America and the Promised Land

From an American perspective, the Israel-Palestine conflict has largely exited center stage in recent years. And yet, comprehending the evolving interests, sentiments, and coalitions behind the US-Israel alliance may be the best way to understand the fundamentals that define America’s foreign policy more broadly.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Prophets without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution, Oxford University Press, 2022.

Walter Russel Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Knopf, 2022.

Though it has dragged on for three-quarters of a century, the metaphysics of Israel’s role in the international relations and the centrality of Israel-Palestine conflict in global politics continue to befuddle onlookers. How could this speck of land inspire such emotional intensity and command such outsize influence over US foreign policy?

In The Arc of a Covenant, Walter Russell Mead, a celebrated American diplomatic historian who has written widely on foreign policy in the idiom of grand strategy, uses this lacuna as his point of departure. The result of a decade-long project to reinterpret Jewish and Israeli history in the United States, the book offers a broad-tent analysis that smashes cherished conceits and challenges long-held assumptions. Rather than placing all the customary figures at the head of the table, Mead rearranges the chairs to give us a glimpse of something new.

In an earlier book, Special Providence, he established himself as the rarest kind of foreign-policy thinker, playing the part of the responsible iconoclast who seeks to educate Americans about the deeper roots of their foreign policy. There, Mead described four foreign-policy traditions that have at times defined America’s national interest: the Wilsonian, which seeks a world safe for democracy; the Hamiltonian, which prioritizes America’s economic interests; the Jeffersonian, which aims to protect America from the corrupting influences of the outside world; and the Jacksonian, which envisions an America so powerful that it can avoid foreign entanglements and focus on the home front.

For Mead, the ongoing interaction between these traditions makes America what it is. Different traditions will take precedence from one period to the next, though all of them are continuously present in the country’s foreign-policy thinking. Mead’s quiet aim is to prepare the US for a period when a mixture of Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism could become ascendant. Since then, as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he has tackled all the big issues of great-power importance, such as the West’s rivalry with China, the realignment of global political forces, and civilizational crises like climate change.

Yet now, in this moment of profound crisis for the post-Cold War international order when most commentators are focused on the return of twentieth-century geopolitics, Mead has surprisingly pivoted to a region and a conflict that has largely exited center stage. Focusing squarely on the nature of the US-Israeli alliance, he insists that only by grappling with the evolving interests, sentiments, and coalitions behind it can we understand the fundamental factors that define America’s foreign policy more broadly.

Manifest Destinies

For Mead, Israel “occupies a continent in the American mind.” It is neither “America’s most important ally nor its most valuable trading partner,” he writes, “but the idea that the Jews would return to the lands of the Bible and build a state there touches some of the most important themes and cherished hopes of American religion and culture.” Mead’s ambition is to excavate America’s Christian past and trace its unanticipated intersections with US foreign policy. (...)

All Geopolitics is Local

For a suggestive counterpart to Mead’s book, we can turn to Prophets Without Honor, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami’s look back at the 2000 Camp David Summit and the unraveling of any commitment to a two-state future. Rather than situating Israel in the context of an always-evolving American foreign-policy identity, Ben-Ami places it smack in the center of Middle East politics. While Mead goes broad, Ben-Ami, who is also a trained historian, homes in on the particulars. (...)

Ben-Ami spends considerable attention analyzing the hopes and follies that have defined the so-called peace process since those momentous days at Camp David and Taba, bringing the story up to the 2020 Abraham Accords, the end product of Donald Trump’s “deal of the century.” He reminds us that there is an extensive history of proposed economic incentives designed to foster normalization with Israel. But the agreement that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates eventually accepted was one where Palestine is nowhere to be seen. (The same was true when Sudan and Morocco subsequently normalized their relations with Israel.) Ben-Ami thus favors Hezbollah’s description of the accords as a “deal of shame.” It was always a dirty secret that Arab states’ official advocacy for Palestinian statehood served as a smokescreen for shoring up corrupt oligarchies at home. But now, as Ben-Ami shows, the masks have come off.

by Ivan Krastev and Leonard Bernardo, Project Syndicate |  Read more:

Image: Knopf