In a great squandering of power, our leaders helped create in 2023 the landscape that President Bush imagined in 2002.
President Joe Biden, center, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, right, and Vice President Kamala Harris, left, speaks Tuesday in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, about the war between Israel and the militant Palestinian group Hamas.Twenty-one years ago, in the shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks, George W. Bush warned of an “axis of evil,” encompassing the authoritarian and anti-American regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
To be clear, we do not know yet whether the Hamas attacks were planned with Iran’s blessing or connivance. But the fact that Iranians have in recent years increased funding and support for Hamas means that the attacks flowed in some way from Iran’s grand strategy — its desire to surround Israel with enemies, to extend its power through allies and proxies and to disrupt the American attempt to mediate a rapprochement between Israel and the Sunni Arab states.
Is this alignment an actual axis? Not necessarily. To be broadly aligned is not to be perfectly in sync, and our three rivals are not enacting an anti-American master plan. Rather, they are behaving as you would expect revisionist powers facing a declining but still potent hegemon — each trying to weaken the hegemon in their respective theaters, each trying to draw benefits from the hegemon’s preoccupation with other crises.
Talk of the nightmare that just unfolded as “Israel’s 9/11” should hammer home this last reality. The original Sept. 11 yielded an American response that was initially proportionate and effective but soon metastasized disastrously. It may not have been the kind of crumpling that Osama bin Laden overconfidently anticipated, but it was corrosive and empire-weakening nonetheless.
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