Today, only a few Westerners are still attending President Vladimir Putin’s showcase events, such as the Valdai conference in Sochi, which, before the war, was Russia’s most prestigious international gathering. This year, one of those foreign guests was a journalist from a German far-left newspaper, who asked Putin to explain a seeming contradiction: If Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, as Putin claims, why is the Kremlin maintaining high-level contacts with the far-right Alternative for Germany party?

The question had particular saliency because the AfD is growing in power and popularity across Germany. Earlier this month, it achieved historically good results in regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, two traditionally centrist states. Nationally, the AfD is polling at a record 21 percent, making it the second-most-popular party in Germany. After next year’s regional elections, it could even become the leading party of several states in its eastern-German stronghold.

Putin’s response was revealing. He questioned the notion that the AfD is far-right and defended his contacts with the group. He went on to suggest that the AfD was the victim of “Nazi methods” rather than a party “using them.” As evidence, he pointed to rumors of an assassination attempt on one of the party’s leaders during a recent campaign event. The German authorities have not confirmed that any such attempt took place, but the AfD tried to exploit the rumor in the days before this month’s regional elections. Putin’s surprisingly detailed knowledge of a little-known conspiracy theory involving the AfD points to the special interest that the Kremlin is taking in Germany’s far right.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Putin’s connection to Germany is personal. A country that he thought he understood, from his posting to East Germany as a young KGB officer, has turned its back on him. “I still have friends in Germany,” Putin said at Valdai. “And it may seem strange, but their number is growing.” The implication, when taken with his remarks about the AfD, was that he’s finding new friends among Germany’s right.

Putin seems to hope he can make an ally of Germany’s far right in an effort to sow discord in German society. This would meet an important goal in his broader campaign to dissolve Western unity and reduce support for Ukraine.

Living and serving in East Germany in the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union had a huge influence on Putin’s life and political priorities. Throughout his career, he has shown a consistent preoccupation with Russia’s relationship with Germany. “Russia has always had special sentiments for Germany,” he said in a speech—delivered in fluent German—to the Bundestag in 2001. Many times, he has tapped into German guilt over its World War II history and harped on the debt of gratitude Germany owes the Russian people for the country’s reunification. Putin’s tactics have been very effective, and Germany has long put its relationship with Russia before that with any of its Eastern European neighbors.

In 2014, Putin extended his arm-twisting by drawing a parallel between Germany’s reunification and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Just as the Russian people had supported the “desire of the Germans for national unity,” he said in a public address, so he expected Germany to “also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity.”

Although Germany joined the widespread European and American condemnation of the annexation of Crimea, the country’s dependence on natural gas, and Russian supplies of it, was growing. That vulnerability bolstered Putin’s confidence that Germany’s business-driven political system would not dare cutting ties, regardless of Russia’s aggressive actions elsewhere.

That belief was affirmed by his close relationship with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Putin has attended Schröder’s birthday parties, and once took Schröder on a Christmas sleigh ride in Moscow). After Schröder left office in 2005, he was appointed chairman of the boards of both Nord Stream AG and Rosneft, two major Russian-controlled energy companies. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Schröder fell into disgrace, and the Nord Stream 2 gas-pipeline project between Russia and Germany that he championed has been abandoned. Yet Putin continues to defend his friend as a “true son of his people.”

[David French: Hatred makes fools of us all]

The German response to Russia’s 2022 assault on Ukraine suggests that Putin did not know Germany as well as he thought. Even when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Germany—a move that many countries, including the United States, long feared would sway German decision making—Germany continued to support Ukraine. In fact, Berlin became Kyiv’s second-biggest military supplier after Washington. Although Germany has hesitated to step into a leading role in Europe—delaying the delivery of tanks and still debating whether to provide long-range missiles to Ukraine—the era of a special relationship between Russia and Germany is over.

Putin’s reaction to this has been to turn his false narrative about neo-Nazis in Ukraine back on Germany. “It’s unbelievable but true,” he said at an event earlier this year commemorating Soviet sacrifices during World War II. “We are again being threatened with German Leopard tanks.” (Germany had “panther” and “tiger” tanks in World War II, but no “leopards,” in fact.) Germans, however, thought of a different wartime analogy for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939. “Acting as an imperial power, Russia now seeks to redraw borders by force,” wrote Olaf Scholz, Germany’s current chancellor, and “my country’s history gives it a special responsibility to fight the forces of fascism, authoritarianism, and imperialism.”

