Following the horrific October 7 atrocities, conservative nationalists across Europe faced an existential awakening.
Surrounded by massive, aggressive Muslim immigrant supporters of Hamas on the streets, in alliance with the Left, a civilizational line was drawn. European nationalists, shocked by decades of unchecked immigration, unambiguously chose the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western civilization.
Cleverly leveraging this civilizational divide, Israel’s foreign policy apparatus forged deep alliances with those suddenly alert to the threat. Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry’s invitation to prominent European right-wing figures signals the emergence of a new strategic alignment.
The resulting cultural shockwave even drove the European Parliament to pass its most restrictive anti-immigration package in history: a feat considered impossible just years ago.
It is also worth noting that following the atrocities of October 7, the global Iranian diaspora emerged as a rare and unwavering pillar of solidarity with the Jewish people. While antisemitic demonstrations surged across parts of the Western world, Iranians across North America and Europe repeatedly stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.
The American insulation and the horseshoe effect
Yet, in the United States, a different and highly perilous political dynamic has unfolded. Lacking Europe’s massive, concentrated demographic shifts due to migration from Muslim countries, the American populace did not experience the same immediate civilizational jolt.
This geographic insulation created a vacuum where a toxic political phenomenon took root: the horseshoe theory in full effect, culminating in an unholy ideological convergence between America’s progressive anti-Zionist Left and the populist isolationist Right.
The cracks in what was once a rock-solid bipartisan consensus became glaringly visible. Following the joint US-Israeli defensive and preemptive strikes aimed at neutralizing Tehran’s rapid advancement toward a nuclear arsenal and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), a surreal harmony emerged in Washington’s political discourse.
Suddenly, establishment Democrats and MAGA isolationists were reading from the exact same script. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton gave voice to this very sentiment, describing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “obsessed” with relentlessly pressuring the US into backing an attack on Iran, recounting high-pressure demands that American leadership fall in line.
When figures from the globalist center-left echo the talking points of right-wing populist influencers like Megyn Kelly, framing Israel’s existential struggle as a calculated effort to “bamboozle” or drag America into doing Jerusalem’s “dirty work,” the horseshoe theory is no longer a political abstraction; it is an active threat to Western collective defense.
US Vice President JD Vance’s recent extraordinary lashing out at Israel and effectively framing the country as diplomatically isolated without US President Donald Trump is deeply worrisome. Vance’s rhetoric mirrors the exact pressure tactics traditionally weaponized by the progressive Left to undermine the Jewish state.
A forgotten history of aggression
This rhetoric is not merely flawed; it is a dangerous display of historical amnesia that jeopardizes American national security. To frame the Iranian regime as an “Israel-only problem” requires ignoring over four decades of bloodshed. The Islamic Republic’s war is not against the Jewish state alone; it is against the entire free world, with the United States designated as the “Great Satan.”
Islamists and leftists do not hate the US just because it supports Israel; they hate Israel because the Jewish state is the beacon of light of American values in the Middle East, just as they hated the Shah of Iran for his Western values, resulting in the disaster of 1979.
These American isolationist and progressive critics appear to have forgotten October 23, 1983, when an Iranian-backed suicide bomber drove a truck into the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, murdering 241 American servicemen. They ignore the decades of global terror, the American soldiers killed by Iranian-made IEDs in Iraq, and the continuous targeting of US assets across the Middle East.
The regime in Tehran has never hidden its ultimate ambitions. The development of nuclear technology paired with ICBM capabilities is not meant for regional skirmishes: you do not build intercontinental missiles to hit Tel Aviv. The regime’s strategic ambitions became undeniably clear with its recent long-range missile strikes targeting Diego Garcia, a distance of over 4,000 kilometers.
This reckless escalation proves that Tehran is no longer bound by regional limits, openly testing the precise foundational technology required for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) designed to strike the American homeland. If the Ayatollahs successfully acquire a nuclear umbrella, they will not hesitate to strike American targets, just as Hamas did not hesitate to breach Israel’s borders on October 7.
The wake-up call for Washington
By treating the war against the Islamic Republic as a foreign entanglement engineered by a foreign power, both the isolationist Right and the progressive Left are actively undermining the West’s collective defense. The Left views the conflict through a distorted lens of intersectional oppression, casting Israel as an “aggressor.”
Meanwhile, the populist Right adopts a short-sighted “America First” provincialism, failing to understand that protecting global stability and standing by our most vital democratic ally is the ultimate form of American self-defense. Europe learned the hard way that ignoring civilizational threats only brings the crisis directly to your doorstep.
America’s political class must wake up to the same reality. The strikes against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure were not a favor to Israel; they were a necessary defense of human civilization against a tyrannical, theological regime seeking global reach.
When the far-left and the far-right unite to scapegoat Israel for a war initiated by Tehran’s aggression, they do not preserve American peace. They merely signal weakness to a regime that plans for our ultimate destruction.
It is time for mainstream American leaders to reject this toxic convergence, restore the bipartisan alliance, and recognize that the fight against the Iranian axis is a shared struggle for the survival of the free world.
Anti-Netanyahu: new cover for antisemitism
Ultimately, this surreal convergence exposes a grim, timeless truth: antisemitism is a chronic human disease. Where the Western Left once rebranded this ancient prejudice as “anti-Zionism,” its modern name is now “anti-Netanyahu,” because he happens to be the wartime prime minister of Israel during an existential war.
What these foreign critics fail to comprehend is that within Israel, there is absolute, unyielding unity when it comes to defending the Jewish state. This internal solidarity transcends all partisan divides, as MK Benny Gantz recently emphasized in an interview with Al Arabiya, stating: “I trust Netanyahu, but I have political differences with him.”
By using political figures as a proxy to scapegoat Israel, the American far-left and far-right do not just misunderstand Israeli democracy; they actively align themselves with a global bigotry that seeks nothing less than the dismantling of the Jewish state.
The writer is an Iranian journalist and former editor-in-chief of ManotoTV.