The West must remember how to fight. It may already be too late

Welsh Guards platoon live firing training at Sennybridge Training Area, Wales, United Kingdom

One of the good things about being a citizen of the West is that, since the last world war ended in 1945, most men’s survival has not been imperilled by the need to go and fight in massive wars.

We do not have to kiss goodbye to tens or hundreds of thousands of beloved sons, friends, fathers or brothers. We have a professional army, are accustomed to relatively small casualty numbers when that army does go into combat, and, bar periodic terror attacks, we are generally able to get on with the business of living miserably or prosperously – but living.

Less lovely is the corollary of this comfort: the moral decrepitude and cowardice that has sunk deep into our psyches. We are too narcissistic and bored, too cossetted and ill-focussed to be collectively courageous – or warlike. This has been devastating for the trajectory of the whole world in general and catastrophic for the safety, security and prosperity of the West.

How did we get to this perilous pass? The answer is that we have spent the past decades focussing on made-up threats and burying our heads in the sand. We have elected leaders, and created political, policy and educational elites, who have wilfully pretended that the real threats – Islamists, global jihadi movements, their regime funders in Iran and the unvetted influx to Europe of migrants from countries steeped in their evil ethos – are just the fever dreams of a racist and backward fringe.

In so doing, we have picked apart the rationale of robust defence – which sometimes involves the need to attack; and to die in doing so. By discrediting Western interventionism and military might, we have not made the world a nicer, cosier, more just place. We have merely given a green light to monsters happy to die if it means killing more of us.

And so as Israel enters yet another month of bombardment from terror groups on all sides, with a dwindling number of hostages still alive in Gaza and anti-Semitic displays getting bolder every day in Britain and the US, I find that my patience is at an all-time low for the faux-astonishment and passive consternation at the prospect of Iran, a rogue state on the brink of being a nuclear power, directly attacking Israel.

Israel, after all, is one of the few countries left in the civilised world – a member of that tiny number that includes Ukraine – that still understands the devastating but necessary calculus of military power. The chain of events that would follow any assault by Tehran would begin with a sturdy and (one expects) devastating military response.

At times like these, we don’t need proclamations of dismay from our leaders. We need action. The hour is already advanced. And still, the fast-dwindling powers of the West do nothing. With Iran, Obama seemed to work as hard as he could to keep his head in the sand, pretending that his laughable “deal” would somehow change Iran’s spots and convince it to put on hold its ambitions to be the most evilly powerful regime in the world. Trump cut off the bargain, and while Biden tried to keep it on life support, it now appears to be dead.

That hasn’t stopped the White House freeing up billions of dollars that Iran has been able to use to fund its nuclear programme and its proxies, including Hamas. Leaked documents this week appear to show how Tehran sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the group from 2014. Meanwhile, Britain’s response to the Iranian threat has been lily-livered. We have refused to cut off diplomatic relations with Tehran, and more bewilderingly refuse to proscribe its Revolutionary Guard as a terror group for fear of provoking the regime. This is despite threats to Iranians on British soil.

The US and the UK have let Iran’s proxies get away with violence for decades, but since October 7, there have been direct hits with the Houthis’ bombardment of our shipping vessels in the Red Sea. And instead of roaring with rage, we prefer to turn the other cheek.

We seem to have done our best to defang our military, whittling down the appeal of our armed forces so that even many of those who do apply end up giving up before even getting to basic training because recruitment is so rife with delays. We have the smallest number of combat personnel in modern history, and the focus in the armed forces, as elsewhere, seems to be as much on “diversity” tick-boxing as on preparing for war or offering credible deterrence.

All of this, and the mindset that has allowed it to happen, has helped embolden Putin and Xi Jinping, and literally helped to arm Iran – with Israel paying the awful price.

Yet, instead of thanking and helping Jerusalem as it takes on the ogre of the Middle East, we snipe at it, lecture it and threaten it – sinking low enough to moot cutting off arms sales in its hour of need.

Will we wake up in time? We need to relearn the vital importance of the West’s role – and particularly that of the Anglosphere – in maintaining the balance of power that keeps us from global reversion to bloodthirsty servitude, religious mania and authoritarianism. Our leaders must stop misleading platitudes about fighting racism and Islamophobia and get real, acknowledging that it’s partly our fault that Iran, Afghanistan and Russia have become what they have – and that it’s in our gift to stave off the threat posed by their regimes.

But to do that, we’d actually have to remember what war is for, and the sacrifice it requires. We would have to be willing to send some to die for the sake of good against evil, right against wrong, the West against horror and despotism. We would have to be willing to kill for that too. Those of us who lack physical courage need the courage of our convictions – and at the moment many of those convictions are deeply and terrifyingly wrong.

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