The Arc of a Covenant, page 5
It is rare for solar astronomers to go off on wild-goose chases like the hunt for Planet Vulcan, but students of foreign policy lead less predictable lives. In the world of foreign policy, even experts go badly wrong, and history is full of examples in which very serious and thoughtful people have fundamentally mistaken the nature of the forces with which they were trying to deal. As noted earlier, a common source of often very damaging mistakes comes when foreign policy practitioners mix stripped-down and simplified assumptions about how groups of people behave—stereotypical ideas about ethnic groups, religious communities, and ideological movements, for example—with simplistic theories about the international system. The result is almost always confusion, and the consequences are often grim. As shrewd and as ruthless as Joseph Stalin was, crude Marxist ideas about how “bourgeois” and “imperialist” governments behaved often led him astray. Adolf Hitler’s foreign policy was distorted by his belief that “the Jews” were behind both the capitalist and communist governments that he faced. During the Cold War, Americans frequently missed the subtleties and complexities of important international developments because they viewed events through a simplistic “us vs. them” paradigm. Had Americans understood how estranged the Soviet Union and China had become by the early 1960s, the most tragic American misadventure of the Cold War era might have been avoided.
We’ve seen that stereotypes and illusions based on oversimplified political theories have played a significant role in American policy in the Middle East. Crude ideas about the nature of Iraqi society and its prospects for democracy led the George W. Bush administration to misread the realities of Middle Eastern politics in Iraq; just a few years later the Obama administration would make eerily similar mistakes about the Arab Spring in countries as important as Egypt. We’ve seen that orientalist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims have frequently led Americans to miss opportunities and make false steps in the Middle East. Similarly, stereotypes about Jews, in the United States and abroad, have often confused analysts about the sources and aims of American policy.
Indeed, the way many observers have thought about America’s relationship with Israel bears an uncanny resemblance to Le Verrier’s approach to Planet Vulcan. The United States and the other states in the international system are seen to circle the sun of the national interest on steady and predictable orbits—except for a certain wobble in the American orbit when the subject of Israel comes up. The search for Planet Vulcan, the mass of dark matter whose gravitational pull is responsible for America’s deviation from the true path of the national interest, has engaged many minds.
Down through the years there has been no shortage of books and articles claiming that an “Israel lobby” that prioritizes Israel’s interests over those of the United States, composed largely of American Jews and empowered by their wealth (“It’s all about the Benjamins,” as a first-term congressional representative inelegantly but forcefully put it)[5] largely controls both the public discussion of U.S.-Israel relations and the actual policy. We can call this the Vulcan Theory of American Israel policy: it is the belief that Jewish power exerted in the interest of a foreign state is subordinating American policy to the will of another state.
There is more than one version of this modern Vulcan Theory, just as there was more than one theory about Planet Vulcan. Some observers see two planets at work: fundamentalist Christian support is also involved in the force that pulls the United States away from its true national interest. With or without the evangelical embellishment, the belief that American Jews control America’s Israel policy is an article of faith in much of the world.
Vulcan Theory is somewhat less popular in the United States than it is abroad, but over the years many Americans have accepted it. In 1974, General George S. Brown, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bemoaned Israel’s influence in Congress and said that Jews “own, you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers.”[6] Columnist and onetime candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Pat Buchanan called Capitol Hill “Israeli occupied territory” on national television in 1990.[7] Minister Louis Farrakhan, one of America’s leading Vulcanists, told an audience that “the Israeli lobby controls the government of the United States of America.”[8] Senator J. William Fulbright, longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in 1973 that “the Senate is subservient to Israel,” and that the United States could not use its economic leverage to affect Israeli policy because “Israel controls the Senate.”[9]
To have an intelligent discussion about Vulcan Theory is hard. Those who accept it do not think of themselves as victims of prejudice; as they see it, they are drawing obvious conclusions from overwhelming evidence. When, after stating what they see as obvious facts about American foreign policy, they find themselves widely attacked for antisemitism, they see those attacks as confirming the truth of their original conclusions. Anybody who dares to tell the truth about Jewish power in the United States, they claim, is subjected to nonstop vituperation and driven to the margins of public life. What more proof could one want that “the Jews” dominate the media and the policy debate?
Even so, for reasons that Vulcan Theory proponents sometimes do not understand, many Americans, and not only Jewish Americans, find some of the ideas that inform Vulcan Theory—and some of the language in which its ideas are often expressed—problematic in the extreme. Any allegation that American Jews are powerful string-pullers who secretly control our political system immediately strikes many people as a form of vicious and ignorant bigotry. Similarly, the allegation that American Jews are less loyal than other Americans, that as a group they have what is known as a “dual loyalty,” preferring the interests of Israel over those of the United States, is seen by many people as an ugly smear, an expression of the kind of hate and prejudice that no honest and intelligent person should embrace.
