Should Iran Be Contained, or Defeated?
The perils of bad historical analogies.
June 26, 2025
Should Iran Be Contained, or Defeated?
The perils of bad historical analogies.
Martin Kramer recently resurfaced a 2009 talk on the tendency of Western analysts to compare Islamist Iran to Soviet Russia. Of course, when these comparisons were first offered in 1979, those making them didn’t expect the Berlin Wall to fall in ten years, or the USSR to collapse two years afterwards. But the claim, made even by the great Bernard Lewis, that the Iranian Revolution should be compared to the French and Russian ones was, Kramer argues, shaky from the get-go:
June 26, 2025
Why the President Didn’t Need Congress’s Permission to Attack Iran
The Constitution, international law, and the twelve-day war.
Zohran Mamdani Makes the Case for Zionism
Hatred for Israel helped his campaign.
How Tel Aviv Became Home to One of World’s Greatest Collections of Modern Art
“A new Hebrew city should exhibit new Hebrew art.”
An Outbreak of Austrian Anti-Semitism Helped to Create the First “Modern” Rabbi
Israel Isserlein and the beginning of the aharonim.