Suchergebnisse

Since Joe Biden described Israel as "starting to lose support" due to "indiscriminate bombing" in Gaza, news media around the world have described the United States as pushing, unsuccessfully, for Israel to change both its tactics in Gaza and its preferred political arrangements for when the fighting ends. To date, that supposed pressure does not appear to have had much effect, which has led to "tail wags dog" arguments about how the U.S. is either unable, or unwilling, to force a shift in Israeli policy.Of course, it is impossible to know what, if any, threats are being made behind the scenes by the parade of U.S. officials who have been shuttling to Jerusalem over the past few weeks. However, given the nature of Prime Minister Netanyahu's governing coalition, one might imagine that any such threats might have been leaked to the media. Moreover, if one looks at what the two sides are disagreeing over — when precisely the bombing campaign should end, or how, down the road, some hypothetical third party would temporarily administer Gaza — there is, as a practical matter, precious little daylight between the U.S. and Israel. This is abundantly clear from the various news conferences given in recent days at the White House, the State Department, and the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, notably on the issue of how a Security Council resolution had to be worded to avoid yet another American veto.But the strongest reason to doubt that very much pressure is being applied is the Holmesian dog that did not bark: Put simply, the people who run U.S. foreign policy show no indication of viewing a shift in Israeli policy as a matter of national interest for the United States. For the fact of the matter is that when U.S. officials perceive the national interest as being at stake, they are more than willing to change policy, including overriding close allies. The classic example is the 1956 Suez crisis when President Eisenhower threatened the United Kingdom financially and humiliated his old companion in arms, Anthony Eden. Other examples include President Kennedy's withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from its NATO allies Turkey and Italy as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis deal; President Nixon's squeezing of South Vietnamese President Thieu over the Paris Peace Accords; President George W. Bush's bypassing of Thatcher and Mitterrand regarding German reunification; and, most recently, President Trump's sanctioning of Turkey over its offensive in northern Syria.If, therefore, there are no signs of the U.S. threatening Israel over Gaza, it is unlikely due to White House qualms about facing down Netanyahu and company; rather, it is because the Administration sees little U.S. cost in slow-walking a modest policy change. Put simply, there is just not enough at stake to warrant the use of pressure. Both in terms of international relations and of domestic politics, the status quo is not significantly unsatisfactory. To see this, consider each of these factors.The "humanitarian situation" in Gaza, as a so-called "senior administration official" put it, is not perceived by Biden and his advisers as putting the United States in a position that requires a notable change in policy. I refer here not to the private views of these individuals, but to how they see the international status of the U.S. as affected by its support of what Israel is doing in Gaza. The answer is, not much. For example, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, after characterizing the plight of the people in Gaza as "gut-wrenching," added immediately that this was why Israel's "operations" should be seen "through to completion quickly, effectively, and doing everything possible to minimize the harm to those caught in a crossfire of Hamas's making." Another unnamed official described the diplomatic "cost" as "intangible" and making it "harder to win support on issues we care about." And when journalists ask about the U.S. being isolated because of its Gaza policy, the questions are blandly dismissed.One might imagine that this downplaying of discontent from other countries' governments or public opinion is due to a realpolitik sense that human rights and humanitarian concerns, even during genocides, are secondary. Evidence for this claim would cite President Clinton's maneuvers to prevent UN intervention in Rwanda, continue with President Reagan's support of Gen. Rios Montt in Guatemala and Presidents Ford and Carter's de facto backing of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and stretch back as far as President Roosevelt's refusal to bomb the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. However, the point has to do with perceived pressure from outside the U.S.: Viewed from Washington, neither massive killings nor most other situations give rise to pressure significant enough to change U.S. policy. In part, this is because the United States is in a unique position: Most of its adversaries are economically too weak to threaten the U.S., whereas those with economic weight are for the most part its allies or clients.But it is also due to a more fundamental feature of American foreign policy. When policy makers choose a course of action, they tend to discount longer-term negative consequences. A classic case in point is the July 1965 decision to send 200,000 ground troops to South Vietnam. When Under Secretary of State George Ball argued that the U.S. would end up like the French, his points were dismissed with Micawber-like platitudes. So too it was with Truman's decision to send troops north of the 38th parallel, and with Bush's decisions to invade Iraq and dissolve Saddam Hussein's military. Given this tendency, claims about future diplomatic damage for failure to crack down hard enough on Israel are no doubt met with reactions akin to Keynes's famous line about the long run.In this regard, it is significant that the cases cited above in which the U.S. cracked down on its allies involved reactions to current events, not a long-term calculation. Thus, U.S. policy over Suez was spurred by a sense of being in a life-or-death battle with the Soviet Union for the favors of countries in Africa and Asia; to side with the colonial powers and Israel who had occupied the canal was an immediate threat to U.S. interests (this is also why the Eisenhower White House supported civil rights at home). Similarly, the pressure on Thieu to go along with the Paris accords was, as Henry Kissinger infamously put it, in pursuit of a "decent interval." For U.S. policy makers, the response to discontent from abroad over their Gaza policy is akin to Scarlett O'Hara's views in "Gone With the Wind:" Tomorrow is another day.What of domestic U.S. politics? Here, multiple strands of argument lead to the same conclusion: For Biden and his advisers, there are no clear political reasons to switch U.S. policy on Gaza. To start with, it is very likely that within the policy-making group, there are strong norms against bringing up domestic politics, the assumption being that Biden, as a long-time professional, is capable of making such judgments on his own. Those judgments, second, are likely to be that current policy already is triangulated correctly between hawks and doves; that the latter, if faced in the end with a choice between Trump and Biden, will swallow hard and vote Democratic; and that in any case, elections are almost never won or lost on foreign policy issues. These calculations, of course, leave little room for error: Even a small increase in abstention rates among core Democratic constituencies could prove fatal in various swing states. For that reason, a non-veto in the Security Council, repeated emphasis on "targeted operations," humanitarian issues, and a two-state solution, and, most importantly, well-publicized criticisms of Netanyahu by close Biden allies are attempts to reframe U.S. policy as less anti-Palestinian. As the war drags on, it is possible that the White House will agree to modest conditions on the use of military aid, albeit with waiver language included so that push never comes to shove.These kabuki-like moves show clearly that U.S. policy makers feel little pressure, whether domestic or foreign, to change their policy on Gaza. Absent additional, immediate moves, such as organized abstention in presidential primaries, the most likely scenario is continued death for thousands and despair for millions.