Discussions of Israel policy often break down at this point. When charged with antisemitism after voicing what they see as perfectly reasonable ideas, Vulcan proponents become more deeply convinced that a powerful and well-organized Jewish lobby group is trying to curtail all discussion of an important topic. And the more Vulcan Theorists refer to these ideas, the more vociferous the cries of antisemitism become. This is not a cycle from which much enlightenment can come; we must find other ways to discuss these issues or we will not be able to address the subject at all.
As we think about this impasse, it is important to remember that even for someone like me who believes that Vulcan Theory is a delusional mess often if not always rooted in the intersection of ignorance and prejudice, the question it asks—why does the United States support Israel to such an unusual extent?—is a perfectly valid and legitimate one. Israel is a small country; it is a long way away; it is involved in a long-standing and highly publicized conflict; there are many people in its neighborhood and beyond who hate it; many of its policy choices at home and abroad are controversial. Not only is there nothing wrong with asking questions about American support for this controversial country; the subject of American support for Israel is one that any serious student of American policy would want to address.
* * *
Policy conversations that collapse into moral outrage and name-calling are increasingly common in American life; many Americans seem to be taking Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough, as a role model. “She hated easily; she hated heartily; she hated implacably,” Lord Macaulay wrote of this redoubtable woman.[10]
Whatever merits this attitude may have, it is a crippling liability for the student of foreign affairs. In this field, one cannot simply reject; one must try to understand people whose ideas one sometimes abhors. Any diplomat must be able to engage people across all kinds of political and moral divide; any historian, any student of foreign policy, must come to understand a wide variety of attitudes and opinions that, often for extremely good reasons, are largely unacceptable in polite American society today. Whether the issue is racism, misogyny, jihadi ideology, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, communism, fascism, or, yes, antisemitism, the student of foreign policy must develop the capacity to engage calmly, dispassionately, and sometimes even cooperatively with people committed to utterly revolting ideas.
No American diplomat in the Middle East or Europe can operate without encountering many people who regard Vulcan Theory as settled science. They believe as firmly as Monsieur Lescarbault that they have seen Planet Vulcan transiting the sun. That “the Jews” control American foreign policy is an article of faith for such people; it is a deeply implanted piece of their worldview that cannot be easily changed. Similarly, one cannot engage in the politics of Israel policy in the United States without encountering people who fail to perceive the intellectual gravity and in some cases the moral squalor of these errors.
There are those who try to silence all such talk because it is morally repugnant. This is both a moral and a political mistake. One must engage with ideas, even unpleasant ones, and if pro-Israel campaigners try to ban anti-Israel speech, they can hardly be surprised if others try to silence pro-Israel voices in turn.
In any case, not every Vulcanist is acting in bad faith. Nobody is born omniscient, and all of us must form hypotheses about how the world works as we develop a worldview. Sometimes our hypotheses turn out to be wrong. It is far more important to see how and why Vulcan Theory falls short as an explanation of world events than it is to analyze the morals and the motives of those who espouse it.
Vulcan Theory exists at many degrees of sophistication. In its simplest and most naive forms it is indistinguishable from Protocols of the Elders of Zion–style propaganda mixed with the kind of disinformation about the United States and liberal capitalism that the USSR and Nazi Germany once competed to produce. More intellectually elaborated forms of Vulcan Theory avoid the crudest stereotypes and caricatures but still offer radically oversimplified accounts of U.S. policy and politics.
To engage with every form of Vulcan Theory would make for a longer, duller, and less useful book than anything I am prepared to inflict on my readers, and in any case it is more interesting to learn why Einstein was right than why Le Verrier was wrong. The best way to challenge a bad theory that offers a superficial picture of the world is to offer a richer and more satisfying perspective that covers more facts, integrates more phenomena into a compelling picture, and leaves fewer loose ends. Escaping the narrow confines of Vulcan Theory is like finding a small key that opens the door to the outside world; exploring that world is what this book is about, but before we turn to that larger picture, it is worth a quick look at some of the problems and limitations associated with Vulcan Theory.
The idea that an Israel lobby composed of Jews and fundamentalist Christians dictates America’s Israel policy in ways that deliberately elevate Israeli interests over those of the United States is wrong about the history of U.S.-Israel relations, wrong about the way foreign policy works, wrong about the American political process, wrong about American Christians, and, last but by no means least, it is wrong not only about American Jews but about the political context of Zionism. This never was, and given the power relationships between gentiles and Jews, never could be an agenda that “the Jews” imposed on the gentile world. The triumph of Zionism in the Jewish community was driven less by the spontaneous appeal of Zionism to Jews than by the recognition, late and reluctant in many cases for many Jews, that unshakable gentile preferences and priorities, which all the Jewish power in the world was helpless to alter, made the odd and unlikely ideology of Zionism the only program that offered many of the world’s Jews a hope however modest for both personal and cultural survival. Israel is not a project that Jews imposed on gentiles; for better or for worse it is something that gentiles, antisemites included, and Jews made together.
