But
what do I actually want? Besides an inchoate belief “for the clicks,”
as critics may allege, is the gist of my advocacy and analysis, as my
late mentor (dead four years last month) and surrogate father, Mark
Perry, a longtime advisor to the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, might have said
after a scotch, simply “Screw Israel”? It is not. More diplomatically,
why have I become a hater, and utterly convinced that the U.S.–Israel
relationship, particularly when Republicans hold national power, has
become a world-historical, perhaps the world-historical case, of the tail wagging the dog?
As
former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon—as mentioned by Max, a
longtime source of mine, as well as that of the most fun journalists in
this town—has taken to labeling the dynamic: Israel is a “vassal state”
calling the shots in the world’s most powerful empire, and “regime
change in Tel Aviv,” his words, not mine, is necessary. This change in
tone, in my studies of Steve, to the extent that I understand him, has
occurred in just the last six months. After all, this is a man who
archaically refers to Istanbul in Turkey as Constantinople and Iran as
Persia, not exactly the stuff of an Islamophile or crypto-Mullah.
Something is in the air.
But
first, I will attempt to pre-emptively rebut some of the arguments of
my cobelligerent Max Abrahms, who before today I had only met in Max’s
guise as a determined if infinitely ludicrous and hilarious “reply guy”
in my mentions, frequently insisting he would fail me in his class,
teaching the immortal and exact and totally-not-subjective-in-the-slightest
science of international relations. I would prefer to at least minimize
the degree to which we are talking past each other.
Max
wants to advance the cut, as you just heard, that baby MAGA
Isolationists, a uniform bloc and cabal of dumbasses, insisted that
World War III would happen in June, and because we are all here at the
NatCon 5 today and not in a heap of radioactive ash, that he is right
and should never be questioned again. Putting aside that Max is setting
up the Burning Man of strawmans, I submit that I don’t really want to
talk about tactics at all; I seek to discuss strategy.
Why
are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s
liabilities? Why do we, in the national conservative bloc, broadly
speaking, laugh this argument out of the room when it’s advanced by
Volodymr Zelensky, but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu?
Why should we accept America First—asterisk Israel?
And the answer is: we shouldn’t.
But
first, actually, on the tactics. I don’t feel the need to concede that
Israel triumphed in the Twelve Day War. The circumstantial evidence
indicates that Israel was running out of missile interceptors; the
indisputable evidence is that Israel needs U.S.-made and -operated
(meaning American troops could be killed at any moment in another
extraneous theater a la Abbey Gate in Afghanistan) THAAD
missile systems, deployed by no less than the Biden Crime Family itself
in the previous administration, to protect it; the most plausible
evidence is that the Israeli propaganda machine has kicked into high
gear since early summer to cover up the extent of damage imposed by the
Iranians on the Israeli homeland, in what was still clearly a relatively
restrained response by Tehran, hence, no World War III. After all, Tel
Aviv? Those aren’t Bibi’s voters. He’s a real nationalist.
The
Iranians concede they were surprised by the war, failing to anticipate
the objective daring of the Israeli prime minister and of another
country’s resources and reputation, but appeared to have moved quickly,
and quickly rallied by the end of that month. It’s not clear the June
ceasefire was brokered per se for Iran’s benefit as much as for
Israel’s, especially as President Trump showed limited appetite in the
later days of the crisis. No America meant Israel on its own, which
meant Israel would have to make decisions with its own capabilities,
which are still pretty immense, but not with the full weight of what
some might term “Uncle Sucker.” As it should be.
As
David Hearst of the Middle East Eye observed, Iran in its limited
response inflicted more damage in a few days than Hamas’s homegrown
rockets or Hezbollah’s previously-vaunted arsenal landed in nearly two
years of conflict. With the recession of Netanyahu’s poll numbers
swiftly back to pre-war levels by some polls, the reality is that Israel
is likely to come back to Washington asking for even more very soon. If
you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to want a glass of milk.
