The Clausewitz Delusion

Israeli officials are no more enlightened than the rest of the West’s so-called security establishment. They are simply better at surviving the noise. The truth is that the Western world, in its post–World War II form, has never actually won a war against political Islam. Let’s be precise. The West before 1945 did beat Islam, and more than once, in brutal, bloody, and decisive wars. The Reconquista. The destruction of the Barbary pirates. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Those victories came from a West that still believed in the ugly, necessary mechanics of winning. But the West that emerged after 1945 is not that West. This version is defanged, comfort-addicted, obsessed with humanitarian optics, and unable to stomach the hard realities of total war. And this West has not won a single war against political Islam in nearly eighty years.

Without an enemy’s surrender, you have not won. That is a simple truth that the Western mind, in its current condition, cannot grasp. The security establishment cannot stomach the idea of endless conflict, so it manufactures ceremonial endpoints. It declares a war over, announces victory, and rushes back to peacetime routines, even though the enemy is still there, still committed, still fighting. This is the Clausewitz delusion, the belief that wars can be neatly wrapped up with a speech and a treaty, even when the enemy has no intention of stopping.