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A recent essay from Israeli writer Gadi Taub in Tablet makes clear that Israel's war in Gaza is not its last. Israel is going "to shed its defensive strategy and go on the offensive." That means taking out Hezbollah and then taking on "a multifaceted struggle against Iran over its drive for regional hegemony and its nuclear weapons program."Taub, whose hawkish views in many ways reflect the vital center of Israel opinion, sees the Biden administration as following a longstanding Democratic policy of appeasing Iran. In sharp contrast to Henry Kissinger, whose 1970s diplomacy he lauds, Taub finds Secretary of State Antony Blinken's policy to be a disaster. "By empowering the Iranians, Blinken's policy will inevitably also further the penetration of the region by Iran's patrons, the Russians and the Chinese, at America's expense. Kissinger's policy was focused on pushing America's great power rivals out. American policy today is inviting them in."The Dream Palace of the IsraelisThe most extraordinary feature of Taub's essay is its unreal portrait of the regional forces arrayed for and against Israel. Iran, Taub writes, "is at war with the old American regional alliance system — which includes Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. But Secretary Blinken and President Biden are appeasing the new radicals, not containing them."In this imaginary tableau, shared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is in an unspoken but deep alliance with the Sunni Arab states, who want to see Hamas crushed and Iran and its proxies relentlessly attacked. What these rulers say in public, so the story goes, is miles apart from what they say in private. In public, of course, Arab leaders are breathing fire about Israel's mad amplification of the Dahiya Doctrine in Gaza. In private, these Arab leaders are reportedly telling U.S. and Israeli insiders (but seemingly no one else) that they heartily approve Israeli's operations. This Israeli view of Arab leaders is delusional. Yes, Arab leaders have big issues with Hamas. But they also think, as do their people, that Israel's extreme violence in Gaza may open the gates of hell, as the 2003 Iraq War once did. They don't think it's possible to pulverize Hamas into oblivion, because new defiant leaders will inevitably emerge. Israel, in their view, is not solving anything, but rather magnifying insecurity in the region. The (feeble) attempt by Blinken to put restraints on Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza is said by Taub to invite Russia and China into the region, but in fact it is Israel's policy that does so. That policy pushes Iran and America's traditional Arab coalition into one another's arms, making them realize that they have congruent interests in opposing Israeli plans. These interests, in turn, are likewise simpatico with those of Russia and China right now. Taub believes that Israel's coming offensives would break the new relations between the Saudis and the Sino-Russian bloc. No, these relations would be strengthened. This Islamic consensus — which joins Arabs, Iranians, and Turks and is supported by Russia and China — would be given further impetus if Israeli ambitions in the West Bank are fully realized. Another Nakba in Gaza and in the West Bank is anathema to America's Arab friends. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks of the Palestinian Authority just as harshly as Hamas or Hezbollah. He has rejected U.S. proposals to bring the PA into Gaza after the war. Netanyahu maintains within his coalition powerful ministers (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich) who have big plans for the West Bank and Temple Mount. In this regard there appears to be a fourth security front in the West Bank and Jerusalem, distinct from Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Washington as Enabler and RestrainerTaub hangs his essay on a comparison between Henry Kissinger's Middle East diplomacy in the 1970s and Antony Blinken's policy today. Kissinger, Taub relates, taught a masterclass in diplomacy. Arab leaders, Kissinger saw, "would understand that only the U.S. could deliver Israeli concessions, and that the price–peace with Israel and breaking with the Soviet orbit–would be worth it. It worked."Fast forward to today. If the United States cannot or will not deliver Israeli concessions, surely its leverage with the Arab states is sharply diminished. Israel is totally dependent on U.S. arms for the conduct of its current and projected operations. "The Israelis are playing with house money," as one U.S. official puts it. As of December 1, transfers loaded on to U.S. cargo planes included 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells. More is on the way. The Biden administration has lots of leverage over Israel. They are just unwilling to use it. The Biden administration has rightly warned Israel against a big offensive operation in Lebanon. Hezbollah is in a use-it-or-lose-it situation with respect to its offensive systems, with Hezbollah reportedly having 100,000 to 150,000 missiles and rockets, far superior to Hamas's force. The evacuation after October 7 of some 80,000 Israelis from communities bordering Lebanon is undoubtedly an unacceptable outcome for Israel, but Israel cannot seek to eliminate Hezbollah without incurring grave risks to its own population. It would be far better for Israelis to reoccupy the northern towns under the auspices of the mutual deterrence that prevailed before October 7, rather than to launch a big war against Hezbollah. However, the Israelis clearly think otherwise. