The Billiard Balls of Foreign Policy

Ripped from the pages of Instapundit, where I found this link to an article on foreign policy, and Israel, by Walter Russell Mead.♠  Here is the case he puts, and timely it is, given that Vice President Biden is just back from a visit to, amongst other nations, Israel.

The American relationship with Israel is both a political and an intellectual challenge for some students of foreign affairs.  Convinced that US national interests would be best served by distancing ourselves from the Jewish state, scholars try to figure out why our country behaves in this seemingly self-defeating way.

The problem is particularly tough for hard core realists who believe that the behavior of every state is determined by the nature of the international system. For these thinkers, domestic politics don’t matter; states do what they must.  States are like billiard balls; they move when struck.  It doesn’t matter what the billiard ball thinks; it rolls where it’s pushed.

I like the billiard ball analogy.  Foreign affairs is about national interests.  "The strong do what they want and the weak do what they must." (Thucydides)

Some people put down the US support of Israel to the Jewish Lobby.  It looks logical, but it fails to see the whole picture.  The thing is that we are a Republic, but we are also a Republic that responds to the will of the People.

...the power of the Israel lobby in American politics stems from its relationship to gentile public opinion.  The lobby facilitates a foreign policy that public opinion broadly supports; it has no special powers of its own and if gentile opinion about Israel were to change, policy would change whatever the lobby did.

Put another way, there are a lot more non-Jews in the US supporting Israel than there are Jews, just because there are a lot more gentiles than there are Jews in this nation.  And a lot of those gentiles supporting Israel are from the various Christian faiths in this nation.

At the same time, there are some people who think there is some sinister Jewish plot out there to drag us into the problems of Israel.  That would be to overestimate the political power of the Jewish segment of our society.  Here is your test.  Which way do Jews tend to vote in national politics?  (Hint:  Not for the likes of Ronald Reagan or George W Bush.)  Now ask yourself if Republicans in office are significantly less supportive of Israel than Democrats.  I am assuming you don't need a hint here, but if you do, EMail me. In the mean time, ask yourself how the Arab nations would feel if we suddenly switched from support of Israel to rejection of Israel?  They might like the outcome, but would they then cosy up to us; or would they ask themselves what kind of fair weather friend we would make?

When you read the article and come to the first picture and wonder who the guy is behind the counter, talking to President Harry Truman, that is Eddie Jacobson, President Truman's partner in the haberdashery business after World War One.

This statement from the article sums up some of the thinking abroad in the land today:

Rule to live by, folks:  when your theory of how the world works starts sounding like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,♥ it’s time to recheck those assumptions.

And a good rule it is.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Sure, the author and I have the same middle name, and thus I favor his opinions.
♥  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

PS:  To file under Lessons Learned. If you are trying to use the playing card symbol of "SPADE" for a footnote and you enter the code "& spades ;" (without the spaces), do not put the word "SPADES" in caps or what you get is the word "SPADES".

PPS:  As I was checking the links after publishing the post I noted the title is a play on words.  "Is This Lobby Different From All Others?"  It brings to mind the first question of the Passover Seder, "Why is this night different from all other nights?"