Culture counts. It is not everything, but it is often the most important influence, whether in an organization or a corporation or a nation.

I spent some time in Japan on business, and I loved the culture of precision, efficiency, care, and self-sacrifice, replete with an insistence on finding the natural beauty wherever it is. I knew I didn’t dare come to the station a minute late for my train—I’d see it departing as I would be running up the stairs. Not like my Amtrak experiences, where the only question was how late the train would be.

I could rely on people paying attention, whether it was the desk clerk that left her post at the hotel to help me get my bags down to the train platform across the street, and refused to take a tip; or the driver who saw me walking down a street in Hiroshima looking for my errant hotel, who saw my lost look, offered his help, and drove me to my lodgings. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: The Eclipse Transcends Politics and Division)

I can rely on my Toyota Corolla that I bought new in 2007 and now has over 600k miles on it.

These things are in the culture.

There were other things in that culture that were prominent eight decades ago—aggression, cruelty, and a disregard for life—especially that of nationalities they considered lesser than their own. They made the Japanese formidable warriors and it made them cruel masters. The Rape of Nanking is a brutal chapter in history; their making sex slaves of thousands of Korean women was horrific. Their cruelty to prisoners of war is infamous.

The goal of the nations Japan attacked in World War II was not just to turn Japan back and get it to give back conquered territory. It was also to obliterate its war machine and to remake its culture. Here General Douglas MacArthur had the greatest success of his career. I could feel the result and I admire the culture today.

The utopians running American foreign policy feel that people are infinitely malleable and that there are no real constraints on people that can stop them from being perfect. No need to pay attention to culture—if we can imagine a place for them in our thought, that’s good enough.

The problem is that most empowered utopians really don’t want to suffer the consequences of their policies, and they don’t much care about those little people to whom those consequences are exclusively diverted.

And so they ignore culture. Their utopian program will fix everything and is to be instituted without any thought of the beliefs, attitudes, goals, or behavior of the people they are fixing.

But if there is one thing the deeply committed people know, it is how to outlast trends in thought and politics. They think long-term. Whether it is a religion of life or a cult of death, they make plans to survive til their opportunity arises.

Thus Hamas waited out the trendiness of the utopians in Israel and the U.S., knowing it would bring them an opportunity to do what is at the core of their religious commitment—bring death to Israel and, they hope, to the United States. That is their culture, which they inculcate from the earliest childhood years. For the West, they  make videos of suffering as a consequence of the war they start. On their own media, in their own language, though, they are explicit about their deadly aims, with mothers and grandmothers urging their offspring to become martyrs, so long as they can kill some Jews. (READ MORE: A Political Movement Upends the Word ‘Genocide’)

Our Utopians at Foggy Bottom pay no attention. They want the outer trappings of peace, They do not have to live next door to the rump of Hamas whose survival they guarantee. So what if another 10,000 rockets fall on Israel. You won’t hear them squawk as they did at Israel’s prosecuting its war against Hamas’ army of rapists. And they will not be there on the receiving end when the next obscene incursion inevitably pours forth. They won’t pay much attention. They care more about their own pristine dream.