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Events are moving fast. Seven days ago, as I write, Israel had not yet launched its first attacks on targets in Iran. Seven days from now, things may well have changed -- significantly.
In such times, a historian's perspective may be helpful. Fortunately, the two most eminent English-language historians (pace, Tucker Carlson) have weighed in with analysis.
"There are some moments in history," writes Andrew Roberts, author of deeply sourced and bestselling biographies of Winston Churchill, George III and Napoleon, in The Free Press, "when a sudden act of opportune ruthlessness readjusts the world toward a safer path." He cites Francis Drake's fireship attack on the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Winston Churchill's agonizing decision in July 1940 to destroy the French navy lest it fall into the hands of Hitler's Nazis.
Roberts salutes Benjamin Netanyahu for ordering Israel's multipronged and astonishingly sophisticated attacks on the mullah regime in Iran. He contrasts this with Barack Obama's "adamant and repeated refusal to help the Iranian opposition" and his "cringing, appeasing … neither joint … nor comprehensive" 2015 nuclear agreement.
Echoing Netanyahu, he writes that "we should believe the threats of dictators." Donald Trump, he concludes, "should act with Churchillian ruthlessness" and use America's bunker-buster bombs and destroy Iran's as yet untouched Fordow nuclear operation.
Ferguson makes reference to his fellow British historian Niall Ferguson and his "Axis of Ill Will" -- China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Ferguson elaborates on these at much greater length in The Free Press and in an interview last month with Noema magazine editor Nathan Gardels.
There, he advances two propositions disregarded by most American analysts. One is that this Axis has been waging a Cold War II against the United States and its allies since around 2018. The other is that Trump "is a pacifist at heart who prefers trade wars to real wars." That helps account for Secretary of State Marco Rubio's initial insistence that Israel acted on its own last Friday and Trump's statement that gave them a 60-day warning, "and today is day 61."
Ferguson, currently writing the second volume of his authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, puts this in a longer perspective. He rejects Gardels' view that Trump is dismantling what Gardels calls "a liberal international order of free trade and trusted alliances across a unified West."
Instead, America was operating since 1945 as an empire, enlisting Europe as a useful partner on Berlin in 1957-62 and on deploying Pershing missiles in 1979-83 and surviving "a window of great danger" in the Vietnam years by Kissinger's playing off China against Russia. Then, having won Cold War I in 1989-91, we relaxed, hoping Russia and China would move toward democracy.