The Middle East finds itself, despite the catastrophe of Oct. 7 and the current conflagration, at its best chance for peace in 75 years. The only ingredient missing to achieve previously unachievable permanent peace is American leadership. U.S. President Biden has been paralyzed with fear over a “wider war” with Iran, which is exactly what is needed to finally achieve Middle East peace.

Under former President Donald Trump, four Sunni nations joined Egypt and Jordan in normalizing relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords. That brings to six Arab nations at peace with Israel: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. While each of these nations has its own reasons to risk the wrath of their population by making peace with the Jews, the common denominator is economics. Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 couldn’t afford to keep fighting Israel, so they sued for peace. The smaller, wealthy nations that recently normalized relations with Israel in the fall of 2020 did so precisely because of their wealth; they like the taste of economic success and finally wish to build on that success more than they wish to kill Jews. It’s that simple.

Enter the Palestinians. By keeping the “Palestinian cause” a festering and open wound, Iran keeps Israel, the Arabs, and frankly, the world “occupied,” which is the only real “occupation” in Gaza. Iran perpetuates the false narrative that Israel is an occupier of Gaza, even though every single Jew in the coastal enclave was forced to leave in the summer of 2005 and none have ever returned, hoping it would lead to a peaceful coexistence with the Arabs. That failed miserably, and now Iran funds 93% of the war machine and launchpad that Gaza has been turned into after Israel left 19 years ago to keep this narrative hot.

It is widely believed that directly or indirectly, Iran is responsible for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre at the Gaza-Israel border. Why? Because Iran must prevent peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel if it is ever to reign supreme over the Middle East. To that end, the Islamic Republic must destroy Israel (“little Satan”), boot the United States (“big Satan”) out of the region, and engineer the overthrow of the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia—arguably the wealthiest, most powerful Arab nation in the Middle East. Peace between Saudis and Israel would cement the end of Iran’s dream of total dominance of the Middle East and beyond.

On its face, it seems Iran succeeded in that regard. The problem for Tehran is that once the bullets of war start to fly, they act as a catalyst for unpredictable and often unintended consequences. One such consequence is that the pervasive global anti-Zionism and antisemitism exposed by the war, which has shocked American liberals and Democrats who must have slept through much of the last 20 years when they permitted the planting of the seeds of virulent antisemitism. They did so by supporting policies such as Islamist immigration; nearly unlimited student visas from radical Muslim nations; ignoring antisemitic and anti-Israel reporting and bias by the media’s boundless diatribe against Israel with false claims of it being genocidal and apartheid; and, worst of all, promoting anti-Israel and antisemitic education from middle school to college campuses.

But an unexpected thing happened. The country has been shocked and deeply stirred by the magnitude of hatred being displayed at protests in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and at scores of universities. The image of thousands of demonstrators brandishing Palestinian flags, burning American ones, desecrating public menorahs, and violently rioting and disrupting Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations all while screaming for the death of the Jews is just too much to ignore. Conservatives have found it surprising that these same liberals and Democrats who enabled such antisemitism are finally seeing what their well-intentioned but naive support for the evil forces of the “anti-Jew movement.” And it frightens them, as it should. What we are witnessing now is a deep schism in liberal precincts, including the media and the Democratic Party itself.

Back to our enormous, missed opportunity. We have 19 American warships, including three battle groups, in the Middle East. We all remember when Biden repeatedly whispered to Iran and its proxies: “If you’re thinking about joining the war—don’t.” Well, Iran and its proxies have attacked the United States more than 100 times and Israel dozens of times, and still, all that American firepower just sits in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

Iran is the undisputed aggressor. Could we ask for a better invitation to justifiably attack the Iranians offensive capability? Now imagine a world where America had a leader. The United States would take advantage of the opportunity to use its awesome military might in the region to diminish Iran’s offensive capacity that must include employing bunker-busting bombs to set back their nuclear capability. No one is calling for U.S. boots on the ground, just good old-fashioned, made-in-the-USA ordinance to set Iran back a few years, and most importantly, to re-establish the deterrence that Biden squandered early in his presidency.

Better to act now before Iran has nuclear-tipped warheads. Yes, there is a risk of a wider war. But imagine Iran having intercontinental nuclear missiles aimed at New York, Boston and Philadelphia. What could be worse than that from these maniacal religious zealots who hate us more than they love life? A “wider war.” I think not.

If we could find the courage to act, then we can stand strong with Israel and counter the global false narrative that Israel is committing genocide when it is actually among the most humane armies in the history of warfare. We would continue to provide material to Israel as they finally and irreversibly eliminate Hamas in Gaza.

