Day falls

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Rain falls

snow falls

leaves fall

on the ground

gone;

Day falls

like a staple

in the carpet

hidden

sharp

felt

after 

a step.

The Junos

I generally don’t watch award shows. Haven’t for years. Contrary to what they claim, they’re not “best of” honours. They’re high-profile, glitzy promotional events—industry types networking and sizing each other up.

I used to watch the Oscars and Grammys when I was young. When you’re a kid, you’re still figuring out what’s worth caring about. As a teenager, I idolized rock stars. Award shows fed that need for validation, putting the performers I liked up on a pedestal.

Then I grew up. I stopped caring about entertainers, who by then seemed like egomaniacs chasing a buck, and got on with my own way of trying to make one.

It’s been decades since I could identify the latest crop of hitmakers. For me, it ended with hip hop.

Until this year.

My era of music seems to be having a moment, and that’s why I actually watched some of the Junos.

I wanted to hear Joni Mitchell, who—along with Leonard Cohen—is unquestionably the greatest songwriter this country has produced. There’s really no contest. She’s better than Neil Young. Better than Gordon Lightfoot. Even a notch above Cohen, because unlike him, she can sing.

In the end, Joni didn’t have much to say accepting her long-overdue lifetime achievement award. Not surprising, considering she nearly died from a brain aneurysm in 2015, losing the ability to walk or talk, and has been rehabilitating ever since. A lifetime smoker, she did offer one pithy line about it: it was the best thing that ever happened to her she said—it finally made her quit cigarettes.

The most poignant words weren’t hers. They came from Prime Minister Carney, the surprise presenter of her award. He said it’s not just that Joni is a great songwriter, it’s that her sensibility is uniquely Canadian—“geese in chevron flight,”(from Urge For Going) “a little money riding on the Maple Leafs,” (from Raised On Robbery) “a river to skate away on” (from River). In her songs, he said, she “drew a map of Canada” (from A Case of You).

And that’s when it hit me. This Junos felt different. It wasn’t just an awards show—it was a celebration of Canada, at a time when Canadian sovereignty feels under threat. The organizers nailed it.

Even Joni seemed to understand. Thanking the Prime Minister, she said, “We are so fortunate to have him. I’m living in the States, and you know what’s happening there… This man is a blessing. You guys are so fortunate.”

The pièce de résistance was the opener—a surprise performance by Rush, their first live appearance since the death of their legendary drummer Neil Peart in 2020.

And then, yesterday, Céline Dion announced she’ll return to the stage this fall in Paris after an absence of four years due to illness.

Before the show, Carney told reporters the world needs more Canada.

I think Canadians do too.

Beyond Narratives

Human beings are born storytellers. It's in our nature.

We tell stories to make sense of our experience. We tell stories to find reasons. We tell stories to explain. We tell stories to find meaning. We tell stories to connect with each other. We tell stories to amuse and entertain.

The popular writer Noah Yuval Harari describes storytelling as our superpower. It's this ability that fundamentally differentiates homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's allowed us to rise to the top of the survival heap. 

While animals only cooperate with their biological kin or in small packs, our species learned to cooperate with total strangers by telling stories. 

Telling stories has allowed us to collaborate on a mass scale. Pooling our various talents and skills we were able to learn from one another, share with one another, trade with one another and dominate as a species. 

Through stories we created social systems, societies, institutions and civilizations. We created mass market economies, countries, and international organizations.    

I was a storyteller once. Even published short stories and two novels. I wrote book reviews for the newspaper, and gave reviews as public lectures. 

And then it just stopped.

Not only did I lose my desire to write and publish stories. I lost my desire to read them. Up to that point I read about a novel a month. And fiction was all that I read. Then one day - it seemed like it happened overnight - I felt that I never wanted to read another novel again.

I couldn't explain why.   

It happened about ten years ago, so part of me thinks it had to do with donald trump, and his omnipresent brand of post-truth politics. Here for the first time was a politician who somehow defied narrative. 

His political ascendency was both a product of the imagination and made possible by a failure of the imagination. He was a creation of television, more fictional character than real, for years the target of  mockery and scorn, who was somehow becoming a reality to contend with. Many of us could hardly believe it was possible. 

Sometimes that happens. When something so outrageous impinges on normalcy, we fail to acknowledge it, and before we can, it's too late. 

With trump, the reality we were living became stranger than anything fiction could muster. A satire and absurdity worthy of a Simpson's episode. 

No work of fiction could compete with reality anymore. The lie of fiction - noble lies told in the service of art, beauty and truth - became eclipsed by the hollow, ill-intentioned lies and outlandish conspiracies we were hearing every day emanating from the Oval Office.  

What was the point of reading or writing fiction? It had lost the battle. 

I started reading only non-fiction to try to make sense of the world in which we were living. I read books on philosophy, politics, psychology and even physics. As reality became indistinguishable from fiction, I wanted to feel grounded again.

Those books, however, maintain a certain element of narrative, using cause and effect and chronology to analyze and explain the world. 

In recent years, I've gone a step further. 

I've been reading books on Eastern religion and spirituality. You might call these books anti-narratives. They explore the deepest most universal truths of existence by going beyond narrative. They are written with very little narrative structure, usually question and answer format, a guru responding to disciples. 

At root, the message is that narrative obscures truth. The fundamental purpose of narrative, like memory, is the construction of a particular "self", an identity in which one is a protagonist inside one's own story. According to Eastern wisdom this particular self is artificial and therefore false. It must be transcended in order to live fully and truthfully in the present.

Our emotions are not to be denied or avoided, they are not even to be understood or explained, as we do with the narratives we construct. They are simply to be experienced, accepted, and allowed to come and go, without attaching any meaning to them. 

Easier said than done for most of us. In the West we are conditioned to think of ourselves as the central actors in our stories. 

The realization and acknowledgement that each of us has an infinitesimally small part in a grand and complex eternal reality, can itself, be a source of meaning and liberation. And being fully present, in the moment, constitutes the way to live in reality as it truly is.  

A Self-Fulilling Prophesy

I'm indifferent about most countries, with two exceptions: Canada and Israel. I am a strong supporter of both. Canada, because it's where I live—where my ancestors fled persecution and where my family has planted roots for three generations. Israel, because it is the historical, cultural, and spiritual homeland of my people.

I care about Israel the way I care about Canada. I feel a certain responsibility for both, and I don’t always agree with the policies of either government. The difference is that I have a direct say in Canada’s policies, but not in Israel’s.

Treat Canada badly and I get angry. Same with Israel. Canadians recently got a small taste of what Israel has endured for decades: having its very right to exist questioned. I was outraged when trump suggested Canada should be the 51st state, and that our country exists only because of the United States. I realized the challenge to Canada's legitimacy as a country is the same kind of threat Israelis have been living with since 1948.

The difference is that Canada’s “right to exist” isn’t really in question—except in the mind of a delusional megalomaniac—and most people recognize that.

For Israel, the threat is more present and insidious. Questioning its right to exist carries the stench of the world’s oldest and most enduring hatred: anti-Semitism.

But the “right" of a country to exist is not, in itself, a meaningful concept. Human beings have an inherent right to exist; countries do not. Countries are human constructs—formed around shared economic, political, historical, or cultural interests. They come into being, and they pass out of it. In recent decades alone, the Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen states, and Yugoslavia into seven. No one questions their right to exist.

