Dr. Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy; an expert in Grand Strategy and Geopolitics; and a former researcher and desk officer at the U.S. Department of State.
Those of us in both the realism and restraint as well as human rights communities are often opposed to each other regarding unnecessary interventionism abroad. But in recent years, we have found ourselves on the same side regarding Israel. Israel is an American ally whose utility, if it ever had any, has clearly dried up after the Cold War, becoming only a liability. This has been obvious since at least the First Gulf War when Saddam Hussein sought to bait Israel into the coalition against him, correctly predicting that such an entry would undermine the U.S.’ other alliances. Since then the financial and foreign policy costs of being so deeply entwined with Tel Aviv has cost Washington greatly, with no practical benefit (save for certain defense contractors and ideologues who dream of the chimera of global hegemony or even worse, apocalypse). Many of America’s failed foreign adventures have actually benefited the Israeli state in the form of causing a succession of state failures, sectarian infighting, and refugee flows throughout the Middle East, causing massive damage to global stability and opening up justifiable criticism that the bipartisan elite is Israel First on matters of grand strategy.
Israel would undoubtedly behave in an at least somewhat more normal fashion without endless American support. Already having a regional nuclear monopoly, the state's existence is hardly as under threat as its many partisans in the media presume. But its offensive projection ability abroad is aided by American defense and logistical support. As Israel further wreaks havoc across the Middle East on an ever expanding list of countries which face direct attack, it is the United States that could (and should) pull the plug on outside support for this chaos.
But it should not do it in a way that validates the standard neoconservative and liberal interventionist talking points about the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine.
On July 31rst the popular news shows Breaking Points co-host Saagar Enjeti responded to eminent realist scholar John Mearsheimer calling the Gaza War a genocide by taking the unpopular opinion that even if that is the case, it is unhelpful to use the term in the context of geopolitics. Correctly predicting that there would be a backlash to his point, Enjeti brought up that the term genocide is often invoked as an excuse to militarily intervene in other countries at the behest of unsavory actors in Washington and the capitals of other allied states. If opponents to the U.S. alliance with Israel take the human rights-first approach, as invoking this doctrine would do, they risk re-opening the whole can of worms that got us the disastrous military interventions in Libya and Syria, as well as clearing the field for Forever War advocates to push for unsustainable and strategically unwise U.S. intervention in countries like Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan.
Certain activist groups on the right may push for humanitarian intervention in any country where Christians or even ‘white people’ are persecuted, and some on the left yearn for their own version of Israel, called Kurdistan, which would be an indefensible and land-locked nation beset on all sides with the angry states that its new sovereignty had been carved out of. This is to say nothing of how evangelical pro-Israel organizations claiming to be humanitarian in nature are active supporters of military involvement in Gaza to the point of taking part in the conflict as mercenary actors. These are just as much a recipe for Forever Wars as the War on Terror was. As it is, Israel itself has become a fan of invoking strife between the Sunni fundamentalist government of Syria and the Druze population as an humanitarian excuse for its growing incursions into that country.
This type of rhetoric also dips into the culturally saturated and usually incorrect obsession with the Second World War, a conflict that ultimately was fought to combat rising revisionist powers upsetting the global balance of power, with positive human rights outcomes being an outcome, but not the cause, of the conflict. By presenting a conflict as a moral issue first and foremost, it becomes easier to obscure the actual dangers of investing in it.
Critics of the Israel Alliance must always keep in mind foremost that tragedy and mass murder are always unfolding somewhere in the world. They cannot all be solved by a benevolent or guilt-wracked power swooping in from far away and restructuring the afflicted societies. Escalation dominance, the idea that some powers will have a greater ability to commit to a conflict, always decreases with distance from the conflict. Therefore, for a country to have the skin in the game to really commit to such an intervention it must both be in their national interest as well as be affecting their near abroad. A great example of this would be Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978, which ended one of the most proportionally destructive genocides in history, but was also very much in Hanoi’s regional interest as well as stabilizing a chaotic problem that was impacting their borders. Even so, it was a long and costly affair. Likewise did U.S. logistical and diplomatic support for Benito Juarez in the 1860s help drive distant France out of Mexico utilizing a combination of escalation dominance and geographic proximity.
The lesson of this for those who oppose intervention in Middle East wars is that the United States must end all support for Israel, sure, but it must also not then commit the error of advocating for continued presence in the conflict on any side. The ultimate fate of the Palestinians will be in the hands of those with escalation dominance, that is Israel and its Arab neighbors. The weakness of those Arab states, both diplomatically and militarily, is the key problem here. In an era of increasing multipolarity however, they may have opportunities for counter-balancing. Israel’s attempts to dominate the region seem full of tactical success now, but the region resists hegemony. Turkey and Israel, once happy to subject Syria to divide and rule under their jihadist puppets, risk clashing with each other over the future of the country. Iran, regardless of its present weakness and irrespective of its form of future government, will always be an independent power pole in the region with a historically rooted integrity that most of the Arab states lack. The conditions for counterbalancing Israel and forcing it to finally realize its only sustainable future is in regional integration do exist. Such now faint possibilities would greatly increase with the end of American support for that state. They then would simply require the right combination of leadership and will to bring about regional counterbalancing, something that could very well end up being inspired by the necessity of responding to Israeli hubris.
The Cosmopolitan Crusader acolytes of Samantha Power are waiting in the wings to advocate for a foreign policy of human rights-inspired interventionism which is now far out of step with the multipolar reality of today. It behoves us to give them no ammunition for their future forever wars. The claims of the Israel Lobby can be effectively combatted without walking into a honeytrap of invoking a humanitarian precedent for yet further interventionism down the line.
Sage advice. Our foreign entanglement with Israel since 1947 has produced one headache after another: Suez, USS Liberty, US vetos and votes in the UN against the world, lavish funding of their interminable territorial imperialism, and yet the country still needs to spy on on us and conduct, using American money, influence operations on our political system to insure this albatros never drops away from our neck. And what has acrued to our interests after all this time? I'm still curious to know what nonsense our greatest ally was feeding into Darth Cheney's inbox in the run up to the disastrous Gulf War 2. And now their tar from Gaza is being splattered all over what is left of our international reputation, if indeed anything is left after 25 years of bombing runs and bunker busters rained liberally throughout the Muslim world with the principal effect, other than killing uncountable numbers of Muslims, territorial aggrandizement by 'our greatest ally'.
When is enough enough for these historical dimwits inside our bought off Beltway, for Pete's sake?
Well done, but as an American neutralist, never would a theater be better off without us than the Middle East.
And, dare one say, so would we.
Just come home America.