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Putin appears to hope that a return to Russia’s pre-2022 relationship with Germany is possible. Because “one line of Nord Stream 2 has survived” (the other line was blown up last year), “tomorrow we open the valve,” he has offered—if Germany asks to resume its Russian gas supply. But this is something, he complained, that Germany’s “bosses in Washington” will not allow the country to do. (The idea that the U.S. dictates policy to Berlin is a favorite trope of his: The Americans “continue to occupy Germany,” he said on Russian TV earlier this year.)

Rebuffed by Germany’s centrist politicians, Putin has been forced to look for allies on the more extreme margins of German politics. A supposed lack of national sovereignty and independence is a popular narrative among far-right parties and conspiracist movements in Germany. For example, AfD is calling for emancipation from the United States and rapprochement with Russia in its platform for the candidates it’s running in next year’s European parliamentary elections. The rhetoric of Germany’s continued “occupation” is also echoed by the ultra-reactionary Reichsbürger movement, whose members do not accept the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic and wish for the restitution of the “German Reich” that ended with the defeat of the Nazis.

[Anne Applebaum: Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable]

AfD politicians have repeatedly argued that Germany should move away from the European Union’s sanctions and reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. As well as calling for an end to support for Ukraine, they have also blamed NATO expansion for provoking Russia. For its part, Moscow has cultivated relations with the AfD, including a 2020 meeting between senior party members and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. The Kremlin has also brought AfD members on all-expenses-paid trips to Russia and invited them to act as “election observers” in Crimea. In August, an investigation by Der Spiegel found that an AfD staffer in the Bundestag who was preparing a lawsuit against the German government over its arms supplies to Ukraine had taken multiple trips to Russia, returning with large sums of cash and suspected contacts to Russian intelligence.

The attitudes of the AfD and movements like Reichsbürger conveniently align with some of Putin’s views about Germany. Reichsbürger is growing in strength, and now has more than 20,000 members. A regional branch of Germany’s domestic-intelligence service last year warned that Russia is actively encouraging the movement in online disinformation campaigns.

The likely reasons for Putin’s interest in his new friends are not hard to discern. The rise of Germany’s far right makes it easier for Russia to undermine social cohesion and public consensus. The political center in Germany is growing weaker: The three parties in the governing coalition—the Greens, the Social Democrats, and the Free Democrats—are not performing well. No major party has given any indication of being willing to include the AfD in a coalition. That makes it very unlikely that the AfD will gain power at the federal level. But its strength in local and regional elections is eroding the firewall that Germany’s political center has tried to build between itself and the far right.

[David Frum: Can Germany resist the Trump disease?]

To make things worse, a new nationalist left-wing party just launched by the charismatic politician Sahra Wagenknecht echoes some of the AfD’s positions on Russia. In the past, the Kremlin has also targeted Germany’s far left with hopes of establishing an anti-war coalition between the far left and the far right. Wagenknecht’s party may draw votes away from the AfD, but even if it succeeds in doing so, the presence of two populist antiestablishment and pro-Russian parties threatens to further destabilize the political center.   

By backing the AfD and other extreme actors in German politics, Putin is betting not only on diminishing support for Ukraine in Germany, but also on European and American fatigue with the war effort. As major elections approach in Western countries in 2024 and 2025, Russian interference and disinformation efforts are bound to increase. Its support for far-right groups in the West is not just about weakening democratic societies; it is part of a geopolitical strategy. At a time when the world faces political turmoil on several fronts, the success of Putin’s tactics will be decided at ballot boxes across Europe and in the United States.

The peaceful protests come as the battle for Avdiivka sees Ukraine's defenders hold off attacks by thousands of Russians.

Peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.  

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.   

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.    

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.  

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.  

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.  

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.  

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”   

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.  

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.   

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.   

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

This summer I spent several days in Israel talking with people who were afraid for their country’s future. They were not, at that moment, focused on terrorism, Gaza, or Hamas. They feared something different: the emergence of an undemocratic Israel, a de facto autocracy. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his justice minister had announced a package of judicial “reforms” that, taken together, would have given their coalition government the power to alter Israeli legal institutions to their own political benefit. Their motives were mixed. Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, was eager to stay out of jail. Some of his coalition partners wanted courts to stop hampering their plans to create new Israeli settlements on the West Bank, others to maintain military exemptions for Orthodox religious communities. All of them were interested in doing whatever it would take to stay in power, without the hindrance of an independent judiciary.