The question of Israel’s “right to exist” is therefore not a legitimate inquiry—it is propaganda. An attempt to delegitimize the country, driven by political hostility and hatred.

I also take issue with the term “Zionist” as it’s used today.

Zionism once had a clear historical and political meaning: the project of establishing a Jewish state in its ancestral homeland. That project was realized in 1948. After that, the term becomes less useful—and, in many contexts, counterproductive.

We don’t describe Italians through the lens of the Risorgimento anymore (the 19th century movement to unify Italy). Italy exists. To keep using the term would sound strange and inappropriate.

Yet we still speak of support for Israel as Zionism. As if the project is unfinished, its legitimacy unresolved. It opens the door to those who wish to question it. It is more accurate—and more normalizing—to speak in terms of Israeli citizens, or support for specific policies, as we would with any other country.

But the hostility Israel's opponents have shown is not just rhetorical. It has taken the form of proxy warfare, terrorism, and a pursuit of nuclear capability.

It is, to say the least, an uncomfortable reality for Israel.

And yet, stepping back to look at the last 50 years, a more complex picture emerges.

Israel has flourished—economically, technologically, and militarily. It has signed peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. It has built one of the most capable militaries in the world, along with layered defense systems like Iron Dome and David’s Sling. It also possesses the ultimate deterrent.

Iran, by contrast, has become increasingly isolated. Sanctions have strained its economy to the point of collapse. It has been labeled a state sponsor of terrorism and remains an international pariah. Internally, the regime has faced growing unrest which it has met with increased repression.

In broad terms, one country has been on the rise; the other, on the ropes.

But if you listened to Benjamin Netanyahu, you might think it was the other way around.

Netanyahu has been warning about an imminent Iranian nuclear threat for more than thirty years. As early as 1992, he suggested Iran was only a few years away from a nuclear weapon. The same warning appeared in his 1995 book. The timeline kept shifting, but the urgency remained.

It never materialized.

Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran’s nuclear program was significantly constrained: enrichment capped at 3.67%, international inspections, strict reporting requirements. These concessions suggest the program functioned, at least in part, as leverage for sanctions relief.

That changed after trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, with Netanyahu's urging. Since then, enrichment has reached 60%—approaching weapons-grade—and international oversight has diminished. What once looked like bargaining leverage now looks more like a hedge for regime survival.

To my mind, Israel was never under an imminent existential threat from Iran. The gap between rhetoric and reality was always considerable.

The war has further exposed the limits of Iran’s actual power, confirming what many suspected—that Iran was paper tiger. Much of its posture appears to have been projection, useful for a regime that relies on external enemies to justify itself.

But projection cuts both ways.

Over time, it can be internalized, shape public opinion and political ideology, turning hypothetical threats into real ones.

And that may be the deeper danger now in both Israel and Iran: that in preparing for the worst version of your enemy, you help bring it into being—a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Death, For Instance

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This is a time of video game wars,

the paradox of everything feeling both 

very close and very far away,

real and surreal, 

all at once: 

Death, for instance, 

which for most of us 

feels very far away,

now arrives from the sky

like a meteor on fire 

and images at light speed 

in your pocket;

And if you look closely

at the pixelated bits

shadows appear where 

people used to be, 

and you can see

the dreams of children

leaving their bodies.

19th Century Thinking and Butterflies

One thing the war with Iran has made clear is that 19th-century political thinking doesn’t work in the 21st century.

Actually, that way of thinking died in 1945. World War II was the last conflict where you could bomb an opponent into submission—and even then, it required devastation on a scale the world has never seen: roughly 75 million dead, including 50 million civilians, and the use of atomic weapons.

Since then, the pattern has been unmistakable. In Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and most recently in Ukraine, overwhelming military superiority has failed to produce decisive victory. Again and again, stronger powers have found themselves bogged down, stalemated, or strategically defeated by weaker adversaries.

The lesson is hard but clear: the capacity to “completely obliterate” an enemy—language used by trump and hegseth—by conventional force no longer translates into strategic victory.

At the same time, when a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world it can dramatically impact the opposite side. In this case the butterfly is a Shahed drone. The other side of the world is the Strait of Hormuz, and the dramatic impact is North American gas prices, food supplies, inflation and even employment.  

The past 75 years of global integration have made countries economically and politically inseparable. What happens in one region now reverberates everywhere. Power today is not just military—it’s systemic.

The paradigm has shifted. There is no returning to spheres of influence or clean geopolitical separation. Efforts at de-globalization—whether through trade barriers or political ruptures like Brexit—run up against a reality that is already too interconnected to unwind without enormous cost, especially to those attempting it.

The global system the United States helped build has become so deeply embedded that even it cannot dismantle it without harming itself. In that context, large-scale war is not just destructive—it is self-sabotage.

And that, ultimately, is the paradoxical good news.

Even the most powerful nations are constrained. “Might makes right” is no longer a workable doctrine. Durable outcomes require negotiation, coordination, and restraint.

Which is why the shortcomings of the United Nations feel so frustrating. Because in a world like this, its role is not optional—it is essential.

The most critical problems are no longer local. Poverty, conflict, and instability in one region spill across borders as migration crises. Disease spreads globally, as the COVID-19 made unmistakably clear. And then there's climate change.

There is no going back, and trump and his accolytes ultimately won't be able to do anything about it.

Wars of Choice

I have too many friends cheering on this war. Mostly supporters of Israel.

I get it. Israel has been in a de facto state of war since its founding—attacked or threatened from all sides. My Israeli friends are tired of being on the defensive. It feels good, for once, to take the initiative. To demonstrate strength.

With Iran, it’s long been a war through proxies—the dirtiest kind of war. So they say: bring it into the open. Get it over with. The regime is vulnerable, the timing is right—do it now, on our terms.

It makes sense—but only if you win.

And in this case, there’s really only one definition of “win”: regime change. Not just any regime change, but one that produces a more moderate government—one willing to abandon the revolutionary project and rejoin the international community.

That’s a lot of “ifs.” A lot has to go perfectly. It's the equivalent of drawing a royal flush from a deck of 52 playing cards. Wars have a way of going sideways—not just sideways, but in every terrible direction at once.

We’re seeing that happen now, in real time.

That’s part of why I never cheer for war, and I’m not cheering for this one.

The first reason is obvious: death and destruction. It’s always the most vulnerable—on both sides—who pay the highest price.

But there are times when war is justified. As a last resort. Which begs the question; how do you know when it’s a last resort?

Self-defense is the clearest case. If you’re attacked, you have no choice but to defend your sovereignty and your people.

Another case is when good-faith diplomacy has been exhausted—when there’s an unbridgeable impasse. War becomes, however tragically, a means of resolving a political dispute.

A preemptive war can sometimes be justified if it is genuinely defensive—if there is a credible, imminent threat.

But “wars of choice” are, by definition, not last resorts. They are elective. And calling them that is often a euphemism for something morally indefensible and legally unjustifiable.

That’s why the claim that the U.S. had to strike Iran preemptively—because of an imminent attack on American assets—matters so much. If that claim is false, then the justification collapses.

Another argument was that Israel was going to act regardless, and the U.S. needed to move first.

