respectable observers nonetheless took at face value.

In any case, Hamas communicated its genocidal intentions not just in words, but in deeds. Before it took control of Gaza, the group deliberately targeted Jewish civilians for mass murder, executing scores of suicide bombings against shopping malls, night clubs, restaurants, buses, Passover seders, and many other nonmilitary targets. Today, this killing spree is widely blamed for destroying the credibility of the Israeli peace movement and helping derail the Oslo Accords, precisely as Hamas intended. And it did not stop there. Since the group took power in Gaza, it has launched thousands of rockets indiscriminately at nearby civilian towns—attacks that continue at this very moment and that have boosted the Israeli right in election after election.

Hamas’s anti-Jewish aspirations were evident not only from its treatment of Israelis, but from its treatment of fellow Palestinians. Despite being the putative sovereign in Gaza and responsible for the well-being of its people, Hamas repeatedly cannibalized Gaza’s infrastructure and appropriated international aid to fuel its messianic war machine. The group boasted publicly about digging up Gaza’s pipes and turning them into rockets. It stored weapons in United Nations schools and dug attack tunnels underneath them. (Contrary to what you might have read on social media, Gaza does have underground shelters—they are just used for housing Hamas fighters, smuggling operations, and weapons caches, not protecting civilians.)

When dissenting Gazans attempted to protest this state of affairs and demanded a better future, they were brutally repressed. Hamas has not held elections since 2006. In 2020, when the Gazan peace activist Rami Aman held a two-hour Zoom call with Israeli leftists, Hamas threw him in prison for six months, tortured him, and forced him to divorce his wife. Why? Because his vision of a shared society for Arabs and Jews, however remote, was a threat to the group’s entire worldview. Jews were not to share the land; they were to be cleansed from it.

Simply put, what Hamas did two weekends ago was not a departure from its past, but the natural culmination of its commitments. The question is not why Hamas did what it did, but why so many people were surprised. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, quick to discern anti-Semitism in any effort to merely label Israeli products from West Bank settlements, somehow overlooked the severity of the genocidal threat growing next door. Journalists like me who cover anti-Semitism somehow failed to take Hamas’s overt anti-Jewish ethos as seriously as we should have. Many international leftists, ostensibly committed to equality and dignity for Palestinians and Israelis alike, somehow missed that Hamas did not share that vision, and in fact was actively working to obliterate it.

[Read: Hamas’s attack confounds Middle East experts]

Today, in the ashes of the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, some analysts have admitted their error of sanitizing Hamas. “It’s a huge mistake that I did, believing that a terror organization can change its DNA,” the former Netanyahu national-security adviser Yaakov Amidror told The New York Times. Others on the left have clung to their tortured conception of Hamas as a rational resistance group, despite it having been falsified by events. Perhaps some fear that acknowledging the true nature of Hamas would undermine the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. But in actuality, it is the refusal to disentangle Hamas’s anti-Jewish sadism from the legitimate cause of Palestinian nationalism that threatens the project and saps its support.

In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus, but he wasn’t buying it. “Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,” Brown wrote, “and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.” Two years later, the Times published another news item on the future architect of the Holocaust: “Hitler Tamed by Prison.” The Austrian activist, the piece said, “looked a much sadder and wiser man,” and “his behavior during his imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he] was no longer to be feared.”

Many got Hamas wrong. But they shouldn’t have. Again and again, people say they intend to murder Jews. And yet, century after century, the world produces new, tortuous justifications for why anti-Jewish bigots don’t really mean what they say—even though they do.

The Israeli military has renewed its call for civilians to evacuate northern Gaza as troops gather on the border in preparation for a widely anticipated ground invasion. The region is home to some 1.1 million people, and the United Nations has warned that the evacuation order—foreshadowing further retaliation for the Hamas terrorist attacks that killed more than 1,300 people in Israel—will have “devastating” consequences. Hundreds of thousands of people have already left their homes, while medical workers caring for an influx of patients injured in earlier Israeli airstrikes have called the evacuation order “impossible.”

​Palestinians move toward safer ground following Israeli air strikes in Gaza City late last week. The retaliatory strikes have killed more than 2,000 people and leveled whole neighborhoods. (Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty) Streets in Gaza City filled with Palestinians in cars and donkey carts following Israel’s first evacuation order on October 13, 2023. (Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty) ​Palestinians carried belongings through Gaza City on Friday as the Israeli military dropped leaflets warning civilians to evacuate. (Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty) ​A boy transports a mattress in Gaza City. (Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty) An aerial view of ​Palestinians attempting to evacuate northern Gaza to find refuge in the south (Hatem Moussa / AP) A family flees Gaza City by motorcycle. (Ahmad Salem / Bloomberg / Getty) Palestinian families walk past piles of rubble in Gaza City. (Loay Ayyoub / The Washington Post / Getty) ​Smoke rises in the distance as vehicles attempt to leave northern Gaza. (Hatem Moussa / AP)

This Palestinian photojournalist risks his life to document the deadliest Israeli assault Gaza has ever seen.

Malaysian prime minister says his government will continue to maintain its relationship with the Palestinian group.