In response, Israelis created a mass movement capable of organizing long marches and enormous weekly protests, every Saturday night, in cities and towns across the country. Unlike similar protest movements in other countries, this one did not peter out. Thanks to the financial and logistical support of the Israeli tech industry, the most dynamic economic sector in the country, as well as to organized teams of people coming from academia and the army reserves, the protests kept going for many months and successfully blocked some of the proposed legal changes. I was trying to understand why these Israeli protests had succeeded, and so I met tech-industry executives, army reservists, students, and one famous particle physicist, all of whom had participated in organizing and sustaining the demonstrations.

After the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel earlier this month, I listened again to the tapes of those conversations. In almost every one of them, there was a warning note that I didn’t pay enough attention to at the time. When I asked people why they had sacrificed their time to join a protest movement, they told me it was because they feared Israel could become not just undemocratic but unrecognizable, unwelcoming to them and their families. But they also talked about a deeper fear: that Israel could cease to exist at all. The deep, angry divides in Israeli politics—divides that are religious and cultural, but that were also deliberately created by Netanyahu and his extremist allies for their political and personal benefit—weren’t just a problem for some liberal or secular Israelis. The people I met believed the polarization of Israel was an existential risk for everybody.

[Read: There are no rules]

This is certainly what Michal Tsur was trying to tell me. Tsur is a co-founder and the president of Kaltura, a video cloud platform. She is also one of many entrepreneurs who donated time and money to help organize the protest campaign. Back in January, when Netanyahu’s justice minister first proposed changes to the powers of the Supreme Court, to the system of appointing judges, and to rules obliging government ministers to listen to legal advice, Tsur and her colleagues began talking about their industry and the open, networked, mobile society it needs to thrive. They believed Netanyahu’s judicial changes would crush that society, persuading many talented people to plan their futures elsewhere. Tsur told me that she had felt for a long time that Israel was on a slippery slope, that people had not understood how vulnerable the country’s institutions could become. Israel doesn’t have a written constitution. Its political system works according to informal norms as well as formal law, and Netanyahu has spent years attacking these norms. “It feels as if the country is at real risk,” Tsur told me. “Looking at Israel, if these trends do not turn, I either think Israel won’t exist in 20 or 30 years, or else it will definitely not exist in its current form.” She worried that the kinds of people whose time and energy are necessary for Israel’s self-defense would not work on behalf of a religious or nationalist dictatorship. Israel’s citizens’ army functions, she told me, because it can “get really smart people to serve.” Without democracy, she feared that “people will not serve. People will leave.”

She was not exaggerating: “We will not serve” was one of the threats made by Brothers in Arms, the Israeli reservists who also came together to fight Netanyahu’s assault on the Israeli judiciary. Ron Scherf, one of the group’s founders—also a veteran of one of Israel’s most elite special-forces units—told me that he and his fellow veterans had started the group because “the government is breaking the basic contract, the unwritten contract between itself and the soldiers.” If someone is going to risk his life, he told me, they need to feel a deep connection to the country, that it is their country. Netanyahu was trying to cut that connection, to change what it meant for some people to be Israeli. Scherf couldn’t accept that, and so he and his fellow veterans staged protests in front of the homes of ministers, put banners on bridges and cliffs, even planted Israeli flags in front of the homes of far-right government officials to remind them where their loyalties should lie. Students and academics joined them, and the protests had a snowball effect, convincing others that change was possible. Shikma Bressler, a particle physicist who became one of the most prominent and outspoken leaders of the protest movement, told me that one important impact of the protests was to convince many protesters that they were not alone: “We really had felt that they controlled the conversation,” she said, referring to Netanyahu’s government. “You could not say a word without literally being attacked all over the place. And all of a sudden, we understood that, you know, the majority of the people in this country want something different.”

The government, and Netanyahu himself, reacted to this challenge in the way that all autocratic populists react to any challenge: They accused their opponents of disloyalty. They refused to listen. The prime minister and his supporters slowed down the judicial overhaul, passing one element and tabling the rest, but persisted in polarizing the country, even when they were warned that doing so was dangerous. The links that some members of the protest movement had to the military seemed to fuel the government’s suspicions of the people who were most responsible for national security. Earlier this year, the head of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence service, warned that Israeli settlers who were attacking West Bank Palestinians posed a security threat to the country. One member of parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud party responded using language that will sound familiar to Americans: “The ideology of the left has reached the top echelons of the Shin Bet. The deep state has infiltrated the leadership of the Shin Bet and the IDF”—the Israel Defense Forces.