But that doesn’t hold.

If Washington was concerned about being targeted, it could have objected and stayed out. If Israel proceeded anyway, the U.S. could have maintained distance. If Iran then chose to respond by striking American targets, a U.S. response would clearly fall under self-defense.

More likely, Iran’s response would have been calibrated—symbolic, as we’ve seen before—precisely to avoid escalation.

That’s not the path that was taken. The U.S. chose to go to war.

That decision is not equivalent to Israel’s. If the goal was to support Israel, there were many ways to do so that did not involve sending bombers.

The Crossroads

No, Vladimir Putin does not have kompromat on trump. That’s not why trump consistently sides with him.

The explanation is much simpler: Trump idolizes Putin. He wants to be him.

Putin represents a kind of power trump has always admired—personal, unconstrained, untouchable. By many accounts, Putin is also extraordinarily wealthy, perhaps the richest man in the world. Trump has always been driven by that same obsession with wealth and status. Over the past decade, it’s become increasingly clear that Putin is not just a counterpart in trump’s mind, not just a model, but someone who provides trump with narcissistic supply, a drug trump needs to feel good about himself. It's that powerful.

In February 2022, just over four years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The expectation in Moscow was clear: Kyiv would fall in days, Zelensky would flee, and the Ukrainian government would collapse.

It didn’t happen.

Instead, the war dragged on. Ukraine defended itself with remarkable resilience. Zelensky emerged as one of the defining leaders of this moment. And Russia paid a staggering price in lives and resources, by some estimates an astounding 7,000 to 8,000 casualties per week.

How did Putin get it so wrong?

The answer is simple. He was working with a distorted version of reality.

Putin surrounded himself with loyalists who told him what he wanted to hear. They painted a picture that confirmed his assumptions and filtered out inconvenient truths. That is the Achilles’ heel of authoritarian systems. We saw it with Joseph Stalin. We saw it with Adolf Hitler. Over time, reality stops reaching the top.

Something similar—though not identical—is happening with trump.

He, too, has surrounded himself with people who reinforce his instincts rather than challenge them. That’s how he’s ended up in an unwinnable situation.

Yes, Benjamin Netanyahu likely played a role, pressing him to act and framing the moment as urgent. But that’s only part of the story. Trump was already predisposed toward confrontation with Iran. He’s spoken about it repeatedly. This isn’t new.

And now, once again, he’s backed himself into a corner, as he always does.

In trump’s mind, the instinct is to act like his idol—to double down, to project strength, to never retreat. But the United States is not Russia. Trump is not Putin. And now we're witnessing reality asserting itself.

The U.S. is at a crossroads.

On one side are regional allies and partners who expect follow-through and don’t want to be left exposed. On the other side are skyrocketing gas prices and rising costs, public anger, and a MAGA base that feels politically betrayed. 

My sense is that trump will do what he often does: declare victory and walk away, leaving others to deal with the disasterous consequences. It would be the smart move, because the alternative would be catastrophic.

Then again—when has trump ever chosen the smart move?

Learning from my mother-in-law

For a couple of years now, my 87-year-old mother-in-law has been living with Alzheimer’s. Over the past six months, the decline has been steep—steep enough that she’s had to move into assisted living, and soon likely into a facility that offers a higher level of care.

We had her over for brunch yesterday with family—our daughter and her boyfriend, a daughter-in-law visiting from Vancouver with her son, and her other granddaughter who’s studying at McGill. It had been a while since the Vancouver cousins had seen her.

She didn’t know who they were. Her own grandchildren. Of course, they were heartbroken.

The truth is, she doesn’t recognize my children or me either. My daughter, who visits her every week, has to reintroduce herself each time.

There’s something deeply sad about knowing someone your whole life and no longer being known by them.

And yet—this is only part of the story.

My mother-in-law is not unhappy. Each encounter feels, to her, like a first meeting. And she seems to genuinely enjoy it.

My daughter’s boyfriend had never met her before. Sitting beside them on the couch, I watched him engage her with a kind of effortless warmth. He asked questions the way you would when meeting someone new, and she answered as best she could—sometimes in fragments, sometimes drifting, sometimes not making sense at all.

And he just… went with it.

No correction. No discomfort. No need to anchor her to reality.

He met her where she was.

Watching them together, I realized something: this “first meeting” is now the reality for all of us. And somehow, he understood instinctively what the rest of us are still learning—that connection doesn’t depend on shared memory. It depends on presence.

In her own way, my mother-in-law is teaching us something profound: how to accept her on her terms, with patience and love.

To let go of who she was to us, and be fully with who she is now.

At one point, I told her something I’ve always carried with me. When I first joined the family, she said to me: "You’re not my son-in-law—you’re no different from my own children."

That openness—that generosity—defined both her and my father-in-law. It wasn’t something I was used to, having grown up in a more rigid and judgmental household.

My mother-in-law chose to be that way, in part, because she hadn’t been fully accepted by her own in-laws. They treated her differently from their daughter. She made a quiet vow to do better—to treat the spouses of her children as her own.

And she did.

When I told her this, something flickered. Recognition, maybe. Her eyes lit up. She nodded. And she recalled fragments of memory, and pieced together how her in-laws had favoured their daughter.

And it struck me then: Now it’s our turn, to meet her where she is.

To offer her the same open, generous, non-judgmental love she gave so freely to us. It doesn't matter if she she knows who we are. What matters is the moment we are sharing together.

I'm Very Nervous

Back to publicly venting my anxiety.

I’m nervous.

I haven’t felt this nervous since October 7th, 2023—and this time it feels like it could get much worse.

It started a couple of weeks ago, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to throw Israel (and, by extension, Jews more broadly) under the bus by suggesting Israel forced the U.S.'s hand to preemptively attack Iran.

Then this week came the very public resignation of the Director of Counterterrorism, Joe Kent. He echoed that framing, saying there was no imminent threat to the United States from Iran, and explicitly blamed Israel and its American lobby for pressuring the U.S. into war.

Yesterday, Netanyahu made an unusual public statement about the war—something that, in itself, signals how serious the situation has become. It read as damage control. When asked about the Israeli attack on the South Pars gas field, he claimed Israel acted alone. That directly contradicted earlier statements from Israeli officials, who said the operation had been coordinated with the U.S. No one seems to believe him.

When asked whether Israel had “dragged” the U.S. into the war, Netanyahu deflected: “Does anyone really think someone can tell President Trump what to do? Come on.”

My answer: the most transparently transactional president in modern U.S. history? Ugh—Yeah, of course.

Iran responded to the South Pars attack by striking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City—the world’s largest LNG facility.

According to Michael Wolff, it’s no coincidence that trump quickly claimed he had no prior knowledge of the South Pars attack and urged Israel to stop targeting energy infrastructure. Wolff said trump got a call from Jared Kushner who warned that his Qatari patrons were extremely unhappy.

Which brings me back to the underlying dynamic. According to Wolff’s sources, many inside trump’s orbit believe Israel pushed him into this war.

Meanwhile, in the MAGA conspiracy ecosystem, the narrative is hardening: that Jews are pulling the strings—Kushner and Netanyahu are controlling trump.

