When historians look back on this period of war in Ukraine and Iran, they will be deeply puzzled by a simple question: why can’t the leaders of the Western Democracies hear our enemies?
There were two examples last week, one from Russia and one from Iran, in which our enemies were extraordinarily clear about their view of things.
In both cases, our enemies’ comments were dramatically different from what we have been telling ourselves.
We keep hoping for reasonableness, for negotiating to a peaceful conclusion, for finding some common ground to build a better future.
Our enemies share none of those goals, and they are very clear about their goals and how different they are from the West’s self-delusion.
Consider first the Russian position.
While Putin was having a very nice chat with President Donald Trump for over an hour, his senior national security spokesperson was preparing a radically different message.
Dmitry Medvedev has been president, prime minister, and now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia. He would never make an aggressive, hostile speech without Putin’s approval.
Yet the day after Putin’s call with President Trump, Medvedev gave a speech in which he declared that the United States is Russia’s geopolitical rival and that the conflict with the West is “a question of existence” that will last longer than this generation. He rejected any American mediation between Russia and Ukraine and asserted that victory over Ukraine would solve a lot of Russia’s problems.
Medvedev’s speech was a pretty clear statement of long-term conflict. Remember that Putin, in his April 2005 State of the Nation address, said he believed the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Why would we expect a former KGB Colonel who is a fervent Russian nationalist and who wants to reassemble a very strong Russian state to settle for the survival of a Ukraine he is determined to conquer?
While the Russians were telling us we were in a very long conflict that would last over a generation, the Iranians were sending us a clear, unambiguous statement about their intentions.
As the Institute for the Study of War reported:
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei declared on April 30 that Iran will retain control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and maintain its nuclear and missile capabilities, which supports ISW-CTP’s assessment that the Iranian regime is unlikely to make meaningful concessions in its next proposal to the United States…Mojtaba also underscored that Iran will defend its nuclear, missile, and advanced technological capabilities as resolutely as it defends its territorial borders. A senior Iranian official speaking to the Washington Post on April 30 similarly asserted that Iran’s security establishment rejects compromise on key matters, such as Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.
It seems clear that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Major General Ahmad Vahidi now dominates the Iranian dictatorship and represents the hardline position that Iran can withstand American and Israeli attacks and ultimately win the war simply by not giving in.
Western analysts, including those who dominate Washington, D.C., simply cannot break out of their rational, Enlightenment model of reasonableness to understand how unreasonable alternative systems can be, and yet, within their own values and their own experiences, they are following a logic train that is easily understandable.
This was the key problem Winston Churchill faced after reading “Mein Kampf” in the early 1930s and understanding the logic of Hitler’s insanity. He simply could not get the British establishment to listen to Hitler and rearm accordingly.
Consider first the belief system and history that shape General Vahidi. He is part of a religious dictatorship that has been chanting “Death to America” for 47 years. General Vahidi was born in 1958 and joined the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 1979 at the age of 21. He is sanctioned by the United States, Canada, and the European Union for terrorism and nuclear activities.
When we think about the pain our bombing campaign is causing the Iranian government, we have to put it in the context of their experience of the war with Iraq from September 1980 to August 1988. This was a brutal meat grinder in which the Iraqis used chemical weapons. The best estimate is that Iranian casualties were over 1,000,000, with the Iranian death toll somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000.
If you consider that General Vahidi’s experience from the age of 22 to 30 was this brutal war, and since then he has waged terrorist campaigns against the West while focusing on building nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach Europe and the United States, you get a different sense of what we are up against.
If the religiously inspired (and this is the vital fact which the rational West refuses to consider) dictatorship, when it was barely established, could endure an eight-year war with a million casualties, what is the historic yardstick by which we should expect them to accept terms they would regard as a betrayal of the revolution?
This question of pain levels also applies to Putin and the Russian dictatorship. The Soviet Union lost over 20 million dead in World War II. At Stalingrad alone, they lost 40,000 civilians and had about 1,100,000 soldiers killed or wounded.
From a Ukrainian perspective, the horror of the Stalin-enforced famine of 1932 and 1933, which killed 3,900,000 (about 13% of the population) through starvation, is a horrifying reminder of why they fight against Moscow so intensely and at such costs. The Ukrainian word for the famine is Holodomor, which combines the Ukrainian words for starvation and to inflict death. It is reasonable to suggest that the Ukrainians will fight to the end rather than accept subjugation to a city that deliberately starved millions of them to death.
Our enemies are trying to tell us who they really are. Future historians will puzzle at our inability to hear them.
The Chinese and North Korean dictatorships are watching carefully our inability to confront and respond to reality. They will develop their own strategies accordingly, and both will help Russia and Iran survive the inadequate efforts of the United States and its allies.
Literally, the future of the world will be decided by the American ability or inability to learn and change when faced with aggressive evil.
If we do not change and recognize that our enemies are enemies who think differently from us, we will lose. It is that simple.
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Newt Gingrich was the Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Follow him on X @NewtGingrich.