And that rhetoric was typical: In order to pass his judicial program, Netanyahu and his government attacked the judges, the courts, the independent media, the civil service, the universities, and eventually even the protesting army reservists and the military leaders who warned that the division of the country was creating a grave security risk. They attacked the people who were protesting with thousands of national flags, at times calling them “traitors.” This long, drawn-out public battle damaged Israel’s sense of national unity, that mystical but essential element of national security. It created distrust inside the system. It also gave the government an excuse to make the protection of West Bank settlers a military priority, to sideline the Palestinian authority, and to ignore anyone who objected. It may even have been one of the reasons Hamas dared to launch its attack. As Jesse Ferris of the Israel Democracy Institute told me, “The single-minded focus on the judicial overhaul created deep and visible divisions within Israeli society that projected weakness, which tempted aggression.” Last week, the Israeli education minister, Yoav Kisch of Likud, seemed to acknowledge publicly that this division, although it was fostered and promoted by his government, was a mistake. “We were busy with nonsense. We’d forgotten where we live,” he told an Israeli website.

[Keren Yarhi-Milo and Tim Naftali: The lessons Israel failed to learn from the Yom Kippur War]

In one sense, the protesters’ fears proved unjustified: After October 7, Israel’s divided society instantly unified. Netanyahu had not yet succeeded in changing the nature of the country; Israel is still able to inspire the loyalty of its citizens and of the reservists, who went back to their units. Someone described the current moment to me not just as full mobilization but as “150 percent mobilization,” because even those who were not called up are asking if they can join. One opposition party’s leader, Benny Gantz, agreed to take part in an emergency war cabinet, partly to contribute his experience—he is a retired general and former defense minister—and also to help bridge the divide.

But anger at the Netanyahu government remains—80 percent of Israelis say they want Netanyahu to take responsibility for the attack—especially because the intelligence and security failure on October 7 has since been compounded by a failure of the state to cope with the aftermath. Some members of Brothers in Arms, now expanded to Brothers and Sisters in Arms, who are too old to fight or otherwise ineligible have spent the days since the attack volunteering in the Israeli border communities most badly affected, helping to feed and evacuate people. Within hours, they had set up computer systems to keep track of who was missing, sourced supplies for civilians, and gone to places that had been bombarded to pull out survivors. In Israel, the instinct to protest for democracy on the one hand, and the desire to volunteer in order to make up for the state’s failures on the other, are both coming from the same source: anger at a political class that shunned expertise, thrived on polarization, and threw suspicion on all kinds of state institutions and then neglected them.

There is a lesson here for Americans: We need to look hard at what happened in Israel, and start asking which security risks are posed by the scorn that American far-right politicians and propagandists now pour on the American military, the FBI, and of course the federal government as a whole. They have already weakened public trust and, if Donald Trump becomes president again, they may deliberately set out to weaken the institutions themselves: Preparation to replace civil servants has already begun. The impact of their campaign to undermine Americans’ faith in American democracy has already been felt, and its security implications are already evident. To take just one example, online disinformation campaigns of the sort the Russians ran in the 2016 election work best on polarized societies, where levels of distrust are especially high.

The lesson for Israel is similar, only in the past tense: An autocratic populist party, in alignment with extremists, created the present crisis. Netanyahu’s political choices, including the decision to divide the country, as well as the decision to pretend regional peace could be achieved without the Palestinians, have created a world in which Israel has only bad options. Any response that allows Hamas to keep ruling Gaza could encourage more terrorist violence in the future; at the same time, a horrific ground war in Gaza will kill many Israelis and many more Palestinians, probably creating more anger, feeding more grievance, and maybe inspiring more terrorism in the future too.

We are too far from a solution right now to even imagine what that might look like. I can only offer this imprecise thought: Someday, Israelis and Palestinians have to find some way to live next to each other, both relatively prosperous and relatively free, in states that they feel at home in. A unified Israel will find it very difficult to ever reach that solution. A divided Israel never will.

The Gulf country negotiated a mechanism to return Ukrainian children taken by Russians to their families.

The “rules-based world order” is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago.

Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria.  

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them.

