William Kristol and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark: All around us, there are indications—I’m tempted, in honor of Passover next week, to call them signs and portents—of a new era.
Last night, Israel responded to Iran’s attack of a few days ago by striking Iran. What for decades has been a proxy war is now a more direct conflict between two Middle East powers. Coming in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, it would seem to be a new moment in the Middle East. One in which the United States is very much involved.
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In 2012, President Barack Obama mocked Republican candidate Mitt Romney for warning about the geopolitical threat of Putin’s Russia: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
It turns out that we’re living in a world far closer to that of the Cold-War 1980s than to the world President Obama chose to imagine we inhabited in 2012.
But the situation that the current moment really resembles, though, isn’t so much the 1980s as 1948—the beginning of the Cold War, the beginning of a new and unanticipated era of foreign policy challenges and confrontations for the United States.
More here.
