All wars teach lessons. The war that began with the murderous assault on southern Israel by the governing organization of Gaza, Hamas, on October 7, 2023, and ended – at least for now — on June 22, 2025 with the American bombing of three major parts of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, demonstrates the importance of five basic features of political life.
1. Military power matters. It has become fashionable in the United States and Western Europe to stress the importance of what is called “soft power” – that is, the capacity of a country’s culture to persuade others to comply with its wishes. As it happens, the term itself misleads: culture is indeed powerful but it is not a form of power in the sense that it can be wielded to achieve specific foreign policy goals. The significance of the term’s popularity lies in the implication it conveys that in the twenty-first century the use of force has become less important, or even unimportant.
The war in the Middle East proved that proposition wrong. Over twenty months, the precisely calibrated and devastatingly effective use of land and air power by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) saved the State of Israel from a mortal threat, transformed the balance of power in the Middle East, and created diplomatic possibilities that would not have come into existence without it. War – known to the proponents of soft power as “hard power” — showed itself to be a supremely useful instrument of foreign policy.
2. Military strategy matters. Israel’s feats of arms will no doubt be studied, and appreciated, for as long as any human society takes an interest in war, which is likely to be a very long time indeed. A shift in the country’s basic approach to its enemies opened the way for its military accomplishments.
Its enemies apparently believed that Israel would not do what in fact it did. Hamas assumed that Israeli army would not dare to conduct a full-scale war in Gaza, a belief that rested on a series of related assumptions: that the Israeli public would not accept the level of casualties that an invasion of Gaza would cause; that casualties would be unacceptably high because the Israeli armed forces would not be able to find military solutions to the combination of fortifications and hit-and-run tactics that Hamas would employ; and that even if domestic pressures failed to restrain the IDF, international pressures would do so, since Hamas had configured its bases and weapons to ensure that Israel’s attacks on them would cause civilian casualties.
Similarly, Hizbullah assumed that its fleet of missiles aimed at Israel would deter an IDF attack on its forces in southern Lebanon, and the ruling mullahs in Tehran did not believe that Israel would engage in a long-range missile war with Iran.
Once Israel discarded its reliance on deterrence and went on the offensive, all these assumptions collapsed under the weight of its military skill.
3. Democracy matters. Israel has a democratic political system that is sometimes deeply divided, perhaps never more so than before in the months leading up to October 7 over the Netanyahu government’s plan for judicial reform. Its adversaries apparently presumed that this division had seriously weakened the country, eroding its capacity to resist their onslaught. In this way, they were following in the footsteps of dictatorships of the past that made similar miscalculations about free societies.
In fact, Israel’s democracy was and is a military asset. Public support for the war was all the stronger because it was not coerced, and the morale of the armed forces was all the higher for that reason. (The deep commitment to Zionism also, of course, played a crucial role here.) Israel’s democratic, open society also produced the military innovations that gave it a large advantage over its enemies.
4. Regime change matters. Neither Israel nor the United States made the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran an explicit goal of its military campaign. Ironically, the one clear case of regime change in the region took place in Syria, which did not take a direct part in the fighting. Regime change has had a bad reputation because of the costly and unsuccessful American expeditions to Iraq and Afghanistan. Those episodes, however, demonstrated not that regime change is a bad thing but rather that it can become costlier, in lives and treasure, than is deemed worthwhile by the people of the country engaging in it.
In fact, only regime change in Iran will reliably guard against a recurrence of the war. Its outcome has given rise to the hope that a negotiated agreement with the still-standing Islamic Republic can put an end to its effort to obtain nuclear weapons. That, however, would require a program of continuing and highly intrusive international inspections of all the relevant facilities involved in the bomb-making process, and this in a country of 90 million people three times the size of France that has already rejected such inspections. The kind of government that would not only tolerate but affirmatively cooperate in such a system of inspections would be the kind of government that would not have as its central goal the annihilation of another country. To put it differently, if the system of inspections that is required to assure the world that Iran is no longer pursuing nuclear weapons were possible, it would not be necessary.
5. Political goals matter. Amid the dramatic and spectacular military events of the Twenty-Month War, the reason that it took place has tended to get lost. It took place because Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran devoted hundreds of billions of dollars over decades for one purpose: the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of its eight million Jewish inhabitants because of their religion. Eight decades after the defeat of Nazi Germany, one of the animating purposes of the Third Reich remains alive and well in the Middle East. Any decent person who does not find that fact uncomfortable is incapable of discomfort.
Nor is that goal confined to the Middle East. The massacre of October 7 evoked enthusiastic support in pockets of the United States, especially on some university campuses. No doubt many of the students involved were ignorant of the basic facts of the conflict on which they had taken the wrong side. The leaders, organizers, funders and spokespersons of the demonstrations, encampments, and harassment of Jewish students, however, knew full well what they were promoting. Now one of them has become the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City.
In the modern era, the appearance of what they were promoting – virulent, murderous anti-semitism – has often served as a harbinger of the erosion, and even the end, of democratic norms and practices. From this it follows that those who have made it their business to worry about the health of American democracy would be well advised to pay less attention to Donald Trump, and more attention to Zohran Mamdani.
