Tag: Military leaders
Netanyahu’s Attack on Democracy Left Israel Unprepared
This summer I spent several days in Israel talking with people who were afraid for their country’s future. They were not, at that moment, focused on terrorism, Gaza, or Hamas. They feared something different: the emergence of an undemocratic Israel, a de facto autocracy. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his justice minister had announced a package of judicial “reforms” that, taken together, would have given their coalition government the power to alter Israeli legal institutions to their own
The Lessons Israel Failed to Learn From the Yom Kippur War
The parallels are blindingly and painfully obvious. A surprise attack against an Israel caught largely unaware; an invading military force; the timing, a holy day in early October; the victims, an unsuspecting population forced to scramble for underground bomb shelters and mobilize for war; the mistakes by an intelligence apparatus that is the envy of the world.
But the surprise attack that took place in Israel this past weekend is arguably worse than the one that launched the Yom
The far right’s victory is not assured
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Most Americans who have heard of the John Birch Society associate it with the political fringe—and rightly so. Founded in 1958 by a small band of anti–New Deal businessmen, the society rejected virtually the entire post–World War II, U.S.-led international order. Birchers urged the United States to
Why the Left Is Learning to Love the Military
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harlem’s Riverside Church to a crowd of thousands that flowed out the door as far as 120th Street. King publicly condemned the Vietnam War because it had “broken and eviscerated” the civil-rights and anti-poverty movements at home. The American government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Read: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War
In 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked another MLK speech while
Petraeus: Our Lack of Commitment in Afghanistan
A year after the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, the outcome of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is heartbreaking and tragic for many Afghans and devastating for their country. The Afghan government that fell, leading to the return of the Taliban, was maddeningly imperfect, full of frustrating shortcomings, and, in various respects, corrupt. Yet it was also an ally in America’s effort to combat Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and the region, it celebrated many of the freedoms we cherish, and
Why Aren’t More Americans Vaccinated?
What will it take? Eighty-year-old Anthony Fauci is on TikTok trying to reach the young and unvaccinated. Dating apps are steering people toward health clinics. The first lady, Jill Biden, is venturing into red America to coax the unwilling into getting shots. White House aides regularly swap messages on an email chain dubbed “Ideas” that flags inventive ways of persuading people to do their part to end the pandemic. On Wednesday, the pop star Olivia Rodrigo made a cameo at