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has promised a military campaign to drive Hezbollah beyond the Litani River unless Hezbollah heeds Israel's ultimatum to evacuate the border region. The horrifying risk from such an escalation is that Israel would turn Beirut and southern Lebanon into Gaza. If Taub's views are a reliable guide, the Israelis have totally given up on Biden and the Democrats. The putative "appeasement" of Iran is not "an offhand mistake of the Democratic Party" but "a premeditated strategy designed to strengthen Iran at the expense of America's traditional allies." At a time when Arab Americans and their allies are livid with Biden and Blinken, it is curious to find Taub and the Israelis joining in the execration. The former group hates B&B for giving Israel the greenest of green lights, the other for the bright red lights (stop with the civilian killing, don't invade Lebanon) that Taub discerns. The administration's position is unenviable. On one side is the geopolitical disaster that follows from a blank check to Israel, on the other the domestic perils of having a gigantic fight with Netanyahu and the whole Israeli nation. In this acute battle between the national interest and personal political survival, will President Biden do a John Adams and choose country over party? I do not have an answer to this question. One thing is crystal clear. Supporting Israel means supporting a grand design that calls for a war on all fronts, financed and enabled by the United States. The Israelis seem to have no consciousness of the fact that previous uses of force in Lebanon and Palestine didn't solve their security problem. Instead, they believe that more destruction, on a Dresden-like scale, will do this time around what it has not done in the past. Given Israel's lonely existence in a sea of Muslims, this belief seems irrational to me. Israel cannot get rid of its security problem or its enemies by the massive use of force. Escalation imperils Israelis as much as it imperils their neighbors. But the Israelis hold to their belief in force with theological conviction, and the belief should be taken with the utmost seriousness. Thus far, this irresistible force has not encountered an immovable object.

United States policy toward Israel's war in Gaza was neatly summarized by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on November 30: "Israel has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. And it has an obligation to do so." This posture — destroy Hamas but do so in observance of the laws of war — is not that of the administration alone. It has been widely embraced by official Washington. A key defense of what would emerge as the hallmark of the Biden administration's Gaza outlook came from Jo-Ann Mort and Michael Walzer in the New Republic on October 18. "A just war requires the defeat of Hamas," they wrote. "It is a maxim of just war theory that the rules of war cannot make it impossible to fight a just war. There has to be a way to fight."In their view, the best way was "to fight with restraint, to reject indiscriminate bombing and shelling, to respect enemy civilians (many, many Gazans are opposed to Hamas), and take necessary risks to reduce their risks, and finally to maintain a clear goal: defeat for Hamas. Nothing more."Walzer is the author of Just and Unjust Wars, a hugely influential treatise on morality in war that has gone through successive editions since its publication in 1977. Walzer's meditation on the just war was especially impressive for taking on a wide range of historical examples, but it was written under the shadow of the war in Vietnam. Walzer condemned that war not only as an unjustified intervention but also as one that was "carried on in so brutal a manner that even had it initially been defensible, it would have to be condemned, not in this or that aspect but generally." In his treatise, Walzer closely considered both jus ad bellum (the right of going to war) and jus in bello (the law governing its conduct). As Walzer noted, "considerations of jus ad bellum and jus in bello are logically independent, and the judgments we make in terms of one and the other are not necessarily the same." But in the case of Vietnam, he argued, they came together. "The war cannot be won, and it should not be won. It cannot be won, because the only available strategy involves a war against civilians; and it should not be won, because the degree of civilian support that rules out alternative strategies also makes the guerillas the legitimate rulers of the country." Do not these strictures apply to Israel's war in Gaza? Hamas hides behind civilians, or is rather closely intermingled with them, as