The Middle East is at a boiling point. Rockets fall daily on Israeli cities, ballistic missiles streak across the sky, and children sleep near shelters instead of in classrooms. Yet much of the Western world watches with confusion, detachment, or outright opposition to the military actions being taken against Iran. On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, Christopher Lochhead sat down with Amiad Cohen, reserve IDF officer and CEO of Herut, the Center for Israeli Liberty. What followed was one of the most clear-eyed and sobering conversations about geopolitics, war, and Western passivity you are likely to hear.

Amiad Cohen brings a perspective shaped by years of national security work and the daily reality of living under missile fire. His argument is not simply about Israel’s survival. It is about how the entire Western world is sleepwalking toward catastrophe, and why the courage to act preemptively may be the most important form of leadership in the modern era.

You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go.

Amiad Cohen on the War Nobody Is Framing Correctly

Amiad Cohen argues that the current conflict is being misread by almost everyone in the public conversation. At its core, he says that this is not just an Israeli war or even an American war against Iran. It is a strategic move in a much larger confrontation between the United States and China. Trump, in Cohen’s view, is playing a four-dimensional chess game, using military pressure on Iran, economic leverage through tariffs, and geopolitical repositioning around Panama and Venezuela to limit China’s ability to threaten global oil supply lines.

China imports roughly 80 percent of its oil through the Malacca Strait, and one of its key counterstrategies in any Taiwan conflict would be to close the Strait of Hormuz. By dismantling Iran’s military capability and opening those straits, the United States is removing a major tool from China’s hand before any direct confrontation begins. Cohen acknowledges this is nearly impossible to explain publicly during an active conflict, but believes Trump is confident the outcomes will speak for themselves once the dust settles.

Strength as the Language of Peace

One of the most compelling threads in the conversation is the relationship between strength and peace. Amiad Cohen references historian Donald Kagan’s book “The Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace,” which argues through five historical examples that the unwillingness to project military force consistently leads to far larger and more destructive wars down the line. From the Peloponnesian War to World War Two, weakness invited catastrophe.

Cohen draws a direct line from that historical pattern to the present moment. Iran, Hezbollah, and their backers were never deterred by diplomacy alone. Every American president from Carter onward declared Iran a threat and vowed to stop its nuclear ambitions, yet none acted with enough force to make that threat credible. Netanyahu and Trump, whatever one thinks of their styles, made the choice to act. Cohen believes that choice, however painful in the short term, is preventing a war that would have been exponentially more devastating.

Why the West Has Forgotten How to Fight Back

Perhaps the most urgent part of the conversation is Cohen and Lochhead’s attempt to diagnose why so much of the Western public, particularly in the United States, struggles to understand or support the use of force even in obvious self-defense. Cohen points to a fundamental difference between first-degree thinking and second-degree thinking. Most people, operating from good intentions and personal kindness, react to immediate appearances. Giving money to someone who looks poor feels good. Understanding that the money might fund something destructive requires a harder, less comfortable kind of reasoning.

Lochhead adds a cultural layer to this diagnosis, pointing to how American legal and social systems have increasingly adopted the belief that there are no bad people, only bad circumstances. This philosophy, however compassionate in origin, has produced a society reluctant to confront evil directly, whether in a courtroom or on a geopolitical stage. Cohen ties it back to the schoolyard bully. Unchecked aggression grows. Strength, projected clearly and credibly, stops it. The West has not forgotten this lesson because it is complicated. It has forgotten it because prosperity and comfort made the lesson feel unnecessary, and that forgetting may prove to be the most dangerous mistake of our time.

To hear more from Amiad Cohen and what’s really happening in Iran, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Amiad Cohen

Amiad Cohen is the CEO of Herut Center, and the publisher of the Hebrew-language intellectual journal, Hashiloach.

He served for several years as the chief executive of his native settlement of Eli and as the head of the Business and Industry Innovation departments of the Mateh Binyamin Development Company.

He is also a partner in several business initiatives in the fields of security and technology.

Links

Hear more from Amiad Cohen!

The Herut Center | X (Formerly Twitter) | LinkedIn

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