In Ukraine, Russia has once again used artillery, cruise missiles, and drones, including Iranian drones, to hit an even wider range of civilian targets: houses, apartment buildings, churches, restaurants, ports, grain silos. Just last week, Russian missiles hit a shop and café in the small village of Horza, killing more than 50 people. This kind of strike had no conventional military justification. The point is to create pain, cause civilian deaths, and sow disruption—nothing else. Russian propagandists praise the destruction and call for more: “We should wait for the right moment and cause a migration crisis for Europe with a new influx of Ukrainians,” one of them told a television talk show.

Hamas is not a sovereign state, but it has the full backing of Iran, a sovereign state, and funding from Qatar, a sovereign state. Since 2006, Hamas has also been the de facto ruling party in Gaza, a self-governing territory since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. Nevertheless Hamas does not see itself as part of any kind of order. On Saturday, Hamas launched what appears to have been a well-planned, well-organized attack, designed to spread civilian terror and create chaos. Hamas deployed missiles and drones, including kamikaze drones of the kind used now in Russia and Ukraine, as well as teams of men with guns. Although they hit a few military outposts, they also murdered more than 200 people at a music festival, chased down children and the elderly, and in some towns went from house to house looking for people to murder. They abducted young women, beat them unconscious, and dragged them across the border, a war crime that is as old as Homer’s Iliad.

The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have—and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.

To explain why one permanent member of the UN Security Council and one quasi-state have adopted this kind of behavior, it is best to start with the nature of their own totalitarian regimes. But there is plenty more blame to go around, because the rules-based order, always pretty tenuous, has actually been dying for a long time. Autocracies, led by China, have been seeking to undermine or remove language about human rights and the rule of law from international forums for years, replacing it with the language of “sovereignty.” Not that this is just a matter of language: The Chinese have carried out atrocities against their Uyghur minority for years, so far with impunity, and openly conducted a successful assault on the rights of the population of Hong Kong. They, and others, have also indulged in deliberately provocative behavior, designed to mock the rule of law outside their own borders. Belarus got away with forcing an Irish-owned airplane to land in Minsk and then kidnapping one of its citizens who was onboard. Russia has organized murders of its citizens in London, Washington, and Berlin.

Democracies, led by the United States, bear a lot of the blame too, either for refusing to enforce anything resembling order when they could, or for violating the rules themselves. George W. Bush condoned interrogation black sites and torture during the War on Terror. Barack Obama accused the Syrians of using chemical weapons, then failed to do anything to stop them. Donald Trump went out of his way to pardon American war criminals and continues to advocate extrajudicial murders, among other things implying that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has notably indulged the most extreme voices in Israeli politics, including political figures who explicitly seek to undermine Israel’s independent judiciary and Israeli rule of law, and parties whose members openly advocate for the mass expulsion of Arabs from the country. One member of his own party, Likud, repeated that same call on Sunday.

By pointing this out, or by noting that the Israelis have also killed Palestinian civilians with impunity and will now do so again, I am not excusing what happened on Saturday, just describing Israel’s contribution to the deterioration of whatever norms remain. Add to that a United Nations that now seems preprogrammed to appoint weak leaders and a European Union that still doesn’t have a clear security policy, and you begin to see the bigger picture: We are heading into an era when there is no order, rules-based or otherwise, at all.  

During its lifetime, the aspirational rules-based world order and the international community that supported it were frequently mocked, and rightly so. The crocodile tears of the statesmen who expressed “profound concern” when their unenforced rules were broken were often unbearable. Their hypocrisy, as they opined on distant conflicts, was intolerable. On Saturday, Russia’s deputy defense minister parodied this kind of talk when he called for “peace” between Israel and Hamas based on “recognized agreements,” as if Russia accepted any “recognized agreements” as a basis for “peace” in Ukraine.

But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.  

The United States is finally getting around to supplying Ukraine with some of the long-range weaponry that the Ukrainians have been requesting for months. For far too long, Ukraine’s Western allies have largely been arming that country to fight a caricature of modern war, not the real thing.  

The results of that decision are evident on maps that, more than 500 days after Russia’s invasion, show only small, incremental changes in the front line. The Ukrainians started a much anticipated counteroffensive almost four months ago and have pushed the Russians back in a few places in the Zaporizhzhia region but have not achieved a full-scale armored breakthrough. By contrast, Ukrainian missile strikes behind enemy lines have produced noteworthy successes in recent months—most notably in forcing Russia to withdraw major elements of the Black Sea Fleet from its base in the port of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea.

