I travel a lot for work — it’s part of the job of being a journalist. I’ve reported from six continents and from multiple active war zones, and something I constantly come back to is this: what if the leaders of today’s West had been in charge during World War II? 

What if the United Kingdom had been run by Keir Starmer in the 1940s? Or even worse, by Andy Burnham? What if Canada had been run by Mark Carney? What if France had been run by Emmanuel Macron?

The world would certainly look vastly different — these western countries, a mainstay of the civilized world, are currently the embodiments of how “weak men create hard times.” I recently had the honor of going behind the glass doors at the Churchill War Rooms, where one can almost smell the ash from his chain smoking while perusing his papers, and I was astonished at the fortitude that this one man displayed while he waited with bated breath for America to join the fight for civilization.

In the Churchill War Rooms, there is a phone that he used clandestinely to call his counterpart in America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was dubbed the “Green Hornet.” For months, Churchill exhorted Americans to join the war effort beyond sending supplies, and we did — but only after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor made such a decision all but inevitable.

Today, those leaders are gone in Europe. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have each, in his own unique way, urged — and at times, begged — Europe to rediscover its commitment to greatness. Instead, those pleas are falling on deaf ears.

Today, on the third anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, insists that “today is also a moment to reflect on the unfathomable suffering and killing of Palestinians, both in Gaza and in the West Bank.” 

No, it isn’t, actually. The anniversary of Pearl Harbor is not the day to mourn the loss of Japanese lives — civilian or soldier. It just isn’t. 

“The UK Government is right to call out the reprehensible actions of the Israeli Government and [sic] apply more pressure to keep the prospect of a two-state solution alive,” Khan continued.

The United Kingdom’s current Labour government is on the same side of history as Iran when it comes to Israel. The same country that withstood the Nazis’ onslaught is now praised in Iranian state media for helping to bring about “the end of Israel.”

The UK went from saving civilization under Churchill to “plagiari[zing]” Iranian anti-Semitism, according to Iranian state media, which praised Ed Miliband — the UK’s Jewish Foreign Minister who admits to never attending synagogue — for his decision to boycott Jewish-made goods. 

Iranian propagandists praised Miliband’s condemnation of “Israeli occupiers,” but admonished the “naive UK government” for not giving credit to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in its missives.

The UK’s problems go beyond London’s Mansion House — look at the latest occupant of 10 Downing Street to see how the mighty have fallen. As Andy Burnham ascended to the prime ministership, he felt compelled to curry even more favor with the Red-Green alliance of communists and Islamists than even his predecessor did. This poisonous alliance is increasingly dominating the British left. 

In a Guardian op-ed defending his decision to sanction Jews living in Israel — rather than focusing on protecting Jews living in the UK — Burnham waited until the 17th paragraph to “condemn[] the monstrous terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 in the strongest possible terms.” 

Immediately before Burnham became the UK’s latest unelected prime minister, he was the Mayor of Manchester, where Syrian-born Jihad Al-Shamie attacked and murdered multiple Jews during a car and knife assault on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, on Yom Kippur in 2025. For too many, the Intifada has been globalized. Burnham’s priorities could not be more out of sync with reality.

On October 7th, 2023, the very same day during which Israelis searched for body parts of their loved ones, Macron was the first foreign leader to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to Ophir Falk, Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor, Macron’s immediate instinct was for Israel to negotiate with the barbarians on its southern border. Macron “urged diplomacy and offered to mediate,” Falk recounted. Netanyahu’s Churchillian message was simpler: “Hamas is ISIS.” 

In America, we are not immune from this phenomenon either. 25 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, New York City is run by a mayor who couldn’t muster the courage to condemn a globalized Intifada. In Michigan, Democrats nominated a man so radical that his response to a Hezbollah-inspired suicide attack on a synagogue was that “hurt people hurt people.” Never mind that the attack’s would-be perpetrator, Ayman Mohamed Ghazali, was “hurt” because Israel killed his terrorist brother Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali.

Abdul El-Sayed also confessed that he could not comment on the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad.” El-Sayed’s remarks display a disqualifying lack of courage, but they also concede that for too many in America, the desire to surrender to our enemies, rather than to defeat them, remains strong.

In fact, that is much of the Democratic Party’s closing message in the 2026 midterms: give up on our war with Iran, because gas prices are too expensive at home. Does anyone honestly believe that Democrats are going to make gas prices cheaper? One of President Joe Biden’s first acts as president was to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline. 

This desire to surrender may go beyond the 2026 midterms for Democrats, however. The Democrats’ most recent presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, displayed a stunning lack of awareness of the Middle East when she said she has “studied the maps” of the Middle East, and concluded that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be a disaster. Harris’s moves helped mollify a social media campaign that had its eyes of Rafah, but it fundamentally misunderstood where Hamas’s terrorist leaders were hiding: in Rafah. Harris remains a potential frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s nomination, and her alternatives aren’t much better.

Churchill famously told his compatriots that “we shall never surrender.” For too many liberal leaders in the west, the phrase has been inverted: “we shall always surrender” is the slogan of far too many in Western Europe.

Churchill’s phone line to FDR went two ways. Either man could call the other. Today, when we think about how so many western leaders are content to cower and pander for votes to fanatical Islamists and to surrender-minded liberals, what do we think would happen if we tried to call them?

Would they even pick up the phone?

Matthew Foldi is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Reporter.