the Viet Cong once were. It has enjoyed an equal or greater amount of support from the local population. Its acts of assassination and terrorism fall far short, numerically, of those committed by the VC. Walzer was rightly shocked by the civilian toll in Vietnam, which saw a civilian-combatant fatality ratio of approximately two to one. In Gaza, the proportion of civilian-to-combatant deaths is at least five to one and probably much greater. Israeli leaders have made clear that their war is on the whole population. Their criteria for when to bomb, aided by AI, has blown past previous restraints. Another case taken up by Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars was America's atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The decision was justified at the time as the only way to avert the far larger casualties likely to ensue were the United States to have attempted an invasion of Japan. Walzer rejected this argument. "It does not have the form: if we don't do x (bomb cities), they will do y (win the war, establish tyrannical rule, slaughter their opponents)." Instead, the U.S. government in effect argued that "if we don't do x, we will do y." The real problem, Walzer argued, was the policy of unconditional surrender — that is, it had to do with U.S. war aims. Walzer approved the policy of unconditional surrender when applied to Germany — Hitler's regime represented a "supreme emergency" — but not when applied to Japan. "Japan's rulers were engaged in a more ordinary sort of military expansion, and all that was morally required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown," he wrote. Walzer's treatment of Vietnam and Hiroshima suggests that there are imperative reasons to stop short of total victory as a war aim, if the result of pursuing it is a moral enormity. If you have to commit wickedness on a titanic scale in order to achieve total victory, you should accept limited war and seek the containment of the enemy, not his obliteration. This is especially so, one might add, if the enemy one aims to annihilate elicits widespread sympathies elsewhere, making probable some kind of over-the-top retribution in the future. There are 2.2 million Gazans. There are 1.8 billion Muslims. Germany and Japan were friendless in 1945. It is obvious that Israel's war in Gaza bears no relationship to the war that Mort and Walzer recommended on October 18. Israel has not fought with restraint, has not rejected indiscriminate bombing and shelling, has not respected enemy civilians. Operation Swords of Iron has been instead the most elaborate and twisted application yet of the Dahiya Doctrine, Israel's longstanding war plan that makes a virtue out of wildly disproportionate retributions. That Israel intended to do this was apparent from the outset — 6,000 bombs were dropped in the war's first six days — but went strangely unnoticed by Mort and Walzer when their piece appeared. The authors stressed the need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza but didn't mention the Israeli blockade on all things requisite to life, a radical policy totally opposed to laws of war and imposed by Israel on the war's first day. In a subsequent interview on October 30, Walzer conceded that there was no justification for Israel's blockades of Gaza's electricity, water, and food supply, but also questioned the idea that a humanitarian pause would be justified before Hamas was defeated. "Acts that shock the moral conscience of mankind" was one of Walzer's most resonant phrases in Just and Unjust Wars. He meant by that "old-fashioned phrase" not the solipsistic prevarications of political leaders, but "the moral convictions of ordinary men and women, acquired in the course of their everyday activities." Clearly, Israel's war in Gaza has entailed a profound shock to these sensibilities. It is this revulsion, not sympathy for Hamas, that explains world-wide public opposition to what Israel is doing. From the beginning of the crisis, the Biden administration's approach to the war ran closely in parallel with the course recommended by Mort and Walzer. Eliminate Hamas. Do so while sparing civilians as much as possible. Then be sweet to the Palestinians and give them an independent state. Israel was happy to take the first part of this formula and to contemptuously reject the rest. Meanwhile, alongside these homilies to humane war, the United States has undertaken a vast effort to resupply Israel's stock of bombs. Confronting the escalating death toll, U.S. policymakers are dazed and confused. They're still on autopilot in support of Israel's war aim, while ineffectually shrieking in horror at the cost to Gaza's civilians. The truth is that there is no way to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza. Contrary to Secretary Blinken's words (and Walzer's advice), Israel does not know how to destroy Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. Monumental harm to civilians follows from Israel's war aim of destroying Hamas, which the Biden administration and Walzer continue to endorse. That war aim stands in urgent need of reconsideration.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!