The movement itself is splitting. On one side, a pro-Israel, pro-war faction, led by Jewish commentators Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin and Laura Loomer. On the other side, an anti-Israel, anti-war faction led by popular (Gentile) podcasters Tucker Carlsen, Megyn Kelly and Nick Fuentes that often frames the situation in openly antisemitic terms.

All of this is compounded by the lack of a clear, convincing justification for the war, and the absence of any real effort to rally international allies, and diffuse responsibility.

Add in the Epstein cover-up. Add the risk of pro-Iranian terrorism. Add the lingering global anger over Gaza.

It feels like all the ingredients are there, from both the far right and the far left, for antisemitism at a level we haven't seen in generations.

And that’s making me very nervous.

In the Miklat

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for Kelp

I'm not in the miklat;

but I imagine

if I were in Jerusalem

with you,

I'd have my guitar

and you'd have yours.

Or if there was no time

because the alert

went off again at 3am,

and we dragged ourselves

down in pjs and slippers,

we'd at least

have our blues harps.

While we waited

for the all clear

we'd fill the silence

with Dylan and Cohen,

between tunes

debate

who was the better songwriter.

I'd tell you Dylan was a poser,

always wearing

someone else's costume,

while Cohen dug deep

into the darkness

of his own

emotional rubble.

When we got tired of that

I'd pull out

my bilingual copy

of Shirei Ahava

and we'd read aloud —

you first in Hebrew,

me next,

from the facing page

in English —

all the biblical allusions

lost in translation,

(hiding inside the words,

as it were),

milot miklat,

you'd joke alliteratively—

words of shelter

from the storm.

We'd listen

for the boom of a strike

above our heads

the crash of collapse,

and wonder

if ZAKA

had already been 

dispatched.

The Big Picture

What you see always depends on what you are looking at.

Me, I'm a big picture guy, not someone who focuses on details.

Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's not.

It's good because I tend not to sweat the small stuff.

It's bad for detail-oriented work, like writing or art-making, where getting the details just right matters so much.

Even before trump was first voted into office, from my big-picture perch I saw the potential for disaster.

Disaster because he was so obviously inexperienced, and so clearly temperamentally unfit to wield so much power.

Disaster because he had no appreciation for institutions or the international alliances he was inheriting.

Worse than indifference, his instinct seemed destructive. He appeared to want to tear down the foundations of American democracy and dismantle the network of alliances and organizations that had maintained global stability since the end of WWII.

The fact that he was new to the job — and not particularly competent or disciplined — limited the damage he could do in his first term.

Having experienced trump version 1.0, I never imagined Americans would choose him a second time. Especially after January 6th.

I was wrong.

It turns out Americans have very short memories.

The second term has confirmed my worst fears. This time, with a compliant and subservient Congress, he is largely unleashed to use the powers of the presidency according to his whims.

My sense was that his first priority in a second term — now that he understood the levers of power — would be to enrich himself, his family, and his friends.

And Americans would pay for it in spades.

The tariffs fit under that heading. So do the lawsuits against corporations, law firms, and universities aimed at extracting settlements. The “gifts” from foreign leaders. The cryptocurrency ventures. The project-fundraising grifts. The selling of pardons. And most recently, the war profiteering — seizing Venezuela’s oil and the kids launching a drone business.

The second priority would be the only other thing he truly craves: attention, fame, legacy.

Hence the constant television appearances, sometimes twice a day. Dominating headlines. Putting his name and face on prominent government buildings. Erecting monuments to himself — the ballroom, the victory arch. His obsessive pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But it also extends to more ominous gestures: the abduction of a government leader in Venezuela, the war with Iran, and talk of taking over Cuba or even Greenland.

Trump cares above all about appearing strong. His worldview is simple: might makes right.

And the more easily he can deploy the military, the easier it becomes to use it again.

Trashing international law, alliances, and global institutions is not really the goal.

It’s simply collateral damage in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

Most of the political arguments I end up having with people come down to a difference between looking at the big picture or the small picture.

People who focus only on Israel’s immediate security, for example, are happy with the war with Iran. They see weapons depots destroyed, military infrastructure damaged, leaders assassinated — and they count those as victories.

But that’s the small picture.

They’re looking at the battles, not the war.

They aren’t thinking about the broader ramifications for regional stability, for international alliances, or even for Jews living in the diaspora.

Big picture, bombs are replaceable. Leaders are replaceable. Even armies are replaceable.

What isn’t easily replaced is stability.

Or trust.

Or credibility.

Once those are gone, they take generations to rebuild.

Actual Community

I want to share a word about my experience yesterday — a breather from political commentary, which will probably come as a relief to many of you.

Suddenly I feel like I’m part of a community. A real one.

This comes thanks to my wife.

For the last couple of years she’s been building a small hobby-business called Montreal Vintage Kitchenware. Check it out. She sources vintage dishware, glassware, cookware, and other beautiful household items, cleans them up, and resells them online. She has a great eye for value and style. And the wonderful thing about dishware and glassware is that they don’t really wear out. It’s amazing how often you find older pieces in pristine condition.

Over time she’s built a nice following on Instagram and her sales and inventory have grown steadily. But she’s kept the business deliberately small and manageable. She sources locally, sells locally, and fits the work around her regular routine — including caring for the affairs of her ailing mother.

Other vintage sellers have been encouraging her for a while to participate in public vintage markets, which have become very popular recently. Vintage style is having a moment, it’s eco-friendly, and it’s often far cheaper than buying new — which helps in uncertain economic times.

She resisted for a long time. Not least because selling glassware and dishes means hauling heavy boxes of fragile merchandise. It’s not quite the same as selling clothes or jewelry.

But this week she finally agreed to try one market — on the condition that I would act as her assistant (read: shlepper). Which I happily did.

The venue was beautiful: a former suburban church with vaulted ceilings, heavy wooden beams, and painted glass windows, now converted into a community events hall. There were about twenty-five vendors selling mostly vintage clothing, jewelry, craftwork, and small tchotchkes.

My wife was the sole vendor selling only housewares.

This turned out to be both good and bad. Good because there was no competition. Bad because there’s a reason no one else was selling it.

Housewares aren’t really impulse purchases. People usually buy them when they’re looking for something specific — to complete a set, replace a missing glass, or find a particular piece of cookware. Market shoppers, on the other hand, tend to want something they can wear home immediately. And most come expecting to spend somewhere between $10 and $25.

My wife often sells sets — dishes, glasses, teapots, serving trays — typically priced between $25 and $60. Still a great deal, but not quite the market sweet spot.

Still, we did fine. More than enough to cover the costs and put a few extra dollars in our pocket. And it was a valuable learning experience. We’re already thinking about what might work better next time: fewer full sets, more individual pieces, and more items priced closer to that impulse-buy range.

But what I enjoyed most had nothing to do with the sales.

It was the atmosphere.

The organizer — herself a vintage seller — was energetic, welcoming, and clearly delighted by the little community she’s building with these events. The music playlist was so good it had me humming along most of the day.

The vendors were friendly and supportive. Of course there were moments of quiet jealousy — glancing over at the next table wondering why they had five customers while we had one — but the overall feeling was that everyone genuinely wanted everyone else to do well.

What struck me most, though, was simply being around strangers. Friendly strangers.

They weren’t from my cultural, religious, or socio-economic milieu. They probably didn’t share many of my political views — and for once that didn’t matter in the slightest.

