The steady, predictable conflict that is Israel's demolition of Gaza (hardly a "world on fire")

This is happening because nobody is particularly compelled to stop it

Israel was attacked on 7 October with the same sort of surprise/non-surprise that marked Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack of 7 December 1941. The fight was already there and so the surprise was only for those not paying attention.

And yet, the shock was real — not in terms of the decision per se but in terms of the all-in, go-for-broke nature of the attack. Japan, in its militaristic arrogance, was betting on a proportional response from the United States (the fabled punch-in-the-nose logic often applied to decadent democracies). Too many of their leaders assumed Japan could —following this crippling attack — withstand the modest blowback because the US would — in such defeatist signaling — indicate some recognition and thus grudging acceptance of Japan’s de facto East Asian empire.

The Japanese were totally wrong about how a democracy like the US responds to such things. Instead of proportionality, we went on a crusade to forever eliminate Japan as a strategic threat (to its and the world’s great benefit). In terms of casualties, we inflicted far more than we suffered in either the initial strikes or the losses we took over the long haul.

Ditto on destruction. Japan developed cool shallow-swimming underwater torpedos and took out some battleships; we developed atomic weapons and took out two entire cities.

That sort of instinctive response similarly marked our reaction to 9/11. Denied a clear state-based enemy, we nonetheless took down two hostile regimes — proportionality be damned yet again. We proclaimed a WWIII-lite: the Global War on Terrorism.

The world stood by as we did this and our allies stepped up. Seven years later, we had worn ourselves out mentally, and so the great withdrawal began and we swore off such behavior for the foreseeable future (much like after Vietnam), preferring to re-engage our Cold War past, this time with China + Russia. Why? It’s what we know and it’s strategically comforting.

America, however, remains one good terror strike away from re-engaging in all the same GWOT behavior — do not forget that.