The Decadence of the Western Progressive

Two screens, one story: the triumph of realism abroad—and the surrender of the West at home.

Two significant events in October—playing out side by side—reveal the decadence of today’s progressive movement in the West. On one half of the screen stands the historic peace deal in Gaza; on the other, Jews barred from attending a soccer match featuring an Israeli team in Birmingham, England.

Let’s begin with the Gaza peace deal. President Trump’s 20-point plan signals a historic pro-peace, pro-West realignment in the region—one unmatched since Israel’s founding in 1948.

It also represents a clear rejection of the left’s naïve belief that bad actors can be pacified through de-escalation and accommodation—the guiding principle behind both President Obama’s and President Biden’s foreign policies.

Trump flatly rejected those approaches as dangerous fantasies—acts of useful idiocy the region’s religious extremist regimes eagerly exploit to make fools of the West. Instead, he advanced a new doctrine: a modernized version of President Reagan’s Peace through Strength, updated with one crucial strategic insight.

By breathing new life into Reagan’s Peace through Strength doctrine, Trump made clear that America—and Israel—would not hesitate to dominate the escalation ladder against Iran and its messianic jihadist armies. Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and Iran’s nuclear masterminds all learned this lesson the hard way.

Beyond that, Trump’s strategic update to Reagan’s doctrine introduced a new vision: deep economic cooperation and integration between key Arab states and the West, built on the belief that nations doing business together are far less likely to be killing one another. Historian Niall Ferguson calls this Real Estate-ism—a play on realpolitik.

Three real estate moguls—Trump, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner—none with formal diplomatic training but each with sharp business instincts—read the region far better than the so-called “expert class” of diplomats who racked up decades of failure.

It’s not just that Trump got it right—it’s that Obama, Biden, and the liberal progressive “expert class” managed to get it so wrong for so long.

Perhaps it was because, in his second term, President Obama was determined to disprove Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m. phone call” critique from their primary battle—that he was a lightweight on the world stage. Eager for a legacy-defining achievement, Obama rushed into a nuclear deal with Iran that was a chimera. His Swiss cheese–style JCPOA agreement was built on weakness and Pollyannaish fantasy.

Indeed, the sadistic, ritualistic slaughter of 1,219 Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023—and the taking of 251 hostages—may trace its roots back to the JCPOA. When the deal was signed on July 14, 2015, Iran likely saw it as confirmation of a sentimental and fainthearted West. The JCPOA allowed the Iranian regime to accelerate key parts of its nuclear program while only temporarily pausing the weaponization of uranium. Worse, to finalize the deal, Obama delivered pallets of cash and eased sanctions on the jihadist regime. He then finger-wagged the Gulf states—condescendingly telling them they would “have to share the neighborhood” with the mullahs who sought their subjugation—or destruction.

Photo by Moslem Daneshzadeh on Unsplash

Iran responded to what it clearly saw as concessionary gifts from the United States by executing nearly 1,000 prisoners and continuing its assassination campaign against Americans. The regime also ramped up key parts of its nuclear program left untouched by the JCPOA—especially the development of advanced centrifuges. Meanwhile, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, backed by Hezbollah and Iran, openly defied Obama’s “red line” warning on chemical weapons and continued a genocidal campaign that slaughtered up to 600,000 Syrians. (A note to the Hamas sympathizers on college campuses: you were strangely silent about that.) It became obvious that the region’s strongmen were playing a president out of his depth.

Obama’s protégé, Joe Biden, faithfully followed his former boss’s playbook once he took office as the 46th president—granting over $100 million in sanctions relief to the regime while largely ignoring its growing nuclear threat. Iran, in turn, opened the spigots for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis as they prepared their genocidal assaults on Israel.

While Biden’s visit to Israel immediately after the October 7 attack was commendable, his resolve quickly crumbled once the progressive, anti-Israel left began shouting its pro-Hamas rhetoric and violently attacking Jewish students across university campuses. In the aftermath, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. surged to roughly ten thousand a year, according to the ADL—while most of the Democratic Party looked on in silence.

As the war dragged on and protests grew louder, Biden chose not to address the nation—to explain that Israel has always sought peace, that Hamas seeks only the blood of Israeli Jews, and that the October 7 massacre was, at its core, a brutal assault not just on Israel but on the entire Western world.

At home, Biden shrank from moral clarity, insisting that the pro-Hamas protesters on college campuses “have a point.” Abroad, he repeatedly undercut Israel with his misguided policy of “de-escalation”—ignoring the basic rule of war: you win by controlling the escalation ladder. This, of course, was the same man whom President Obama’s own defense secretary, Robert Gates, said had been wrong on “every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Soon this moral confusion left the U.S.—and by extension, the West—without any coherent strategy for achieving peace. Biden’s vague calls for de-escalation and accommodation amounted to little more than domestic culture wars dressed up as foreign policy.