For one afternoon I stepped out of my usual bubble and into a room full of people of different ages and backgrounds who had very little in common except that we were all there selling pre-loved stuff. And it felt surprisingly good.

I realized how rare that has become — to share a space with people you don’t know, don’t categorize, and don’t argue with.

I enjoyed people simply passing by our table perusing our wares, maybe picking up a plate or a teacup, chatting for a minute or two, and then saying thanks and leaving without even buying anything.

War, What Is It Good For?

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

So sang Edwin Starr in the 1970 protest anthem War.

Starr was singing about the Vietnam War, a conflict that proved as senseless, misguided, and ideological as any war undertaken by the United States. Decades later, the lessons of Vietnam are still being learned.

Among them:

First, it was fundamentally an ideological conflict. While it had military objectives, its political goals were vague and shifting.

Second, ideological wars are notoriously difficult to win. Territory can be captured, armies defeated, and infrastructure destroyed. But beliefs cannot be bombed out of existence. More often they harden under pressure.

Third, Vietnam demonstrated the dangers of escalation. What began as a limited commitment gradually expanded into a full-scale war. The phenomenon would later be called “mission creep,” a term popularized during the United Nations Operation in Somalia.

Fourth, Vietnam showed the limits of overwhelming military superiority. The United States dominated the air and possessed vast technological advantages. Yet these advantages proved insufficient against a determined adversary employing asymmetric tactics.

Finally, it was a war of attrition. In such conflicts, the weaker side can prevail simply by outlasting the stronger one. Time, more than firepower, becomes the decisive factor.

The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is “the continuation of politics by other means.” His insight was that war, at least in theory, is rational. It is a tool used by states to achieve political objectives when diplomacy fails.

But Clausewitz’s observation contains an implicit truth: wars end by agreement. Military victory only matters if it produces a political outcome accepted by the parties involved.

Which raises the question: is the war against Iran winnable?

The United States and Israel possess overwhelming military superiority. They can degrade Iran’s military capabilities, damage its infrastructure, and weaken its ability to defend itself. These are achievable objectives. But they are also temporary ones.

Only a political settlement—one accepted by Iran itself—could transform military defeat into a durable outcome. Yet the Iranian regime defines itself in ideological opposition to the United States and Israel. A regime that frames resistance as martyrdom cannot politically survive capitulation.

Washington and Jerusalem appear to have hoped that sustained military pressure would weaken the regime internally. Perhaps popular unrest would topple the government, or factions within the military might stage a coup.

So far, neither scenario has materialized, and there is no reason to believe it is likely.

Popular revolt is unlikely while the population is under bombardment. External attack tends to consolidate national unity, even among citizens who dislike the regime.

Nor has there been any visible fracturing within Iran’s security apparatus, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

If the past is any guide—from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan—the most likely outcome is a familiar one. At some point the United States will declare its objectives achieved and bring the conflict to a close.

Iran, having survived, will declare victory as well.

And in doing so it will strengthen the very regime the war was meant to weaken, while deepening its determination to obtain the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon.

Bad news for Washington.

Worse news for Israel.

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

Say it again.

Please don't write

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

Please don't write 

any more poems about death. 

I've read too many already, 

and let's admit it,

they come too easily. 

War. Grief. Sorrow. Loss: common 

as poppies in spring

when it's still chilly outside, 

the bright papery blooms 

fading quickly. 

Write the elusive  

difficult poems 

about love - 

ones you know by heart

when words 

fail; 

A poem that stands on a riverbank 

watching the flow— 

a poem that surprises,

like a fish leaping out 

from the turbulent darkness, 

with all its might, 

going upstream  

with vigour and purpose,

and you know,

only because it moves 

against the current,

it's alive.

The Golem of Mar-a-Lago

Based on the Jewish folktale The Golem of Prague

Once upon a time, in the city of Jerusalem, there lived a leader of the Jewish community. He was not a humble leader, for he had ruled almost without opposition for many decades.

All his life, the leader of the Jews believed it was his sacred mission to protect his people from their greatest avowed enemy: the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by the Ayatollah and his mullahs.

The Ayatollah dreamed of creating an Islamic caliphate and called for the destruction of the Jews in Israel. For many years he spent the treasure of his people building an army and acquiring powerful weapons, and placing them in ways that threatened the Jews.

The leader of the Jews possessed a mighty army too—indeed the mightiest in the region. But it was not mighty enough to defeat the Ayatollah on its own.

He needed help.

And so good fortune seemed to fall upon the Jews.

In a distant land there existed a being said to command vast treasure and unimaginably powerful weapons. The being was large and orange—the colour of desert clay baked too long in the sun. 

The being was vulgar in demeanour. Many said it was without a soul, because when it spoke, which it did often and loudly, only strange and incoherent noises emerged.

The being lived in Florida, inside a palace of gold and mirrors called Mar-a-Lago.

When the leader of the Jews in Israel heard about this creature, he conceived a clever idea. He believed that if he traveled to Mar-a-Lago and whispered certain mystical words into the being’s ear, he could transform it into a golem—a powerful creature that would obey his commands.

And so he crossed the ocean and did exactly this.

He leaned close and whispered into the creature’s ear.

Instantly the being’s eyes glazed over, and its orange skin began to glow. The leader of the Jews knew that the creature had become a golem and would now follow his every instruction.

He said to the golem:

“You are the strongest man the world has ever seen.”

“You alone can destroy our enemy.”

“The Ayatollah and his mullahs mock you. Iran is your enemy. You must destroy the Ayatollah.”

The words were repeated again and again—until they became an incantation.

The golem of Mar-a-Lago stirred. It pounded the table and released a great, incoherent roar. The golem’s minions understood what the noises meant, and soon an armada of warships was launched against the enemy of the Jews. From their decks, fighter jets dropped bombs upon the Ayatollah’s lands, and missiles rained down across Iran.

At first the leader of the Jews smiled. The golem had done exactly as he commanded.

But, as the ancient legend foretells, a golem does not understand limits.

Missiles rose from deserts and mountains all throughout the region. Armies mobilized. Oil fields burned. Exploding drones struck hotels, apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.

The streets of large cities were set on fire, a toxic rain burned the skin of residents, many people died and economic markets crashed like towers of glass collapsing in the wind.

The Middle East shook. Yet the golem did not stop.

The creature thundered across the world stage—threatening, striking, shouting. Fear spread wherever it turned. Former allies became mistrustful, and enemies multiplied.

Even many among the Jewish people who had first cheered the golem began to fear it. And soon the leader of the Jews who had activited the creature, realized in horror, that he had made a terrible mistake.

He had forgotten the one thing required by the ancient legend to control the golem. He had never placed the word Emet—Truth—upon its brow. For if the master of the golem needed to stop the creature that was how he did it. He could simply remove the first letter, leaving only Met—Death—and the golem would instantly turn to dust.

But now it was too late.

This creature could not be restrained by truth. Truth had no meaning to it at all.

And so the golem of Mar-a-Lago marched onward—louder, stronger, and more uncontrollable with every step—while the world wondered who, if anyone, still possessed the sacred word that could make it stop.

Evil

This weekend I started watching the Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. I was obviously drawn to it because of the war now unfolding in the Middle East and the demented, soulless, brainless orange golem currently controlling the levers of power in the White House who appears to be steering the world toward ruination and catastrophe. Play with fire and get burned.

