The conflict with Iran is a reminder of how incredibly dumb we've become when thinking about power. To our self-appointed intellectual elites, power is an abstraction, and therefore operates as a consensual exchange with mutually agreed-upon terms, usually rooted in some sort of claim on morality or virtue. You must check your privilege! You must respect my pronouns! If you don't, I will call you a bad person! This is how academics think. It's also why the entire conversation around COVID, for example, revolved not around actual facts--which measures were effective and which weren't--but around authority, or who has the power to call the shots. And for decades, that was the logic of our approach to Iran, with the smart set devising agreements and frameworks to make sure we contain and address and engage. It took Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump two weeks and a handful of muscular military operations to prove that it was all a hoax, that Iran had absolutely no power, and that real power -- unlike the sort valorized in newsrooms and college classrooms -- is less guilt trip and more precision strike. Here's hoping we all learned the lesson.
See Tweet