A debate with John Mearsheimer about the US-Israeli relationship via ‘Judging Freedom’
Yesterday afternoon, on my first day ‘back on the job’ following a two week vacation, I appeared on two of the widely viewed interview programs to which I have been privileged to be invited these past several months: ‘Dialogue Works’ hosted by Nima Alkhorshid and ‘Judging Freedom’ hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano.
My discussion with Alkhorshid was an hour long and dealt with many issues. However, the key issue was how to understand the relationship between Joe Biden’s America and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel in the developing regional war in West Asia. This is what I focused attention on in my article on these pages yesterday presenting the link to the show.
It is commonplace to say that U.S. policy is being guided by the Israeli lobby and that Netanyahu is leading Collective Biden around by the nose. My counter-intuitive argument was that the reverse is true, and that this is not the result of arbitrary factors of their respective personalities or of the alleged Israeli AIPAC control of U.S. foreign policy. No, what we are witnessing is a second current example of U.S. striving to maintain its global hegemony by provoking and fueling proxy wars against its main adversaries with the help of nominal allies who are being destroyed in the process.
Case Number One of such a proxy war has for the past two years been U.S. assistance to Kiev in its delusional pursuit of a war to reconquer the Crimea and Donbas, which are now in Russian hands. This war was fueled by Washington to deal a humiliating strategic defeat on the Kremlin and, hopefully, to so stoke domestic discontent as to bring down the ‘Putin regime.’ So far, the war has only strengthened Russia, as its military has become battle hardened and victorious, suffering casualties that are most likely one fifth to one tenth those that Russia has inflicted on the Ukrainian forces and their NATO advisers. This war has cost the United States well over one hundred billion dollars in financial and military equipment deliveries to Kiev. On the positive side of the ledger, the proxy war approach has kept Washington at arm’s length from what is in effect a war on the state leading the Global South in opposition to U.S. worldwide hegemony.
Now we see same game plan being pursued by Washington in West Asia/the Middle East, to hammer at Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies, who pose the greatest regional challenge to U.S. dominance there and to retaliate for the series of humiliations that Washington has experienced in the region over the last two decades. Israeli claims following their successful attack on Hezbollah headquarters in Lebanon last week that they now see a once in fifty years opportunity to reshape the politics of the entire Middle East reflect precisely the delusional thinking of Dick Cheney, George Bush and others responsible for unleashing the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The present day U.S. proxy in the Middle East is the state of Israel and Washington is providing its most advanced defensive (anti-missile systems) and offensive (mega-bombs) weapons plus essential real-time satellite and AWACS reconnaissance data enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its assassination bombings in Lebanon. Now the United States is about to enable some kind of escalatory attack by Israel on Iran itself that may lead to all-out regional war.
My appearance on ‘Judging Freedom’ a few hours later yesterday also devoted a lot of attention to this question of dog wagging the tail or tail wagging the dog to describe Israel-US relations today.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKIaI3CTpVI&t=1392s
The Judge was surprised and skeptical about my reversing the usual reading of leader-follower between Biden and Netanyahu. He hinted before the program’s close that he would take this up with a guest scheduled to appear later on his channel, Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago who came to national prominence back in 2007 when he and Professor Stephen Walt published their ground-breaking study entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Their fame was well earned because the subject was then tabu, and their publication resulted in a stormy controversy that for a time threatened their academic careers before it died down. Now, of course, what they wrote is taken as mainstream by whoever looks into the subject.
Judge Napolitano duly raised the question with Professor Mearsheimer. as you can see starting on minute 14 of their chat:
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Does US Want War?
It is interesting to see how an idea like the Israeli direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East moves from being a scorned dissident notion to becoming the guiding thinking of mainstream. As always, mainstream is intolerant of new nonconformist modeling of state-to-state relationships. That is clearly what has happened to Mearsheimer and his AIPAC certainties. In this interview, Mearsheimer says that Doctorow’s reading is nothing new, that it was set out by Noam Chomsky more than a decade ago and is simply wrong-headed.
What Mearsheimer is missing is an understanding that the world does not stand still. It moves on from what was true seventeen years ago. Other actors come onto the stage and relationships can reverse themselves. I believe that Mearsheimer did not listen to my arguments on air, not to mention my more detailed arguments on paper in my presentation on these pages yesterday evening. When he does so, he will appreciate that it takes more than a flick of the wrist to dismiss what I am saying.
I stand ready at any time to defend my concept of U.S. proxy wars as a necessary analytical tool for understanding what is happening in the Middle East today.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024