Just before the 2020 Presidential elections, I published a book—The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America—in which I laid out the deterioration of American foreign policy and what the next administration needed to do to fix it. I argued that we were at risk of stumbling into any number of avoidable wars that could seriously harm our country. Now, four years later, we may be hours or minutes away from making that fateful plunge.
As I write these words, the United States is sending considerable combat power to the Middle East in advance of a retaliatory strike by Iran against Israel. The Israeli government is warning its citizens to prepare bomb shelters and be prepared for major power outages and limited drinking water for an extended period of time. Iran is reportedly in the final stages of preparing an attack.
The perverse irony of this potential clash of titans in the Middle East is that with deft diplomacy and sober thinking, the situation could have been solved below the threshold of combat long ago. Washington and Tel Aviv, however, seem stuck on repeating all the worst of the tendencies I identified in my 2020 book. In one passage, I wrote:
One other thing I can come close to guaranteeing: if America retains our current status quo of foreign policy, if we refuse to end forever-wars, and if we fail to adopt new ways of thinking in how we engage with the world, we will fail.
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