OPINION:
As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, the fights there and around Israel are not regional struggles for territory, as the shortsighted cognoscenti would have you believe.
The great tragedy is that so many in Europe and on the American right refuse to understand what Russian ruler Vladimir Putin and Iran’s dark-age theocrats are fighting for. These are wars for the soul of the West.
The Kremlin and the mullahs are the font for every totalitarian, Islamofascist, sadist and neo-Nazi dream on the planet. Each of those malevolent forces wants America (and the rest of the West) dead.
As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir warned, if someone tells you that repeatedly, believe him.
Blinded by an incomprehensible ignorance of Russian history, the political far right (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes) regard Mr. Putin — often seen standing next to the patriarch every Orthodox Christmas — as a civilizational warrior combating the woke forces of the hedonistic West.
Unfortunately, the patriarch is more likely than not on the payroll of the secret police, as was his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, who served the same purpose for the Romanovs.
While Mr. Putin mouths pieties about defending the family and Orthodox Christianity, he persecutes and imprisons Baptists, Jews, Catholics and homosexuals, and kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children who will never see their parents or homeland again.
He has unleashed traditional Russian savagery on the civilians of Ukraine; more than 15,000 Ukrainians have been killed since Russia’s invasion. The Daily Telegraph aptly describes the Russian dictator as a “bestial enemy.”
There is a straight line between the Kremlin and the jihadis. Mr. Putin’s Goebbels-like flunkies often referred to Osama bin Laden as a “conservative revolutionist.” As British editorialist Jake Wallis Simons notes, “Putin’s Rasputin,” Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, wrote that there was hope bin Laden’s “values … can still arise.”
As Mr. Simons concludes, this is “jihadism as orthodox cultural conservatism.” Each night, while Ukrainians shelter in their freezing homes and bunkers, Mr. Putin rains down death with hundreds of Shahed drones gifted to him by his Shiite terrorist proxies in Tehran.
Meanwhile, in the past few months, the mullahs have butchered more than 35,000 of their own people — as many as America lost in the Korean War.
History reminds the regime that the shah’s downfall was consummated when the young people left their schools and universities and took to the streets. We have before us the opportunity — thanks to the Israel Defense Forces, President Trump’s decisive action against Iran and the actions of the people of Iran themselves — to finish off this malevolent regime that has been at war with America since 1979.
In Ukraine, Mr. Putin has now reached the point where he can’t replace the casualties at the front. Russia has suffered more than 1.2 million casualties, sacrificing a generation in pointless assaults reminiscent of the Somme and Passchendaele.
When the ground hardens this spring, the Ukrainians will be able to move, and a rout of the Russian army will no longer be unthinkable.
Western malaise has long refused to recognize evil as evil. Europe has wallowed in a pacifist dream, essentially saying, “Let the Americans do it.” Yet with war and cultural jihadism on their doorstep, this is the last warning.
Israelis, Ukrainians and the young people of Iran stand in the breach against the forces of darkness. It is time to do as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did when he told President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
We now have a chance to change history. If we do not, then we will be haunted by Churchill’s last warning that the two most lamentable words in the English language are “too late.”
Then again, the Carlson right does not like Sir Winston either.
• The Honorable Robert Wilkie served as the 10th secretary of veterans affairs and undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness in the first Trump administration.
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