The alliance system of the United States is frequently called an empire, and for good reason. But it is a peculiar form of empire, in which the metropolitan center seems directed and ruled by the periphery. In the classic idea of empire, rule flowed from the top down. Not in this one. This inversion is nowhere more evident than in the relationship between the United States and Israel. Biden responded to the October 7 attacks by giving Israel total support for its aim of destroying Hamas. The same pattern is apparent in policy toward Ukraine. For 18 months, the Biden administration did not dare to set limits on Ukraine's war aims, though these anticipated, absurdly, total victory over Russia, with Vladimir Putin in the dock at the end. These certitudes, however, have begun to shake. Within the administration, there seems to have been a great awakening over the last few weeks that neither course is sustainable. The gist of recent reporting is as follows: the Ukrainians are losing the war and have to acknowledge that fact, better now than later. The Israelis are behaving barbarically and have got to be reined in, else our reputation in the world is ruined. On the Ukraine front, there were two bombshells. One was an NBC story that painted a dire picture of the military situation and reported that U.S. and European diplomats were telling Ukraine of the need to restrict its aims. It's too late in the day to hope for anything other than a stalemate, said one former administration official: "it's time to do a deal." The other was a long essay in Time that characterized Zelensky as a messianic and fanatical figure, out of touch with Ukraine's worsening prospects. Corruption is even worse than alleged. The West is scraping the bottom of the barrel for key military items. Ukraine's military can't find new recruits. More appropriations from Congress, even the $61 billion requested by the administration, can solve none of these problems.For 18 months, the Biden administration insisted that Ukraine's aims were wholly its own to determine and that the United States would support them regardless. With Ukraine's summer offensive having met with almost total failure, the administration appears to be getting cold feet. This is all very hush-hush, with "quiet" discussions reputedly going on behind the scenes. It's probable, indeed, that Biden's advisers are divided. Though official policy hasn't changed a whit, the impetus to do so is clearly there. The bind over Israel is yet more acute. According to widespread reports, Biden and his advisers believe that Israel is embarked on a mad project in Gaza. They see that the United States — having given Israel a green light, a blank check, and tons of bombs — will be held directly responsible for the awful humanitarian consequences. They don't think Israel has defined a coherent endgame. They fear they are presiding over a moral enormity. They see a precipitous collapse in support from others. Over the past month, Biden has warned the Israelis not to act out of anger and vengeance in retaliation for October 7, advised against a ground invasion of Gaza, and insisted that Israel seek to avoid civilian deaths as much as possible. Use smaller bombs, say Biden's military advisers. Eroding support, his administration told the Israelis, "will have dire strategic consequences for Israel Defense Forces operations against Hamas." Last weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with these ideas and with a request for a "humanitarian pause." Bibi's response: ain't gonna happen. I have an idea. The United States could threaten to suspend military shipments to Israel if it failed to agree to a ceasefire. That might make an impression. Defying Israel, however, is something that no president since George H.W. Bush has been willing to do. The U.S. approach over the last 30 years, as now, has been in the voice of a steadfast friend: "This is really for your own good, but we wouldn't dare demand it of you." Hug the Israelis tight and reassure them endlessly of your undying commitment; that was the way to win an argument with them. There have been some Israeli leaders who responded to this approach, but Benjamin Netanyahu was never one of them. Bill Clinton's comment after first meeting with Netanyahu in 1996 — "Who's the fucking superpower here? — reflects Bibi's considered judgment that he can call forth domestic opposition in the United States that will nullify any threat from a U.S. president. Today, 66% of Americans want a ceasefire, according to one poll, but less than five percent of the House of Representatives does, so maybe Bibi knows whereof he speaks. AIPAC is busy with attack ads against the few brave congresspeople who have criticized Israel and called for a ceasefire. But Biden has to worry about America's larger role in the world and is alive to the likelihood that what is coming in Gaza will wreck America's legitimacy. Who in the non-West could ever bear again a lecture from the United States on its zealous commitment to human rights? What would this do to America's case against Russia? On present trends — no exit to the Sinai for the mass of Gaza's population, the complete collapse of the health and sanitation systems, relentless Israeli military pressure and economic blockade, 1.5 million already displaced — it is difficult to see how the total casualty count among Gazans avoids numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Probably many more will die from disease and epidemics than from bullets and bombs. The experience, as Netanyahu has said, will be remembered "for decades to come." What if it registers in world public opinion as an historic crime? Incredibly, advocates of total war against Hamas invoke Dresden, Hiroshima, and other atrocities to justify their course, neglecting that neither Germany nor Japan had anyone to weep for them after the war, whereas Palestinians have 1.8 billion Muslims to weep over them today. The obvious fact is that Israel cannot pursue to the end its aim of destroying Hamas without causing death on a biblical scale. There is no reason whatsoever for the United States to embrace these aims.Biden's choice is to get tough with the Israelis or to go along with what he fears is going to be a gigantic catastrophe. There are precedents for getting tough, but they are admittedly distant ones. Dwight Eisenhower did it in 1956 over the Anglo-French-Israeli Suez adventure. Bush I did it in 1991 over loan guarantees to Israel. But the most resonant example is 1982, when Ronald Reagan told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to cease Israeli's bombardment of Beirut. "Menachem," Reagan said, "this is a holocaust." To Reagan's surprise, his threat of an agonizing reappraisal worked. "I didn't know I had that kind of power," he told his aide Mike Deaver. At the time of Reagan's threat, the death toll from two and a half months of war approached 20,000, of which nearly half were civilians.Can Biden summon the will to confront Netanyahu? Will his administration force Ukraine to the bargaining table? In our weird empire, where dependents call the shots, deeply embedded tendencies dictate a negative answer to both questions, though wise policy would dictate positive ones. Perhaps the time is ripe for a new policy in which America consults its own national interests rather than theirs.

