The Nova Festival October 7 memorial site in Re’im, Israel, near Gaza, on November 11, 2024. The October 7 massacre is a reminder that evil is real and confronting it should be the lodestar of US foreign policy, writes Amanda Rothschild. (Shutterstock/Omri Eliyahu)

Why Realism Requires Confrontation with Evil

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The remembrance of atrocities should remind us that moral clarity should be an essential feature of US foreign policy.

This September, our nation marked the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the deadliest mass murder of American civilians by foreign forces in our nation’s history. On that fateful day, the terrorists boarded planes alongside their future victims, including young children, then slit their throats and crashed the planes into buildings containing thousands of people, knowing their last act on this earth would be to terrorize and violently kill as many strangers as possible.  

This October marks the third anniversary of the October 7 atrocities in Israel, where terrorists in gleeful fervor raped, mutilated, tortured, and burned their victims—proud of their violent crimes. A summary of the atrocities committed that day obscures the individual horrors experienced by each victim and is woefully inadequate in conveying the monstrousness of their murderers. 

In remembering these horrific attacks and reading the accounts of victims and survivors, we are disgusted by the evil at work in these atrocities. It is common to label the perpetrators’ actions as “medieval,” tying their behavior to a supposedly less evolved state of humanity, somewhere in the distant past, long before the full attainment of civilization.   

This characterization of disturbing violence as if it were a bug, not a feature of humanity’s........

© The National Interest