The National Interest
The heart of Vulcan Theory is the idea that America’s Israel policy does not serve America’s national interest, but serves Israeli interests instead. When Israeli interests are at stake, the United States deviates from its “true orbit” around the sun of the national interest, and the quest for Planet Vulcan is the quest to identify the lump of dark matter responsible for this otherwise inexplicable behavior.
This picture is, to use Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s phrase, a great deal “clearer than truth.”[11] In the real world, as opposed to the simplified cosmos of an IR—international relations—theory textbook, the national interest is rarely clear and almost always in dispute; politicians and national leaders are often much more interested in preserving their own power than in anything so abstract and patriotic as the national interest, even if they could be sure what it was.
As soon as we begin to think seriously about the national interest, we face some very tough questions. It is difficult to define the national interest, and it is difficult to identify with any certainty the policies by which it can best be served. People come to politics with very different ideas about what the national interest is and how we can advance it. Some Americans, for example, believe that America’s national interest requires us to build a global order based on democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Only this, they believe, can prevent the eruption of new wars between the great powers that could exterminate our species, while offering the scope for American enterprise to operate on a global scale in ways that assure American prosperity in a stable and affluent world. To achieve this goal, they believe that the United States should engage in an active, global foreign policy aimed at strengthening organizations like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. American forces should be used, preferably in association with others but if necessary on our own, to protect human rights.
This approach has its critics. Some Americans believe that a global foreign policy of this kind leads to endless wars overseas. Others believe that the economic policies like free trade that this approach involves actually work to the detriment of American workers. Some believe that the project is unrealistic, and that the nations of the world will never create the kind of order that these Americans are hoping to build.
My book Special Providence centers on a discussion of four very different traditions of American thought about the national interest—Jeffersonians, Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, and Jacksonians all care about the American national interest—who often disagree profoundly about what that interest is or how it can best be achieved. Wilsonians believe that the United States should promote the establishment of a world order based on human rights, international law, and powerful multinational institutions. Hamiltonians believe that we must build a strong federal government that can act to support American business abroad and economic development at home. Jeffersonians believe that too much activity overseas will increase the risk of war, promote inequality in the United States, and reduce individual freedom at home. Jacksonians share Jeffersonian skepticism about Wilsonian interventions to promote human rights and Hamiltonian support of a strong central government and pro-corporate economic policies; but unlike Jeffersonians, they believe that the United States will not be safe unless other countries respect our willingness to use force to defend our honor, our interests, and our allies. These schools argue for very different foreign policies. The quarrel is more than two hundred years old; it is no closer to being settled now than it was when George Washington was president.
The political history of American foreign policy is not a struggle between patriots wanting to advance the national interest and traitors who seek to undermine it; it is a history of conflicting ideas about what the national interest means and how to pursue it under particular circumstances. When Secretary of State William H. Seward supported the annexation of Alaska and opponents denounced it as “Seward’s Folly” and “Andrew Johnson’s Polar Bear Garden,” the opponents were not a Russia lobby or a British lobby seeking to prevent American territorial expansion in order to help foreign governments. They were patriotic Americans who believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the addition of a large but largely empty expanse of territory on the far northern fringes of the American continent would not be worth the purchase price of $7.2 million.[12] Intelligent people can and frequently do disagree in good faith about what the national interest is—which means that the national interest is anything but self-evident much of the time.
Even if we could agree on what the national interest is, it is unlikely that we would often find a consensus about what policies are most likely to achieve it. The history of American foreign policy is in part a history of disappointment—when policies do not work out as planned—and partly a history of surprise, when unexpected developments catch American policymakers off guard. American officials were unable to predict the Iranian Revolution of 1979; neither did they predict the fall of the Soviet Union ten years later. The administration of George W. Bush failed to anticipate the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia; Barack Obama’s administration failed to anticipate Russia’s intervention in Syria or the boost to Russian influence that the intervention—which the Obama administration, wrongly, predicted would fail—ultimately provided. Over thousands of years of human history we can see how great leaders and great states have been repeatedly surprised by both positive and negative events that they could not predict and did not expect.
In the Middle East, the predictions of those who supported and those who opposed closer U.S.-Israel relations have repeatedly been proven wrong. Pro-Israel observers argued in 1948 that Arab hostility to the new state would rapidly diminish. Anti-Israel observers argued that U.S. relations with Israel would frustrate our efforts to build a Cold War alliance with the Arabs against the extension of Soviet power. Both predictions were wrong. Arab bitterness over the establishment of Israel remains a powerful force in the Middle East even today; on the other hand, during the Cold War and beyond no other power has been able to develop and maintain the range of deep, cooperative, and strategic relationships the United States has built with many countries in the Arab world.