History rarely repeats itself in the neat and tidy ways we imagine, but it does have an unsettling habit of echoing when political systems grow fragile and grievances become political fuel.

“Evil” is a word I dislike and very rarely use. It has too many religious connotations. It belongs to a universe of absolutes, and we don’t live in absolutes — or at least we shouldn’t.

Through archival footage and dramatizations, interspersed with commentary from historians, the series tells the story of the failed Austrian painter Adolf Hitler, his rise to power in Germany, and the world’s attempt after the war to seek justice at the Nuremberg Trials, where twenty-four of the regime’s most senior surviving figures — including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop — were prosecuted.

The story is told in part through the eyes of the American journalist William L. Shirer, who had a front-row seat to events. Shirer reported from Berlin during the Nazi period, covered the trials, and later wrote the monumental history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The question at the heart of the story is whether there is such a thing as evil.

The answer, I think, is no — at least not as something distant, mythical, and grandiose. Its source is far more mundane. It lies in ordinary human weaknesses: resentment, humiliation, cowardice, opportunism. Not even as interesting, perhaps, as the word “banal” that Hannah Arendt famously used when writing about the bureaucratic mediocrity of Adolf Eichmann.

Watching the series, what strikes you most is how ordinary and unremarkable Hitler himself appears as an individual. His character was shaped by personal failure, grievance, humiliation, and resentment — hardly unique qualities in politics.

His rise from a marginal extremist with a radical agenda and a relatively small following to someone holding the balance of power in parliament was enabled by conservative and moderate politicians who believed they could control him, harness his popular support, and neutralize his more dangerous tendencies.

They miscalculated.

In the fractured political landscape of the Weimar Republic - divided very much along rural/urban lines - elites who feared instability more than extremism opened the door to him, convinced that the institutions of the state would ultimately contain him. It was a door they later discovered they could not close.

Hitler understood how to exploit the situation. His nativist and romantic vision of German greatness appealed to an economically struggling population that was humiliated by defeat in the First World War and by what many perceived as betrayal by a feckless political class who had accepted the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Once in power, Hitler’s first objective was to avenge that national humiliation. The symbolism of forcing France to accept surrender in the Compiègne Forest — inside the same railway carriage used for the 1918 armistice — was no accident. It was revenge made theatrical.

The regime’s genocidal campaign against Europe’s Jews did not emerge all at once as a single master plan. It was radicalized over time, particularly after the Blitz failed to defeat Britain, and the military campaign against the Soviet Union in the east hit a brick wall. Military success had emboldened the regime, while later desperation hardened its brutality, and the plan was codified at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.

But if evil exists at all, it is not the product of some diabolical plan, like in the movies. It's a more organic process, and often improvised. It flourishes in weakness, grievance and opportunism, and feeds on apathy, fear and cowardice. 

Then it festers and spreads like an untreated disease in the body politic - hiding in plain sight, behind words like patriotism, security, loyalty, greatness.

The Golem

My orthodox friends were giddy at the coincidence of the US launching its bombing campaign just a couple of days before the festival of Purim. They saw in this attack a parallel with the biblical story of the small Jewish community of Shushan, located in ancient Persia (present-day Iran), who miraculously and fortuitously defied a king’s death warrant and turned the tables on his evil henchman Haman.

Haman–Khamenei. Get it?

I see parallels to current events in another Jewish story from folklore: the Golem.

Created from mud, the Golem is an oversized, brainless, soulless humanoid creature of myth possessing superhuman strength, summoned to protect a Jewish community in peril. The creature is brought to life by Jewish mystics who recite a mysterious formulation of sacred texts.

The origins of the story may date as far back as the Talmud, but the best-known versions of the legend come from the late 16th century. In the most famous telling, rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel summons a Golem to defend the threatened Jewish ghetto of Prague.

In this version of the story, the creature is animated by placing the Hebrew word Emet (truth) on its forehead. The creature is deactivated by simply removing the first letter, turning Emet into Met (death)—like flicking an on/off switch.

The Golem of Prague predates Frankenstein by Mary Shelley by more than a century. It’s possible Shelley knew the legend, since the first German publication of the tale appeared in 1808.

Like Frankenstein, the story of the Golem is often read as a cautionary tale—a warning to be careful what you wish for.

According to the legend, the Golem was man’s creation, not God’s. Therefore it lacked the gifts of reason and speech. It carried out the tasks it was given without reflection or restraint, which carries great risk.

In many versions of the story the creature eventually becomes uncontrollable. The power that was unleashed to protect the community turns against it. The Golem runs rampant, wreaking havoc, spreading destruction. The genie has been let out of the bottle, and can't be put back.

With all this talk of Bibi Netanyahu going down to Mar-a-Lago and whispering in the ear of the orange Golem, one has to wonder: Are we living through a contemporary version of this ancient tale?

The Greatest Danger of the War

The first danger of a war with Iran is to the international rules-based order—and global stability.

But the second, far more immediate danger is to American democracy itself.

The stage has already been set.

Last Sunday, a mass shooting in downtown Austin left three dead and a dozen injured. The shooter, a 53-year-old naturalized immigrant with no prior FBI record, wore a hoodie reading “Property of Allah” and reportedly a t-shirt with an Iranian flag underneath. A lone actor, perhaps—but one whose symbolism will be seized by those who want to portray the homeland under threat.

If the war drags on, costing a billion dollars a day, trump will eventually need Congress to approve a special appropriation. He currently lacks the support of both parties. And politically, he is in trouble: unpopular, embattled, facing the very real prospect of a Democratic wave in the midterms that could end his presidency.

Under these pressures, one can imagine a scenario that until recently seemed unthinkable: the declaration of a state of emergency, the assumption of extraordinary wartime powers, the suspension—or outright cancellation—of elections.

A war abroad is no longer just a question of foreign policy. In this climate, it becomes a weapon against the very democracy it claims to defend.

Thinking it Through 2 - The Case for Israel

Notice that in my previous post explaining my reasons for opposing the war, I did not mention Israel.

The reason is simple. Israel can make a coherent and legitimate case for attacking Iran on the basis of self-defense in response to an imminent threat. The United States cannot. And that distinction matters.

The United States, as the most powerful nation in the world by far, has the greatest responsibility, and that includes responsibility to build an international consensus in response to the Iranian regime’s conduct. Instead, by taking unilateral military action, it has undermined the very rules-based international system it claims to defend, and given other great powers free rein to act with impunity.

The threat Iran poses to Israel is one matter, and it is inarguable. The threat Iran poses to the international rules-based system is another.

Israel has a responsibility and obligation to its citizens, as all nations do. For decades, the international community failed to adequately acknowledge the threat Iran poses to Israel. Arguably, Israel felt it had little choice but to act, and do so when Iran was most vulnerable.

The same cannot be said about any threat Iran may pose to the United States. Let’s be clear: there was no imminent threat to the United States or to American citizens. The claim that this war was necessary to prevent such a threat simply does not withstand scrutiny.

As a sponsor of international terrorism, the Iranian regime does represent a threat to the rules-based international system. But that threat is precisely why the response should have been collective and grounded in international law, norms, and conventions. The responsibility of the United States was to build that consensus, not bypass it.