Finally, America’s military action against Iran and its proxies would push them back onto their heels to create the best opportunity to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East. Nothing breeds success like success, so we would, by our action, open the path for other Arab nations—likely Saudi Arabia—to join the Abraham Accords. Who benefits? Everyone except Iran and its new axis partners, North Korea, China and Russia. Importantly, the Palestinians also benefit as they shed the albatross of Hamas and their Iranian benefactors, who have stolen their wealth, their peace and their futures for 17 years.

The Gaza war is not only about Israel’s survival; it’s about our own. The current conflagration in the Gaza Strip is much more consequential than most people believe it to be. Israel’s destiny is the West’s destiny. This is not a simple land dispute. It never was. It’s the best example of the generational struggle between radical Islam and modernity. In it, Hamas is a surrogate for Iran and Islamists, and Israel is a surrogate for America and the West. This is a winner-take-all struggle for Israel but also for modernity and Western culture.

America and the West (including Israel) are at a crossroads in history. So early in the 21st century, we are embroiled in a fight for the world order. In one corner are the cumulative hard-learned cultural gains the West has carved out of history by promulgating and honing Judeo-Christian values in an uncivilized world. In the other is fundamentalist Islam, which has changed very little since the days of Mohammad some 1,400 years ago. The Islamists emulate the worst their religion has to offer; the raping of women, the beheading of nonbelievers (of Islam), the killing of Jews, and absolute intolerance of infidels who must convert to Islam or die. All of these are the “teachings” in Islamic scripture from the Koran and the Hadith (life of the prophet, Mohammad). Today’s Muslim radicals are remnants of the despotic, misogynistic rulers and backward thinkers of Islam from a bygone era. They exist with only one goal: the global imposition of fundamentalist Islam by defeating the West and expunging the blasphemy that is our Judeo-Christian democracies, starting with Israel and ending with America. There is no “live and let live” with Islamists. The Bible also has its share of violent passages. The difference is that over the centuries, Jews and Christians have mostly relegated the anachronistic aspects of their scripture to history and promoted the lessons of tolerance and love for one’s fellow man.

The answer is simple: We got here by sleeping through unfettered immigration, and decades-long antisemitic, anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda funded largely by Arab money. This Arab money flows into our universities as we educate radical foreigners who spread to our children their deceptive and poisonous lies. Vladimir Lenin once quipped: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” This is the playbook they use, and they wield it well to kill two birds with one stone. Anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment bombard the younger generations in public schools and universities, Hollywood and via social media bots. The nearly universal and constant diatribe denigrating Israel has largely succeeded. They have literally recruited our children from under our noses, often aided by well-intentioned but ignorant liberals, Democrats and media sources. They are adept at using our liberties against us as they blur the line between religion and politics, thereby wrapping themselves in the protective cloak of Islam the religion, insulated from criticism. This “lawfare”—using our precious freedoms against us—is how they have come so far in so short a time.

Time is not on the side of the West. In a world where Muslims weren’t hell-bent on killing Jews and Christians, and destroying their cultures, no one would care that the growth rate of Islam far exceeds other religions. In Europe since 1990, 90% of all immigration has been Islamic. A Pew study projects that the percentage of Muslims in Europe will grow 70% by 2030 and exceed 14% by 2050. For any culture to sustain itself, the reproduction ratio of children to parents must be 2.11 to survive 25 years. In other words, each set of parents must produce just over two kids (statistically) to persevere. As a population shrinks, so does its culture. A growth ratio of 1.9 or lower has never been reversed. The non-Muslim reproductive ratio for France is 1.8; England 1.6; Greece 1.3; Germany 1.3; Italy 1.2; Spain 1.1; and 1.6 for both Canada and the United States. Muslims in all European nations and America exceed 2.1 and are as high as 4.4 in some countries. Between reproductive statistics and immigration, we had better defeat Islamism soon.

If Hamas survives the war, in any capacity, then Israel loses it. This would be a catastrophic loss for Israel because it would prove them incapable of obliterating an enemy for the first time, particularly a relatively weak one that is not even a nation-state. The ecstatic empowerment of radical Islam in America and the Western world from Israel’s defeat will be insuperable, and Israel will not likely survive it. Worse than that (even though worse is hard to imagine), America and the West will suffer an exponential increase in Islamist hostility at a time when we are reeling from the Islamist hate and hostility plaguing us.

Western culture is crumbling, and the last thing it needs is an accelerant. We have never experienced this magnitude of moral bankruptcy in our citizenry, our leaders and our media. This is why our destiny is so vulnerable to—and may be predicted by—Israel’s success or failure in this war. This is why Israel’s fate is America’s fate.