It has become a staple among critics of American foreign policy to refer to the United States's approach as "liberal imperialism." By this they mean that America's globalist agenda and its willingness to use force in theaters across the globe derives from its desire to evangelize the gospel of liberalism and thereby extend the reach of a US-dominated democratic capitalist order. These critics point to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and trace how this agenda evolved over the next century. The dominance of liberal ideology, they argue, is so all-encompassing that virtually all of the main variants within the modern US foreign policy tradition, from anti-communism to neoliberalism to neoconservatism, fit under liberalism's umbrella. In Republic in Peril, the eminent foreign policy scholar David C. Hendrickson turns this thesis on its head. A trenchant critic of America's quest for global dominance, Hendrickson argues not only that liberalism is not the culprit, but is in fact where we should turn because it offers a powerful critique of both militarized interventionism and the US quest for full-spectrum global dominance. Covering all of the major episodes of the past century, he shows how the US has fully abandoned a tradition of republican liberalism that dates back to the Founders. The republican liberal tradition, which dominated US foreign policy for over a century, mandated non-intervention and the promotion of peace. This "golden rule" policy toward other nations served America well, he contends, and many of the pathologies that plague US foreign policy now - particularly its disastrous approach to the Middle East - can be traced to the desertion of the republican liberal tradition. He therefore advocates returning to the more collegial form of internationalism ("iso-internationalism") that preceded Wilsonianism. Combining both a rich historical overview of modern American foreign policy with a forceful indictment of the illiberal straitjacket in which US has bound itself, Republic in Peril provides a genuinely original defense of liberalism in the service of peaceful non-intervention - a position that contemporary critics of aggressive liberalism are sure to find surprising.

This essay offers a constitutional perspective on the American encounter with the problem of international order. Its point of departure is the American Founding, a subject often invisible in both the history of international thought and contemporary International Relations theory. Although usually considered as an incident within the domestic politics of the United States, the Founding displays many key ideas that have subsequently played a vital role in both international political thought and IR theory. The purpose of this essay is to explore these ideas and to take account of their passage through time, up to and including the present day. Those ideas shine a light not only on how we organize our scholarly enterprises but also on the contemporary direction of US foreign policy and the larger question of world order.

The bequest for the Church Peace Union—the predecessor of today's Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (and the publisher of this journal)—was given by Andrew Carnegie in February 1914. The Church Peace Union subsequently sponsored the first worldwide gathering of religious leaders, which was held in Constance, Germany, on August 2, 1914. Convened under the shadow of an impending war, not all delegates made it to the gathering. Six months previously, Carnegie had stipulated that the Church Peace Union devote its funds to the deserving poor "after the arbitration of international disputes is established and war abolished, as it certainly will be some day." This could happen, he noted, "sooner than expected, probably by the Teutonic nations, Germany, Britain, and the United States first deciding to act in unison, the others joining later." The outbreak of war was a catastrophic blow to such hopes, as the very nations expected to be at the core of this civilized project descended into an orgy of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.