What the war has demonstrated so far is something many analysts long suspected: Iran was, in many ways, a paper tiger. Iran’s feckless military response to Israel’s attacks has revealed just how limited its capabilities really are. Much of the threat turned out to be bluster.

From that standpoint, one could even argue that the war may still prove necessary from the perspective of Israel’s long-term security.

My own position has always been that Israel ultimately possesses the strongest form of protection: nuclear deterrence. For that reason, I have never accepted the argument that Israel faced an existential threat, or that the Iranian regime was suicidal.

Like all regimes, the leadership of the Islamic Republic has always pursued two basic goals: first, self-preservation; and second, the expansion of its ideological influence across the Middle East, including the long-term ambition of a broader Islamic political order. That is not an apocalyptic agenda.

Their campaign against Israel has therefore been primarily religious and ideological rather than strategic. It is also why they signed the JCPOA. The agreement offered them time, legitimacy, and a stage upon which to wage a different kind of war—one fought not with missiles, but with narratives.

Their hope was that Israel would ultimately defeat itself, not on the battlefield, but in the court of international opinion.

There is little reason at this point to believe that the Iranian regime will not survive this war as it is currently being waged, nor that it is losing the capacity to wage conflict through asymmetric means indefinitely—through proxy forces, regional destabilization, and other non‑conventional strategies. 

An aside: After two years of war, massive destruction, loss of life and ruination, and a ground invasion and occupation by the IDF, Hamas is still in control of almost 50% of Gaza. 

The real long‑term cost of this war may not be the battlefield losses of Iran, but the lasting damage to the international rules‑based order itself. By sidelining international law and consensus, the United States has weakened the very norms that restrain conflicts and preserve stability, creating a world in which power, rather than law, increasingly dictates outcomes.

Thinking A Position Through

I’ve been hearing this a lot: “I’m glad Khamenei is gone. So I support the war.”

In a nutshell, that’s what Mark Carney suggested in his initial public statement — one he has since tried to walk back, or at least qualify, by calling the war “regrettable” and "inconsistent with international law."

Regrettable, indeed.

The statement “Khamenei and his terrible regime needed to go, therefore I support the war” is known in the parlance as a non sequitur.

It does not necessarily follow that because you are pleased with a result, you must also approve of the way it came about.

Imagine you’re walking down the street and find a $20 bill on the sidewalk. Lucky day. You’re $20 richer. But that same $20 was clearly dropped by someone else. You can be happy about your gain without celebrating the misfortune that produced it.

So yes — one can be relieved that Khamenei is gone. But that does not oblige anyone to endorse the means that brought it about.

Even if you oppose the terrorism-sponsoring leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran — as most of us do — the action taken by the United States that led to this outcome must also be evaluated on its own terms. Here is the logic:

1. Khamenei and his repressive, criminal regime were undeniably harmful — to the Iranian people and to global stability.

2. Therefore, the world is better off without them.

3. A central reason the Iranian regime was so destabilizing is that it ignored and actively undermined the rules-based international system by sponsoring and spreading terror and violence.

4. Therefore, if the justification for removing them is to preserve international stability and curb terrorism, the action taken must itself respect the norms and conventions of the rules-based international order.

5. The unilateral action of the United States — outside clear international legal authorization — further undermines those same norms and conventions.

In other words, the ends do not justify the means.

In fact, the means may do greater long-term harm than the instability they seek to eliminate.

And the end itself is uncertain. There is no way to predict what follows the assassination of a leader and the decapitation of a regime. Power vacuums do not produce order; they produce struggle. The only certainty is instability.

Add to that the human cost of war, the damage inflicted, and the further erosion of the legal and normative framework that has structured international relations since the end of World War II, and the conclusion becomes clear:

One may oppose the Iranian regime and still condemn the reckless manner in which it was removed.

If the justification for war is the defense of international order, then violating that order to achieve it is self-defeating.

And that is precisely why the war must be opposed.

Celebration of Death

This morning I listened to the second press briefing by the former Fox News host and current U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. It was like listening to a giddy teenager describing his latest round of Call of Duty 2. It was cavalier, unserious—and horrifying.

In truth, I could only manage about five minutes before changing the station in disgust.

He said things like:

“They are toast and they know it.”

“We will fly all day and all night… death and destruction from the sky all day long.”

“We are punching them while they’re down.”

Then he compared the war to a football game.

Who talks like this? Someone who thinks it’s a game. Someone not fully tethered to the reality of the forces he is unleashing.

I found myself thinking: this is not strategy. It’s glorification. A celebration of death and destruction. The only other leaders I have heard speak in this register are the clerics and officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah—men who inhabit a world of religious martyrdom and apocalyptic rhetoric. They at least clothe it in solemnity. This was something else: swagger.

And then I thought of the reported 168 girls killed at a school in the initial bombing of the city of Minab on Saturday.

It’s often said that war develops a momentum of its own. Once the killing begins, perspective narrows. One coffin is a tragedy; hundreds become a statistic. The language shifts. It becomes a numbers game. That is why Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “To win without fighting is best.”

Instead, what we are seeing—and hearing—is a kind of techno-fascination with the spectacle of war, engineered for television. A belief that dazzling imagery and muscular rhetoric can pacify the public. Hypnotize us. Desensitize us.

As officials grasp for justifications—leaning on the old lie about imminent threats—they obscure the human toll. The terrible price that led the world, after World War II, to attempt something better: a system of rules meant to govern conflict and mitigate its consequences—mass migration, refugees, starvation, disease—the suffering of the defenseless and the vulnerable.

How easily we forget. How easily the world we worked so hard to build and maintain can begin to disintegrate before our very eyes.

Institutions that took generations to construct—laws forged from the ashes of catastrophe, alliances born of hard lessons, norms written in the memory of mass graves—prove far more fragile than we ever wanted to believe. 

The tragedy is not only in the lives lost. It is in the erosion of the guardrails that were meant to prevent those losses in the first place.

How easily we forget—and how costly that forgetting becomes.

Rubio Throws The Jews Under The Bus

My jaw dropped yesterday.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters after briefing congressional leaders on the attack on Iran, said the following:

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Read that carefully.

The United States struck Iran because Israel’s action would have triggered retaliation against American forces, effectively forcing Washington’s hand.

Rubio — one of the more conventional figures in an otherwise unconventional administration — was clearly reaching for a legal rationale: anticipatory self-defense. A pre-emptive strike to prevent imminent harm. That is the language of Article 51 of the UN Charter.

But in constructing that argument, he did something deeply irresponsible and dangerous.

He framed American military action as reactive to Israel’s decision-making. In doing so, he handed anti-Israel conspiracy theorists, and outright anti-Semites, a talking point that we've heard over and over again: U.S. foreign policy is dictated by Israel.

Now, I have little doubt that Netanyahu lobbied aggressively for a strike. He has long argued that Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose an existential threat to Israel, and he has been pressing Washington to “finish the job” they started last June. Trump — impulsive, glory-seeking, and drawn to performative displays of power — is obviously susceptible to appeals of cos-playing the military commander in chief. Add to that the intoxication of being the president who finally eliminated America’s long-time nemesis, Khamenei, a moment to rival Obama ordering the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

But lobbying is not coercion. Advocacy is not control. And it is reckless for an American Secretary of State to blur that line in public.

