Free nations prefer peace to war, but that preference is complicated by the continued existence of nations led by criminals, ideologues and irredentists. In a fallen world, war eventually comes, wanted or not.
And it’s coming. Iran and its proxies, having started one war in Israel, don’t appear reluctant to consider another with the U.S. A Russian victory in Ukraine, even a partial one, would make eventual confrontation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization almost inevitable. China menaces Taiwan. And the possibility that Kim Jong Un isn’t plotting an attack on South Korea—or on the U.S.—is a bet only a fool would take.
These admittedly rather basic reflections occurred to me as I read Mark Helprin’s latest novel, “The Oceans and the Stars.” The book, which went on sale on Oct. 3, relates fictional circumstances that became far easier to credit four days later. Mr. Helprin’s novel imagines a war launched by Iran against the U.S. and Israel, a political class that views national security exclusively as a means of gaining electoral advantage, a perpetually irritable American president whose chief goal is to avoid blame, and an army of terrorists capable of savagery so repellent that Western elites refuse to contemplate it.
There are other anticipatory details. Mr. Helprin’s story, written between 2019 and 2022, somehow counters the American news media’s outrage over Israel’s inadvertent targeting of World Central Kitchen aid workers in April of this year. The novel’s hero, a U.S. Navy captain, observes that compared with Israel, “we’ve killed vastly many more of our own in friendly fire, thousands actually, yet we find it hard to accept that someone else can do it.”
Last month I visited Mr. Helprin’s home here, some 10 miles north of Charlottesville. On the wall of his vast and spacious library I spy a framed August 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill on the deck of the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, the ship on which the prime minister met FDR to enlist the U.S. in the struggle against fascism. I came to Earlysville—I say this at the risk of melodrama—to ask Mr. Helprin the sort of question that Churchill had contemplated in the years before that photograph was taken: Are we ready to fight?
The answer today is plainly no. But neither were the British in 1935. What does America need to do to get ready?
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Author: Ruth King
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