In Part 1 we identified the structural mismatch between how the Western world treats war and how revolutionary movements do.
To the West, as codified in the UN Charter and elsewhere, war it treated as an episode with a beginning and an end. But revolutionary movements treat it as a permanent condition that merely changes form.
If that analysis is correct, it should be visible in the historical record. And it It is, with a consistency that is difficult to explain any other way. And understanding this makes us understand that the revolutionary mentality is a challenge not just to Western societies but to the entire rules based international order.
Consider the conflicts that define the modern era of asymmetric warfare.
The Israeli-Arab conflict stated before Israel with the desire of Arab states to stop or destroy the Jewish state. On a national level, it was obviously a threat to Israel's existence, but the national character of Israel's enemies allowed them to have a measure of pragmatism, seen in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, and more recently in the Abraham Accords. Before the Six Day War, however, the Palestinian leadership adopted a revolutionary model, where the war would continue until Israel is destroyed - whether by military, legal or demographic means.
So Oslo was not a peace treaty in the way the Camp David accords were. It was a means towards the same goal that Yasir Arafat defines int he 1970s - destroying Israel in stages. This is why the Second Intifada followed Palestinian rejection of a state - it was a new tactic in the same war. The war - which is still called a revolution by the PLO and Fatah - never ended, and there is no prospect for it ever ending. Fatah and Hamas disagree on tactics but they agree on the goal.
Afghanistan consumed a Soviet empire and then an American one. The Taliban were removed from power in 2001 with startling speed. They spent the next twenty years doing what Mao prescribed: organizing, propagandizing, and waiting. When the occupying force finally exhausted its patience and left, the Taliban returned within weeks. The episode ended; the movement hadn't.
Hezbollah has been at war with Israel since 1982. Even after Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon behind UN-certified borders, Hezbollah did not disband - it continued to use Lebanon as a military launching pad against Israel, it continued to build a massive military, it continued to threaten war and terror. After the 2006 war, including UN resolutions on how to maintain peace and with a UN force overseeing it, Hezbollah patiently rebuilt its arsenal from tens of thousands of rockets to hundreds of thousands, embedding them in civilian infrastructure across southern Lebanon. The international framework produced exactly one outcome: time for Hezbollah to prepare the next round. Which is what revolutionary theory demands.
Iran has been at war with the West since 1979 — through hostage crises, through proxy networks spanning four continents, through nuclear negotiations, through the JCPOA and its collapse, through missile strikes on American bases, through the funding and arming of every significant anti-Western terror organization in the Middle East. Each confrontation was treated by the West as a discrete incident to be managed. Iran treated each one as a phase in a continuous revolutionary struggle to build a Shiite Crescent - an "axis of resistance" - way beyond its borders.
This is how revolutionary continuous-war conflicts work. Which makes defeating them extraordinarily difficult. And one example from recent history shows this starkly.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - the Tamil Tigers - had waged one of the most sophisticated and brutal insurgencies in modern history for over twenty-six years. They invented the suicide belt. They operated a navy and an air force. They controlled significant territory. They were, by any measure, a formidable revolutionary movement with deep ideological roots and genuine popular support among Tamil civilians.
In May 2009, the Sri Lankan military cornered the last remnants of the LTTE in a tiny coastal strip in the north of the country. And then it destroyed them in a matter of weeks.
It did so by ignoring virtually everything the international community demanded. They were ruthless, they did not care about civilian casualties, they didn't care about humanitarian corridors or feeding the enemy. The military advanced regardless of UN condemnation and international pressure. It killed or captured the entire LTTE leadership. It destroyed the movement's military capacity completely.
The civilian death toll in those final months was catastrophic. Estimates range from ten thousand to forty thousand. The Sri Lankan government has never been fully held accountable. International human rights organizations documented what they described as war crimes.
And the war ended. Permanently. There was no pause, no ceasefire, no temporary de-escalation to allow hostage swaps. The LTTE has not reconstituted. The revolutionary engine was destroyed completely and it has not restarted.
The lesson is brutal and unavoidable: the only successful termination of a genuine revolutionary continuous-war conflict in recent history required doing exactly what the international framework prohibits - pursuing total destruction of the movement without pause, without negotiation, without regard for international legal norms, until the engine that generated the conflict could no longer function.
