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Israel—and America—Have No Choice but to Act
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Israel—and America—Have No Choice but to Act
(Photo by Ismael Adnan via Getty Images)
As Israel begins its ground invasion in Gaza, Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens on the hard strategic decisions facing the West.
By Jay Mens and Niall Ferguson
10.27.23 — International
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Israel—and America—Have No Choice but to Act
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Zugzwang is one of the ultimate challenges for a chess player. In zugzwang, a player is in a situation where any move can only weaken one’s position and carries the risk of checkmate—but not moving isn’t an option. Beyond the intrinsic horror of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it is now obvious that the attack was designed to provoke Israel into reacting. T…

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Jay Mens

Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange, Ernest May Fellow for History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, MENA guy at Greenmantle.

Niall Ferguson

Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. He is a columnist with The Free Press. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of the Latin American fintech company Ualá, and a co-founding trustee of the new University of Austin.

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