“Take the win,” Biden’s team urged, trying to dissuade Israel from responding militarily after Iran’s missile attack in April 2024. Biden later attempted to block Israel’s surgical operations in Rafah—strikes that eliminated much of Hamas’s leadership there, including Yahya Sinwar, with virtually no civilian casualties. Meanwhile, Hezbollah ignored Biden’s feeble post–October 7 warning—“Don’t!”—and Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, displacing nearly 60,000 people. It should have been clear by then that U.S. deterrence wasn’t being taken seriously—an open invitation for more war.

Israel neither started the war nor wanted it, yet Biden seemed to believe that the region’s only pluralistic democracy had no right to win it. In the end, Israel crushed Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad—despite Biden’s objections—because Prime Minister Netanyahu refused to heed Washington’s softness and eagerness to accommodate Iran’s bloodthirsty ethnocentric regime.

Looking back, the Obama-Biden policy failures were born of a dangerous illusion—that the region’s terrorists and jihadists could be pacified with cash and diplomatic recognition. This liberal progressive worldview rested on the naïve belief that these actors were “just like us” and would eventually join the so-called “global rules-based order” if only given the right incentives. The fantasy, long embraced by the diplomatic class, now stands exposed as embarrassingly naïve.

When Trump took office for his second term in 2025, his June joint U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, along with his unwavering support for Israel’s campaign to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah, made it unmistakably clear to the region’s terrorists that their genocidal ambitions would end in humiliation. Combined with his May charm offensive among Gulf and Arab states—offering a vision of deeper economic integration—these moves paved the way for a peace plan that, despite Hamas’s resistance, will be difficult to undo.

And that brings us to the other half of the split screen.

When reports surfaced of threats of antisemitic violence at the Israeli–U.K. soccer match in early October, Birmingham authorities faced a choice: stand with the violent extremists or protect the likely pro-Israeli victims. They chose the former—effectively persecuting the victims instead by putting up a “Keep Out” sign.

The job of a local police force is to protect the targets of violence—not the perpetrators. Yet in Birmingham, where Muslim migrants are soon expected to form a plurality, local authorities’ first instinct was to yield to the extremists. They effectively went “full Nazi,” putting up a “Not Welcome” sign for Jews—as if it were Germany in 1939. Leading intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have long warned that this very scenario was coming.

To be sure, many migrants—including those from Arab nations—are law-abiding people simply seeking a better life and a chance to integrate into the U.K. and Europe. But many others, likely in large numbers, carry with them a strain of Muslim Brotherhood–style theological radicalism, aiming to transform European cities into Sharia- or Sharia-adjacent enclaves. Imams across the EU make no secret of this ambition, often declaring it openly on social media.

In the weeks prior, an Islamic extremist—out on bail for a previous violent offense—murdered two Jews at a synagogue in Manchester. Such attacks have become alarmingly routine across Europe, with more than 1,500 incidents reported in the U.K. alone this year. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has aptly called it “Europe’s New War on the Jews.”

The open-borders obsession has deep roots in Western progressive liberalism. It grew out of the post–World War II pluralist mindset, which, at the time, was entirely laudable. The Western liberal of that era seemed to be saying, admirably enough, “Let’s be as far removed as possible from the Nazis’ brutal, racist ethnocentrism.”

But today, that once-enlightened ideal has morphed into something unrecognizable. The Lebanese-born scholar Gad Saad calls it “suicidal empathy.” The mass migration of unassimilated newcomers—many from cultures with values, religions, and beliefs deeply hostile to the West—has become a kind of ritualized self-cleansing of ancestral guilt, a condition that, as writer Coleman Hughes observes, seems to afflict only Western elites.

Multiculturalism, driven by open borders, has become the Western liberal’s way of wearing a “good person” badge—a form of moral self-advertising to fellow progressives. As scholars such as Peter Turchin and Musa al-Gharbi both separately argue, in an age of elite overproduction, this is how privileged leftists compete for social status among themselves. It’s also how many progressives hope to rebuild a new voter base as the working class abandons their increasingly militant cultural and economic agenda.

Just as blinkered diplomats fail to see the limits of their appeasement strategies, progressives overlook how their open-borders creed undermines democratic pluralism. By welcoming millions of unassimilated migrants who may not share the host nation’s civic ethos or social compact, they risk importing the very sectarianism they claim to oppose. In a bitter irony, the Western progressive may be paving the way for the fragmentation of the pluralism they profess to defend.

Both halves of the split screen reveal something important. One exposes the progressive delusion that the Middle East’s bad actors can be reformed through kindness and concessions. The other reveals a secular, open-borders faith that has become a religion unto itself—one now waging war against the very pluralism that progressives claim to champion.

Julian Epstein is the former Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Democrats and former Staff Director of the House Oversight Committee.