While the public in Israel is looking at what is going on at home – Palestinian terrorist, the political crisis, and Arabs running amok in mixed cities – the international arena is undergoing an upheaval that will affect our own region and the room Israel has to maneuver. These are the shockwaves and aftershocks of the Ukraine war, which is leading western democracies to make new preparations in light of what they have learned about Russian aggression.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
The most notable event in this drama is Finland and Sweden's decision to join NATO. This reflects a fundamental acknowledgement that democracies have to defend themselves like Spartans against those who see their Athenian ways as weakness that is asking for aggression and conquest. There is nothing new in admitting that open societies are vulnerable: the choice of openness reflects a willingness to opt for the flexible resilience of social and political pluralism over barricaded rigidity. But recently, the extent of the authoritarian forces' aggression and audacity have been exposed as they try to bring down these open societies, as has the need to outflank them by patrolled borders to protect the "soft" underbelly of the liberal way of life. In a certain sense, this is a welcome swing away from the "Swedish" western European model to the Israeli model, which combines stringent force against enemies with tolerant openness at home.
This trend calls to mind the "defensive democracy," a lesson learned after the Nazis took control of the Weimar Republic. The main principle is to outlaw elements that spurn the "rules of the game" of democratic regimes to prevent hostile takeovers through these same rules being perverted. This strategy of defense challenges the tendency to reject any limits to pluralism under the argument that the meaning of the term is a lack of limits. The tragic attempt proved the need to outlaw the Nazis in order to preserve German democracy.
The Europeans have recently discovered that two elements that reject pluralism per se – an authoritarian superpower and a patriarchal, aggressive culture – pose a threat to the free, open way of life on the continent. The superpower is Putin's Russia, and the culture is one that is embraced by many of the Arab, Pakistani, Afghan, and other Muslim immigrants who came by the millions and gained a foothold in Europe without trying to integrate into its system of values. This is where, they realized too late, "defensive democracy" is needed against foreign players who come into those democracies.
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
For years, Russia has been waging two kinds of war on open societies: in the cyber sector, which aims to bring down belief in pluralistic society and democratic rule; and a consistent attempt to get Europe hooked on Russian energy. The strategic reality is clear, but most political leaderships and elites opted to delude themselves and deny its ramifications.
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder betrayed his people and western civilization when he opened the door to Russian gas, and as soon as he stepped down received enormous payments from Putin for leading Europe's ongoing capitulation on that matter. The chancellor who came after him and misled her voters by her cautious, responsible image, opened the gates to Europe to over 1 million immigrants, most of whom espouse a culture that endangers the open and pluralistic lifestyle as well as to ever-increasing dependence on Russian gas, which funded Putin's corruption, autocracy, and wars.
It took Europe mass killings, 6 million people who fled their country and another 8 million internally displaced to realize that it was at war. Only now is it willing to forgo the economic advantages (cheap gas and ridiculously low expenditure on defense) and its humanist image in the media and among the irresponsible elite, which took the form of allowing immigrants indiscriminate entry. Only now is Finland realizing that there is no place for neutrality, even armed, even though it helped them against the Nazis.
It's as if in some parallel universe, the Europeans and the Biden administration continue to deny the severity of the Iranian threat, are willing to spend hundreds of billions (in lifted sanctions) to fund Iran's aggression and aspirations of nuclear weapons and regional hegemony in exchange for an absolutely worthless nuclear deal. Let us hope that the wake-up call from radical delusions of reconciliation can come without witnessing a world war.
