President Trump’s supporters have offered some implausible scenarios on the likely outcome of his war of choice with Iran, as well as some wild justifications for it. But the most bizarre justification I’ve come across appears in Francis X. Maier’s essay “On Doing the Right Thing,” published by The Catholic Thing. Trump’s determination to destroy Iran’s supposed nuclear threat and its theocratic tyranny is justified, Maier believes, for the same reason that Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was justified in participating in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In Maier’s view, when it comes to the Iranians, “the lies and violence won’t stop. They can’t, because they’re hardwired into the DNA of a regime moved by religiously diseased hate.” War is the only option. Maier quotes Bonhoeffer: “Doing nothing in the face of such evil is itself evil. And not to act is to act.”
North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, Maier argues, is an example of what happens when U.S. presidents act timidly. “The risks of war were always said to be too high, it was never a good time, and there was always another diplomatic option to exhaust,” he writes. Evidently, the risks of war are rarely too high as far as Maier is concerned. He hopes it will be the Iranian regime and not ordinary Iranians who will suffer, but worries about civilian casualties cannot be “an excuse for paralysis when all other avenues to prevent a grave, impending danger fail,” Maier concludes. But this begs the question: Was the danger Iran posed grave and “impending”?
No one except Trump’s most fervid supporters thinks that the alternatives to war had all been exhausted when the United States joined the Israelis in the attack on Iran—an attack carried out while the United States and Iran were in negotiations. Nor do most experts familiar with Iran believe the war is likely to achieve any of its stated aims, which seem to change from one day to the next. Given the incoherence of Trump’s statements, and the moral depravity of some of his threats against the entire population of Iran, comparing him to Bonhoeffer is laughable. The plot to assassinate Hitler, in which Bonhoeffer had a minor role, was intended to end a war that killed at least seventy million people. Bonhoeffer did not launch a war or threaten that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Maier concedes that in 2026 we confront a vastly different world from the one Bonhoeffer faced in 1945. He also concedes that “a gulf of moral character and heroism separates a man like Bonhoeffer from every recent U.S. president, including the one we have now.” Note the suggestion of a moral equivalence between Trump and his predecessors. In truth, Trump’s “moral character” is flawed in unique and important ways. No other recent U.S. president ever claimed that any election he lost must have been rigged, or incited an assault on the Capitol, or issued wholescale pardons for rioters who attacked police. No other president has lied about the dangers posed by a deadly new virus to protect his poll numbers in an election year. No other president has been found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation. And, of course, no other president has threatened to bomb another country back to the stone age. Let’s be honest: while presidents rarely possess the heroic virtues of a Bonhoeffer, Trump is in a moral category all his own, which is just the way he likes it.
Finally, Maier rests much of his case for war on his understanding of the “existential threat” Iran poses to Israel, one he believes shows the “patterns of human behavior that make history repeat themselves all the time.” Because of the Final Solution, “Jews know” that Iran’s threat to destroy Israel is not mere posturing, but a likelihood that requires preventive war. But while few people would dispute the fact that Iran is a threat to Israel, whether it is an existential threat requiring a preemptive war is a different question. To answer it, one would need careful political, strategic, and technical analysis, not lofty rhetoric and crude historical analogies. By almost every measure, Israel can take care of itself and is rightly determined to do so. Israel is the only country in the region that actually possesses a nuclear arsenal, which it would no doubt be willing to use it if necessary.
Not every threat to Jews or the Jewish state should be understood as a return of the Holocaust, writes Leon Wieseltier, who is no dove when it comes to Israel’s right to defend itself. “Jewish honor requires us to live partially in its shadow, and in that semi-darkness to devise ways not to hate the world,” he writes. “Yet the invocation of the Holocaust must never be designed to shut down clear thinking, or the power to make distinctions. We do not properly respect the memory of the Holocaust by seeing it everywhere.” Wieseltier goes on to question war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and its actions on the West Bank. “What is gained by imprecise or excessive analogies, except to frighten—and in almost every conceivable circumstance in which the Holocaust is invoked, to delude—those whom one seeks to fortify?” he writes. “And why omit the central difference between the Warsaw Ghetto and us, which is the astounding and historically anomalous fact of Jewish power—political and economic power in America, every variety of power in Israel?”
In a recent letter to the editors of Commonweal, Maier took exception to how I had characterized his views in a piece about how Catholic conservatives have championed the work of the late historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch. While praising his critique of contemporary liberalism, Maier and others ignored or dismissed Lasch’s condemnation of modern capitalism and economic inequality. Maier was “careful not to issue any liberal-sounding admonitions about economic inequality, oligarchy, or despotism,” I wrote. Instead, he ended his piece on Lasch on a “pious and nonpolitical note.” In his letter, Maier responded that a pious and nonpolitical note also “characterized the Sermon on the Mount, along with much of the New Testament.” That is true enough, although I suspect Maier would agree that the Sermon on the Mount is not easily translated into a practical policy agenda. When it comes to foreign wars, the Sermon on the Mount lacks the punchiness of Maier’s “Not to act is to act” or, for that matter, Trump’s “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
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