The United States has no clear legal or moral justification for initiating a war with Iran. That, to my mind, is indisputable. 

Israel, however, can plausibly argue that a pre-emptive strike in self-defense is justified since it faces an imminent existential threat. 

The United States is in a categorically different position. Supporting an ally with intelligence, defensive systems, or materiel is one thing. Launching an offensive strike is another entirely. International law, and basic moral reasoning, recognize that distinction.

Which is why Rubio’s comment is so egregious. In a moment that demanded clarity and restraint, he reached for a thin legal veneer and, in the process, reinforced one of the most dangerous narratives in modern political discourse, putting Jews everywhere, especially in America, in peril.     

Intervention as a Moral Imperative

There’s a great deal of debate online about whether there was a moral imperative to remove the “evil” Ayatollah and his regime, even if the American-Israeli attack was clearly illegal under international law.

Legally, the case is weak. The UN Charter is explicit: the use of force is prohibited except in self-defense against an armed attack or when authorized by the UN Security Council. There was no imminent attack underway, nor a credible case of anticipatory self-defense under the narrow standards traditionally accepted in international law. “Regime change,” whether implicit or explicit, directly violates the foundational principle of state sovereignty — the core organizing rule of the post-1945 international system.

However uncomfortable it may be, even Iran retains the sovereign right to develop the means it believes necessary for its own defense. Many states possess advanced military capabilities without triggering preemptive war. The threshold for lawful force is intentionally high because the consequences of miscalculation are catastrophic.

I would argue that this attack represents the most damaging blow to the rules-based international system since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Ironically, it hands Putin rhetorical ammunition. When major powers circumvent international law in the name of security or morality, they weaken their own ability to condemn others for doing the same. This is why Canada's and Australia's support of the attack on Iran becomes problematic.

But what about the moral imperative? What about the argument that the Iranian people — who rose up in protest and were met with lethal force — needed outside help to be “liberated” from a brutal regime?

This is where the dilemma becomes far more serious. It places the bedrock principle of sovereignty in direct conflict with the moral impulse to prevent suffering. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), endorsed in 2005, was designed to address precisely this tension. It holds that when a state is unwilling or unable to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity, the international community has a responsibility to act.

But R2P was never intended to authorize unilateral regime change. It explicitly channels coercive force through collective mechanisms — primarily the UN Security Council. Without broad international consensus, intervention risks becoming indistinguishable from aggression cloaked in humanitarian language.

The real challenge is determining when the line has truly been crossed. “Evil” is not a legal category; it is a moral judgment. If powerful states can unilaterally define when another government is sufficiently immoral to justify war, then the prohibition on force collapses into subjectivity. Every great power believes its cause is righteous. That is precisely why the system was designed to remove unilateral moral conviction as a trigger for war.

We saw the difficulty of this balance during the Balkan wars of the 1990s — in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later in Kosovo. The international response evolved gradually: sanctions, peacekeeping, diplomacy, and eventually military intervention. Even then, especially in Kosovo, the action was described by some as “illegal but legitimate.” That phrase itself reveals the fragility of the order. When legitimacy drifts away from legality, the guardrails weaken.

History also forces us to confront another uncomfortable truth: externally imposed regime change often produces prolonged instability rather than liberation. Power vacuums invite factionalism. Regional actors intervene. Proxy conflicts proliferate. The moral clarity that justified intervention at the outset quickly dissolves into unintended consequences borne by civilians.

None of this diminishes the suffering of the Iranian people. It does not deny the brutality of their government. It simply recognizes that the method of response matters. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, support for civil society, documentation of human rights abuses, and international legal accountability are slower and less dramatic tools — but they preserve the architecture of restraint that prevents global politics from devolving into open-ended power struggles.

Our instinct is to seek simple moral binaries — good versus evil, liberation versus tyranny. That works in the movies. In geopolitics, the landscape is far more complex. The road to hell is often paved with good intentions, and once force is unleashed it isn't neatly contained.

Putin implausibly framed his invasion of Ukraine as self-defense and protection. Most of us see it as imperial ambition. It becomes difficult to maintain moral clarity if other powerful states adopt similar language to justify actions that sidestep international law. The standard cannot be elastic depending on who is wielding power.

If the rules-based order is to mean anything, it must apply even when it is inconvenient, especially when it is inconvenient. Otherwise, “moral imperative” becomes not a principle, but a pretext.

And once that line is blurred, it is not only one regime or one region that suffers. It is the stability of the entire international system — a system that, however imperfect, has constrained great-power war for nearly eight decades, and is now being shredded, with reprecussions we have yet to fully understand.

Getting Real

There is a regional hot war throughout the Middle East, ignited by the American-Israeli attack on Iran that killed the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini and some 50 leaders of the Iranian war council. 

No one is shedding tears for the death of Khameini, except some Shia fanatics, and that is likely to be a dangerous problem in the coming weeks and months.

For those elated with the death of Khameini, let’s get real. Khameini was close to 90 years old. A succession plan was in place. His death is largely symbolic, and will be used as a rallying cry. The brutal, repressive infrastructure that has supported the Islamic Republic for the last almost 50 years did not rest on his frail shoulders.

Can we expect ‘the people’ to rise up spontaneously and suddenly to create a democracy in a place that has literally never had democracy in history. Only in trump’s addled delusional mind is that a thing. More likely, the IRGC will clamp down with more force, increased brutality and bloodshed.

The most Israel can hope for is internal factional struggle. Better that the Iranians point their guns at each other than at Israel. 

That’s a more medium term hope. In the meantime, as long as they can, Iran will continue to lob missiles at Israel and maybe even activate proxies and suicide bombers to wreak havoc abroad. A long term campaign of asymmetrical warfare is my biggest fear. 

Why is this happening now? Do the motives even matter? Probably not. But getting real, as I always try to do, I think the most cynical answers are the probably the right ones:

1. A war puts Netanyahu in the best position possible for the September election in Israel. 

2. A war distracts from trump’s Epstein problem. 

3. Trump is using the US military as a mercenary force, bought and paid for by the Sunni gulf states, who have put billions of dollars into his and his family’s pocket. 

4. Visions of greatness and legacy. It’s a gamble both trump and Netanyahu were willing to take for the sake of hubris. As trump said, no other American president would dare try it. Netanyahu has dreamed of defeating Iran his whole career. 

I will add a word about Iran’s response so far. From the point of view of ‘all out war’ it has been underwhelming and demonstrated, if anything, that it was not an imminent threat to Israel or America. That political justification has been proven categorically false or at least overstated. Netanyahu’s and trump’s brand of politics absolutely require an enemy in order to thrive. In trump’s case, turning to Iran served a purpose after ‘China will take over Greenland’ faltered.  

As I always do, I tend to consider big picture consequences, and there is nothing to celebrate. 

This is another indication of the collapse of the international rules-based order. It’s clear the US was negotiating with Iran over their nuclear program in bad faith - proving once again that they don’t believe in negotiation or diplomacy and can’t be trusted. It was a smokescreen. 

America’s choice of force means thousands of people will die. The world is a far less safe place today than it was last week or even last year. The nature of warfare has changed in a way that means asymmetrical violence and violence against soft targets will increase.