When I was 11 years old, I wasn’t one of the 100 million people who watched the apocalyptic movie The Day After when it aired on ABC in November of 1983. I’m pretty sure I was tuned into CBS, watching Vera the waitress get married on Alice. But the societal impact of the movie’s depiction of nuclear war and radioactive fallout in the American heartland was inescapable, not just to a child but to the White House.
One month earlier, President Ronald Reagan screened an advance copy, then confessed his reaction to his diary:
It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed … Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant [sic] say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.
Reagan’s in-house biographer, Edmund Morris, later wrote the diary entry was “the first and only admission I have been able to find in his papers[] that he was ‘greatly depressed.’”
When the movie aired nationwide, ABC News immediately followed it with a roundtable discussion hosted by Ted Koppel, featuring Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, Carl Sagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., Brent Scowcroft, and Robert McNamara. Koppel began with an interview of the current Secretary of State George Shultz, who sought to be reassuring: “Nuclear war is simply not acceptable, and that fact and the realization of it has been the basis for the policy of the United States for decades now—the successful policy of the United States.” But as noted by Frances FitzGerald, the historian who wrote Way Out There in the Blue about Reagan’s foreign policy, “Unfortunately, the appearance of the real-life secretary of state talking somberly about nuclear weapons gave the movie even more verisimilitude.”
Perhaps fortunately. Despite Reagan’s reputation as a reckless saber-rattler and warmonger, he was serious about working with the Soviet Union to avert the threat of nuclear war. Reagan infamously derailed the hastily arranged 1986 Reykjavik summit with Mikhail Gorbachev by refusing to give up his then-implausible “Star Wars” space-based missile defense plan, but an initial agreement was made to ban intermediate-range nuclear weapons, and such a treaty was finalized the following year. The director of The Day After, Nicholas Meyer, received a telegram from Reagan: “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did.”
Reagan may not have always been the most serious person. And the country may not have been wise to elect a former actor who lacked interest in policy details. But he was president in serious times, in which superpowers clashed over the enormous questions of how we should govern ourselves and how we should organize our economies, while recognizing all humanity would be lost if the clash recklessly escalated. It was a serious enough time for over 40 percent of the American population to watch a disturbing movie about a nuclear holocaust, and serious enough for global leaders to set aside longstanding animosities and work to prevent World War III.
Today, we may be sliding toward World War III, but what we’re seeing is less like an apocalyptic drama and more like a plotless farce.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran despite lacking consensus on the war’s objective, with Netanyahu committed to regime change and Trump’s shifting rationales most often landing on an end to Iran’s nuclear program. The initial joint plan was so unserious it envisioned the Iranian regime being taken over by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the face of Iran’s nuclear program from 2005 to 2013. When that plan fell apart after an air strike almost killed Ahmadinejad, Trump and Netanyahu’s goals diverged. Trump agreed to a ceasefire in April but Netanyahu wouldn’t stop attacking Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, as the Israeli leader wants to take advantage of a weakened Iran. Last week, Trump lashed out at Netanyahu for complicating his diplomacy. When Iran proved strong enough to attack Israel over the weekend, Trump publicly pressured Netanyahu to stand down in an interview with the Financial Times. Israel fired back on Monday. Then Trump launched his own airstrikes on Tuesday and Wednesday, ostensibly in response to Iran taking out an American helicopter. On Thursday, Trump called off planned strikes and suggested that a deal signing was imminent, “maybe over the weekend.”
Throughout this convoluted narrative the president has insisted that a deal containing Iran’s nuclear program is imminent, but it is Trump who in 2018 withdrew from Barack Obama’s deal that was doing just that. And he didn’t need to start a war to bring the Iranians back to the negotiating table because in February they were already at the table. It remains to be seen whether at this point we can get a deal, whether such a deal is a significant improvement over what Trump junked, and whether any deal can contain Israel enough for it to hold.
What has been accomplished with the Iran war, on top of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 murderous mass kidnapping attack on Israel and Israel’s massacre of a response, is an obliteration of anything remotely resembling a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. And that is an underlying source of global destabilization. Middle East analysts used to compare the peace process to a bicycle that needs to keep pedaling forward or else the rider falls off. We’re seeing that adage being proved true.
Not only have Israeli and Palestinian leaders abandoned two-state solutions, American appetites are diminishing as well. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan questioned the premise of Israel’s existence to his Jewish supporters. Jerry Seinfeld glibly says Palestine doesn’t exist. Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes in America are on the rise. And what happens in America has bearing on what happens in the Middle East. Without America applying pressure for a two-state solution, the proverbial bicycle is on the ground, and the literal missiles are in the air.
But the road to world war currently looks less like The Day After and more like a mashup of Groundhog Day and Idiocracy. Every day features the same bloviating from Trump, wildly careening from empty promises of world peace to empty promises of total destruction. Every day gas prices remain elevated because Trump’s impulsive cockiness didn’t account for Iran’s ability to seize the Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes. We saw a similar repetitive pattern with Trump beginning his presidency with boasts he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine immediately and then showing petulance when Ukraine wouldn’t fold at his command. Because Trump’s repetitiveness is not as entertaining as Bill Murray’s, and since most of us are not directly impacted or threatened by the violence, we tune out the president’s blather.
However, what’s merely stupid today could become more apocalyptic tomorrow. We have too many egotistical sociopathic leaders—in America, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Russia, and the Arab states—who would rather flex their masculinity with bombs and social media bravado than make concessions or cede power in the name of global stability. And that’s not going to change until people put pressure on them to change. That’s obviously difficult to accomplish with dictatorial leadership, which is why the people in the democracies of America and Israel are best positioned to break the cycle of idiocracy. Voters should demand new, serious leaders who will get the world back on the two-state solution bicycle.