I'm not condoning the atrocities that Sri Lanka are said to have done. But the West has not considered the downside of the alternative - allowing a terror group to continuously regroup and keep murdering until it reaches its goal. International law means to protect the innocent but it also protects the non-state actors who attack the innocent and plan to keep doing so. It is a broken mechanism - because it still thinks of wars as episodic and not continuous.
As we have mentioned, international law requires an imminent threat before starting a war. But modern revolutionary wars do not start neatly and they weaponize the episodic war assumptions of international law. This can be seen in a brilliant analogy given Israeli analyst Shany Mor:
Israel is supposed to accept the presence of armed militias dedicated to its destruction either because Israel is so strong that it could meet any threat or because meeting the threat now would be too costly. It means that the deterrence Israel is supposed to exercise over its enemies is purely theoretical. I call this the avocado model of deterrence. The conditions for Israeli military action are always not ripe, not ripe, not ripe, and then way too late.
Avocado deterrence was the rule with Hizballah in Lebanon after 2006 just as it was the rule with Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. And nowhere was the avocado principle more dearly held to than in Gaza. Hamas rockets were something Israel needed to learn to tolerate or even accept that it deserved. ...Any Israeli preventive action against the growing arsenal of rockets and tunnels was, as it was always asserted, an overreaction to an exaggerated threat.
Until the threat is too big and a response would incur unacceptable costs. Which is what happened with Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran.
The imminence doctrine doesn't just fail against this strategy. It actively serves it. By requiring a moment of clear and present danger before action is legally justified, it hands the adversary a precise target to stay below. The legal framework becomes a roadmap for how to build threat without triggering response.
But earlier response to possible enemies brings its own set of problems, Any loosening of moral standards can be used by malign states to suppress legitimate dissent. These problems are genuinely hard, but we need to be clear-eyed about what morality demands and the tradeoffs involved — because refusing to grapple with them honestly hands a decisive advantage to those who would destroy the liberal democratic model entirely.
The historical record is grim - except for one model that seemingly violates international law, yet avoided the horrors of Sri Lanka.
In June 1981, Israeli jets destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. The entire world condemned it. The UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution censuring Israel. Legal scholars called it a flagrant violation of international law. Iraq was years away from a nuclear weapon. The threat was not ripe.
Thirty years later, after the Gulf War revealed what Saddam Hussein had actually intended, Dick Cheney sent Israeli General David Ivri ,who planned the Osirak raid, a note thanking him for preventing the US from facing a nuclear armed Iraq.
Osirak didn't end a forever war. It prevented one. And the price Israel paid for that prevention was universal condemnation for acting before the threat was - in the view of international law - ripe.
Every mechanism the West designed to end wars - ceasefires, negotiations, international pressure, legal constraints - has been used by revolutionary movements as a tool for continuing them. They were designed for adversaries who share the goal of ending conflicts, not to continue them forever.
The mismatch between episodic and continuous war theory isn't an accident of history or a failure of imagination by well-meaning institution builders. Revolutionary doctrine, from Mao through Gramsci through its Islamist inheritors, explicitly studied Western liberal democracy's moral commitments and built a strategy around exploiting them.
Liberal democracies cannot easily strike first without overwhelming evidence of a direct and imminent threat. They cannot sustain long wars because their electoral cycles demand results. They cannot ignore civilian casualties because their values demand restraint. They cannot dismiss legal criticism because their legitimacy depends partly on institutional standing. Every one of these constraints, genuine and honorable in origin, becomes a weapon in the hands of an adversary who shares none of them and has no intention of being bound by them.
This is why every exit from these conflicts accepted in the West degrades the liberal democratic side somehow. Strike early and you're the aggressor. Strike late and you've absorbed catastrophic damage. Negotiate and you've handed them time and legitimacy. Accept deterrence and you've accepted permanent attrition.
The revolutionary side doesn't need to win today. It needs you to have no good options. And it has spent decades making sure you don't.
We need to rethink the entire theory of war and then build a framework that can prioritize protecting one's own people over those of the enemy. Because that is what real morality demands. And Osirak gives a hint of how such a theory should be built.
That is what we will attempt to tackle next.
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