Since
Israel’s inception, America has struggled and, I argue, failed, to have
an appropriate, mutually self-reliant relationship with the Jewish
state. It’s clear now in the full view of history. Harry Truman’s
relationship—and I note he was a Democrat, for what it’s worth—with the
state’s founders, many of them by most measures former terrorists (if
Max wants to focus on that), was controversial in the 1948 election.
Dwight D. Eisenhower threw a wrench into early plans for a “Greater
Israel,” the new-old term of art of Netanyahu, during the Suez crisis.
Kennedy courageously sought to limit and negate the nascent Israeli
nuclear program at Dimona but didn’t live long enough to pursue that
policy with long-lasting vigor. His successor Lyndon Johnson was a big
government militarist par excellence, as the country learned
the hard way in Vietnam. I could go on, but it’s very arguable that only
Eisenhower, Kennedy, the first George Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald
Trump have challenged the fragile and dangerous consensus around a
country, to paraphrase the president, that “doesn’t know what the F it’s
doing.”
But the problem is: the country does “know what the F it’s doing.”
First, Israel has made crucial investment in appealing to President Trump’s vanity. As the president told the Daily Caller’s
Reagan Reese over the weekend: “So, Israel is amazing, because, you
know, I have good support from Israel. I have. Look, nobody has done
more for Israel than I have, including the recent attacks with Iran.”
President
Trump again went on to hail the historic strength of Israel’s “lobby,”
the president’s words not mine, making clear, for Trump, why the U.S. is
involved at all. It’s clear as day for him: Israel. Because Israel
loves him.
In
exchange though, they are asking for the political capital of his
administration, and, risking the generational impression that Middle
East wars, no matter what the GOP says about the new right or changing
this or changing that, is risking the general impression that all the
GOP delivers is tax cuts and wars in the Middle East.
President
Trump did not answer the reporter Reagan Reese’s question. Reese
queried, the first question of her sitdown, I will note: “A different
war, Israel, a March Pew Poll, found that 53 percent of surveyed U.S.
adults had an unfavorable view of Israel, that’s down – or that is up
from 42 percent in 2022. Among young Republicans under 50, 50 percent
have an unfavorable view of Israel. That’s up from 35 percent in 2022.
There’s a growing group within MAGA, America First coalition,
Republicans, especially younger Republicans, who are skeptical of our
support for Israel. Are you aware of this group? Are you worried about
it?”
On the home front, this dynamic is dementing.
One
could be forgiven for believing the only people this administration is
reliably deporting are supporters of the Palestinian cause.
After
riding back into power on the appeal of free speech, enshrined in the
First Amendment of this country’s Constitution (if conserving that isn’t
conservatism, I don’t know what is), this administration has used its
influence to attempt to curb and intimidate speech on Middle East
issues, particularly the State Department. After assembling a
potentially generationally-realigning cohort of voters disgusted with
woke pieties and the suffocation of dialogue with incessant accusations
of racism, Republicans have all too eagerly embraced holding the whip
themselves, accusing countless unbigoted critics of being anti-Semites,
instead of engaging on the issue.
Nevermind,
so long as we’re casting the racism stone (which I thought was a
leftist move), that as flagged by his biographer Geoffrey Wheatcroft,
Winston Churchill, that strident Zionist and imperialist and, I may
note, non-American, said in the 1930s, before the horrors of the next
decade: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people [the
Arabs in Palestine] by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade
race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has
come in and taken their place.”
This
discussion almost always descends into the mud. But the mud is where
this issue emanates from and why Zionism in 2025 is at best a morally
dubious project (as the New York Times’ Ronen Bergman wrote in his seminal Rise and Kill First,
Israel has assassinated more people than any “Western” country since
World War II), and one Washington should avoid an “entangling alliance”
with, as this city’s namesake said in his farewell address of foreign
countries and foreign conflicts we ineluctably and poorly understand.
As
for Israel itself and its recent conduct, which I as a U.S. nationalist
feel I have a small vote in, since I remain an unwilling shareholder in
that country and its activities, given U.S. military support and
diplomatic largesse for Jerusalem, as my late mentor said, referring to
the experience of the Shoah: “They know better.”
Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and conciseness.
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