Over the last few days, there has been a flurry of news reports confirming that U.S. policy regarding Gaza is firmly based on revitalizing the Palestinian Authority (PA). This policy is part of the standard Great Power diplomatic toolkit aimed at empowering a supposed Third Force as a way out of a political and military nightmare. Alas, the record shows that Third Force policies are most often chimeras, not solutions, and that the choice boils down to cutting a deal with the group that is beyond the pale, or else accepting war for the indefinite future.One of the first Third Force policies took place just over a century ago, when the UK, fighting an insurgency in Ireland, looked for a political grouping that would be intermediate between the now-discredited system of direct rule and the demonized Sinn Fein. For several years, Lloyd George pursued a will o' the wisp Gladstoneism, creating and backing a Southern Irish Parliament; but in the end, was forced to abandon this idea and invite Sinn Fein's own Eamon de Valera himself to London to negotiate what became the Free State.Fast forward to Algeria, when French President Charles De Gaulle, having been returned to power by the threat of military revolt and having initially called for FLN rebels to surrender honorably, called for his version of a Third Force: an Algeria "governed by Algerians but in close union with France." This alternative to both the status quo and the "horrifying misery" of secession was, a year-and-a-half later, discarded in favor of negotiations with the FLN and independence.One can tell a similar story for other Great Powers fighting counterinsurgencies, such as the Russians in Afghanistan (or, at least in terms of local military dominance, the Dutch in Indonesia or the Nationalist government in South Africa); but the point is that when the United States chases after a Third Force, as it did in Cuba in 1958 (neither Batista nor Castro) and in Iran in 1978 (neither the Shah nor Khomeini), it is following an oft-trodden path. That path is a dead end, and for a very simple reason: the lengthy fighting (or, in the case of Iran, repression) that leads policy makers to hunt around for a Third Force also makes it impossible for any such Force to have more than a fraction of the legitimacy of the foe that the Great Power, or its client, has been combating.Of course, policy makers may decide, for any number of reasons, that they prefer to continue fighting than to work out a political arrangement with their enemies. In this regard, waving the standard of a Third Force may be less a sign of naivete and more a way to try and distract audiences from the decision to continue fighting. Such a decision is often accompanied by invocation of the enemy's moral repugnancy; for example, its use of terrorism and its maximalist political program. The fact that those making these arguments may themselves have a history of both negotiating and coordinating with the repugnant enemy does not make the moral condemnation or the search for a Third Force any the less heartfelt. But it does, however, present a way out — if the will is there.A good case in point is U.S. and Israeli policy with regard to the PLO after the latter was expelled from Lebanon. One might have imagined that, after Yassir Arafat and company had decamped to Tunisia, the Third Force — in this case, King Hussein's Jordan — would have been at the center of attempts to find a Palestinian policy. But those attempts ended, predictably, in a dead end; and the Israelis turned to the PLO, negotiating with the group that their own legislation had until then prohibited them from contacting. Of course, the Oslo Accords failed — a point I will return to below — but the issue here is that both the U.S. and Israel made progress precisely because they jettisoned the Third Force fantasy, and de-anathematized the PLO. Indeed, the boycott of the PLO was always shot through with holes, with face being saved by dint of conversations that took place through third parties. Nonetheless, as a political gesture, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's move was symbolically important, not only convulsing Israel but costing him his life, an outcome which could easily have happened to De Gaulle as well.The point is simple: peace is made between enemies, not friends. Negotiations can occur without any implication that one side trusts the other, or considers it morally legitimate, or that future arrangements can never be scrapped (as seems to have happened between Hamas and Israel, and Hamas and the U.S., on multiple occasions over the past decade). Negotiations in this sense are not a reward for good behavior, but a response to vile actions and bad faith.For in the end, the only alternative is to keep fighting, with the goal of a Hamas-free Gaza administered by a revitalized PA receding like Gatsby's green light. The Israelis can fight for weeks, months, or even years more, with the U.S. continuing to provide them cover; they can kill or capture or exile every member of Hamas; and it will not make the PA any stronger or better able to administer Gaza. It is time for those who pride themselves on their sense of realism to face facts and drop the Third Force.

This book refutes the claim that American foreign policy has varied considerably across time and space, arguing that key policy goals and underlying ideological and political factors have not significantly changed over the last hundred years.

"Simulation and ABM in Foreign Policy" published on by Oxford University Press.