The first few days of the Allied war with Iran have put the depth and breadth of the West’s crisis on display. There are open criminals, like Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who has added a direct betrayal of his NATO ally, the United States, to his barely disguised antisemitism. There are the fools, like British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who insinuate that the war is illegal without having the courage to say so directly. Finally, there are the well-meaning non-entities like German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who provide America and Israel with verbal support, but struggle to gather up the will to do much more.
The West, as a functioning force, consists of precisely three countries at present. The U.S. and Israel, who are fighting Iran, and Ukraine, who is fighting Russia. Every other supposedly Western country contributes little to the collective security of the West, and a few nothing at all. This means that the world crisis will continue to worsen.
Sánchez’s statements are the starkest demonstration of the crisis at hand. On June 26 last year, he described Israel’s war of self-defense in Gaza as “a catastrophic situation of genocide,” at once grossly libeling Israel and traducing the memory of victims of real genocides, including the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
On the very first day of the current war, Sánchez publicly rejected America’s and Israel’s pre-emptive attack on Iran, even though it is essential to Western security, including Spain’s. Within a couple of days, it became known that the U.S. has had to withdraw aerial refueling tankers from Spain, because Sánchez denied America even the use of support aircraft from Spanish soil. This action directly undermines America’s war effort, and is especially repugnant given that American forces have been based in Spain for more than 72 years.
As the days pass, Sánchez’s statements grow more deranged. On March 4, he accused America, not the Iranian regime, of playing “Russian roulette with the destiny of millions.” This was said by a man whose Socialist party is in a minority coalition with the left-wing extremists of Sumar, a party that called America’s capture of Nicolás Maduro “imperialist piracy.” In substance, the current government of Spain is no less repulsive and no less criminal in its attitudes than the Communist regimes of the former Eastern bloc, yet unlike them, it benefits from membership of both the European Union and NATO.
Spain should be alone in its repulsive behavior, but it is not. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is currently the second most popular prospective Democratic nominee for president, called the war both illegal and dangerous on its first day, and now says not only that America has no choice but to reconsider military support for Israel, but also that Israel is “sort of an apartheid state.”
Of course, the governor is saying all this while promoting his memoir, published at age 58. One is left to wonder just how far will America’s internal problems deepen if this moral bankrupt is elected president in 2028?
The ridiculously false premise that the war is illegal, because America’s involvement has not been approved either by the United Nations (UN) or the U.S. Congress, deserves to be quickly dismissed. The UN has been a dysfunctional and immoral organization from the moment of its founding, because it gave the mass murderer Joseph Stalin a veto in its Security Council.
Furthermore, it gives any regime, no matter how criminal or deranged, a vote in its General Assembly. America and Iran both have an equal right to vote in the Assembly, which is equivalent to giving a policeman and a known rapist the same voting rights. The UN has no capacity to convey legitimacy, let alone legality or moral authority. Its five current permanent members of the Security Council count among themselves the vicious dictatorships of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, two utterly lawless regimes.
As for the Congress, it has failed to respond to Iranian acts of war against the United States ever since the regime seized the American embassy on November 4, 1979, and took more than 50 hostages. The 96th Congress, then sitting, feebly called upon the Security Council to “take all necessary measures.”
The Senate of the 119th Congress has just rejected a resolution to “direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities” by a majority of a mere six votes. Congress has had 47 years to declare war on the Iranian regime; instead, it can barely avoid passing what is substantively a demand to surrender to Iran. Like the UN, Congress has long been structurally incapable of discharging its responsibilities. If it had been, the Iranian regime would never have grown into a catastrophic threat.
This is why Sir Keir Starmer’s insistence that it is in Britain’s national interest to seek a negotiated settlement with Iran, instead of taking offensive action against Iran, is beneath all contempt. No settlement with Iran’s regime was ever possible, and this should have been clear as long ago as June 2003, when Labour’s Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, declared that British policy was one of “constructive and conditional engagement with the government of Iran.”
A great many people who are now dead would have been alive if Britain and other European countries had not insistently pursued this futile and immoral course. Yet, even now, Starmer insists on vapid repetition of that filler phrase, “we need to de-escalate,” which only underlines his incurable idiocy.
Superficially, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz appears to have adopted a more intelligent and honorable position, emphasizing Germany’s shared interest with the U.S. and Israel in “ending this regime’s terror.” Yet, in that same statement, Merz followed with possibly the most banal remark of recent times, that war carries risks.
The chancellor’s problem is that he struggles to gather the willpower to overpower risks, as in the years 2000 to 2004, when he lost a critically important power struggle in his Christian Democratic Union party to the ignoble Angela Merkel.
Now, Mr. Merz went to Washington to express the sympathetic thought that “we are hoping that the Israeli and the American army are doing the right things.” This is much better than any of his peer leaders of Europe’s largest countries, but the Chancellor has still not found the will to effectively counter either the ideologically ossified Social Democrats, or the unpleasant populists of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Until Merz stiffens his back, he will not be able to turn Germany into a force capable of defending freedom in Europe, let alone elsewhere.
The extent of European impotence is difficult to describe in words. The population of the European Union is more than 450 million. That of the United Kingdom is almost 70 million. Taken together, this total of 520 million living in advanced economies far exceeds America’s population of 342 million, let alone Israel’s 10 million. Half a billion Europeans are incapable of contributing anything of substance to America’s and Israel’s fight against Iran.
Britain, which used to be a military power, will send only one Type 45 destroyer, HMS Dragon (D35), not to the Persian Gulf but to Cyprus. Two Royal Navy AW159 Wildcat helicopters will fly to the same island. Apart from this, four more Royal Air Force Typhoons will reinforce a small contingent in Qatar. Britain has gone from ruling a third of the Arabian Peninsula and exerting a decisive influence on much of the Gulf to being an irrelevant minor power.
The irrelevance not only of Britain, but of all of Europe, means it is essential to finish off the Iranian regime, once and for all. Europe will not suddenly recover the capacity to act; at best, it will take many years and great shocks for a recovery of some kind to occur.
Therefore, America and Israel cannot look forward to effective European assistance at any reasonably proximate future time. Worse than this, it is overwhelmingly probable that China and Russia, and other dictatorships, will aid the recovery of Iran’s regime, if it survives. Their common interest in further weakening a barely functional West is overwhelmingly obvious.
U.S. President Donald Trump will continue to be highly imperfect and will presumably continue to insist, as he did again on March 5, that Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine needs to “get on the ball,” has “got even less cards,” and must make concessions to Russian aggression. This indisputably weakens the West, but not nearly as much as Europe’s inability to even attempt to defend itself and its fellow democracies actively and effectively.
In these circumstances, the war against Iran must be carried through to its conclusion, to the complete and total destruction of Iran’s capacity to attack its neighbors, including shipping in the Gulf, and to the point that the Iranian regime becomes incapable of controlling the country. This task will become easier by the day, as Iran’s military cannot cope with Allied military pressure. Already, Israel’s main airport has begun to reopen, and the State Department has begun charter flights to carry Americans home.
As the ability of the vicious Iranian regime to terrorize the Middle East weakens, there will be a great temptation, no doubt reinforced by much supposedly informed press opinion, to bring the war to a close by means of some token declaration of victory. That would be a quick road to catastrophe. It took America decades to reach the decision to go to war, and coming back to fight again would be immensely politically difficult, perhaps impossible. The theocratic regime would reorganize, rearm, and quite possibly produce nuclear weapons. Therefore, the war must continue and intensify until the regime is permanently, irrevocably crushed.
- Dan Zamansky is a British-Israeli independent historian and author of The New World Crisis, a Substack analyzing the problems of today.