When Russia prepared to invade Ukraine in February 2022, many military analysts imagined tank-led columns advancing rapidly and overwhelming the Ukrainian army—a vision of war that has continued to shape Western policy now that Ukraine is trying to reclaim territory. The U.S. and other NATO countries have provided armored vehicles and combined-arms-warfare training, mainly to help Ukraine make direct attacks on Russian front lines. But making a decisive breakthrough at the front, always difficult, has become extremely challenging. The Russians, for their part, spent five months attacking the small Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, taking a tiny parcel of ground at an enormous cost in casualties. Defensive weaponry has made even the best tanks and vehicles vulnerable to damage from a variety of cheaper, more numerous types of equipment. If vehicles mass together in preparation for an attack, they can be destroyed or at least slowed down in many different ways—with mines, artillery, handheld rocket launchers, or, in more and more cases, drones.

[Daniel Block: The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet]

The one successful breakthrough exploitation of the past 16 months happened when Ukraine was able to attack a very lightly defended part of the Russian line in the Kharkiv region. This underscores how forward advance is possible only if Ukraine can identify weak points—or create them by striking military installations and logistics deep behind the front, so that Russia cannot move personnel, weaponry, and supplies to the front. This is why Ukrainian officials have been so insistent on obtaining the U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS (pronounced “attack-ems”). This ammunition, which can be fired from the vehicle-mounted High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, has a much longer range—up to about 190 miles—than conventional artillery and even the Western-supplied Multiple Launch Rocket System that Ukrainian forces used to great effect in the first year of the war. Unfortunately, the U.S. has offered Ukraine only a limited diet of long-range weapons. As I argued earlier this year, the West’s approach to military aid was preparing Ukrainian forces to fight the hardest possible campaign.

Only when the United Kingdom supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which typically are fired from aircraft and have a range of more than 150 miles, and France followed with SCALP missiles (its version of the same weapons system) could Ukraine begin hitting high-value targets—bridges, supply depots, anti-aircraft systems—deep in Russian-occupied areas, including Crimea. The most consequential attacks have been on the Russian navy base in Sevastopol. Using just a handful of the British and French missiles, the Ukrainians have destroyed two major Russian warships, including a new Kilo-class submarine that the Russians have used to fire on Ukraine, and seriously damaged the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet itself. Yet the U.K. and France have a modest supply of the missiles. Ukraine has already fired approximately 100 of them, by some estimates, and needs to be very particular about when and where it uses any others.

In retrospect, Russia’s most successful campaign of the war has been what could be called its “great escalation bluff.” Perhaps because the Russians realize how vulnerable they are to long-range fire, they have always implied that giving Ukraine greater reach could lead to a broadening of hostilities, even a nuclear response. As the muted reaction to the attacks on Sevastopol in September has shown, this rhetoric was empty—a desperate ploy to dissuade the West from properly arming Ukraine.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The West must give Ukraine the weapons it needs to win]

That this ploy succeeded is a shame, and Western nations should stop falling for it.

Although Ukraine will now get ATACMS ammunition, the system—along with the F-16 fighters that Ukrainian pilots will likely be flying sometime in the first half of 2024—will arrive too late for the summer counteroffensive. Having missed a major opportunity to help Ukraine make more significant advances, the Biden administration should not make the same mistake again. The U.S. has many other potentially useful kinds of equipment in stock, such as the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, which is relatively difficult for enemy forces to detect. The U.S. has thousands of early-generation JASSMs in stock and should provide them if requested. Germany has the well-designed Taurus missile system. Taken together, all of these weapons would have given Ukraine a formidable arsenal to take apart Russia’s entire logistics system in occupied territory in Ukraine, devastate the Sevastopol base, and isolate Crimea as a supply route. That would have weakened the Russians at the front far more than any direct assaults at prepared positions with armored vehicles.

Helping Ukraine win the war as quickly as possible is imperative. It’s also the best way to limit future destruction and casualties. Yet the combination of Russian nuclear threats and the West’s outdated visions of major tank breakthroughs has put Ukraine in a difficult position. Because frontal assaults are so dangerous and vehicles are so vulnerable to attack, the Ukrainians have been proceeding on foot, undertaking an infantry-based campaign that could continue all autumn and even into the winter. The more that Western allies prioritize long-range weapons, the more Ukraine can wear down Russian resistance and take back its own territory.