The recent events on the Israeli-Iranian front carry significance not only in regards to Iran’s nuclear threat, but also as a potential change in the Western paradigm of foreign engagement.

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”

Those words of FDR after the brutal attack on Pearl Harbor marked the last time the West engaged in a decisive and successful foreign intervention. The US joining WWII changed the world, and put the United States of America on the world stage of international affairs, as an active player that shapes the world order. While the lessons the West learned from WWI was idealism, restraint and isolationism, the lessons from WWII was activism, and total surrender of evil. Since then, a few decades of bad experiences on foreign interventions, and of course the collapse of the USSR, marked the resuscitation of the isolationism paradigm.

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. From Republican Richard Nixon in 1970- “America cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.”, Through Democratic  Obama in 2013-…