Will Walldorf proposes changing the U.S.-Israel relationship somewhat:
Given Israel’s geopolitical stature, Washington needs to upgrade its relationship with the country from one of client-patron to strategic partnership. In the process, it needs to add, as with other U.S. partners comparable to Israel, greater ambiguity to its security pledge to the country. Under this kind of arrangement, the United States will be able to continue to support and protect Israel while reducing the certainty of that support for any and all Israeli endeavors.
Anything that makes U.S. support for its reckless client more conditional and less reflexive would be an improvement over the status quo. Walldorf is right that the current relationship encourages the Israeli government to behave as dangerously and destructively as it wants, and the U.S. ends up absorbing many of the costs as a result. A strategic partnership is not the right answer. For one thing, it’s not clear why the U.S. should want to continue “to support and protect” Israel in light of how its government acts and the many horrific crimes it has committed. Put simply, why should the U.S. want to continue arming and defending a genocidal apartheid regime?
As Sina Toossi has rightly argued before, Israel is a liability. This isn’t a case where the U.S. has compelling interests at stake that require it to continue supporting a terrible client. U.S. interests dictate putting much greater distance between our countries. The prudent course of action is for the U.S. to disentangle itself from its client1 as much as it possibly can. That means an end to subsidizing Israel’s defense and a halt to any future weapons transfers, and it definitely means no more shielding Israel from the consequences of its own aggressive actions.
There is no question that the U.S. has partnered with some awful regimes in the past, and it is partners with more than a few today. The rationalization for this has usually been that the U.S. “needed” the cooperation of these states to achieve some larger strategic goal. Most of those rationalizations didn’t make much sense at the time, and they look even worse in hindsight. In any case, the U.S. doesn’t need Israel as a partner. Israel may need continued U.S. support to pursue its aggressive policies, but that is no reason for our government to provide them with what they need.
No doubt it would be easier to sell a strategic partnership as an “upgrade” in Washington, but I fear that is because it would change very little in practice. Making U.S. support conditional is better than the blank check that the U.S. has traditionally given Israel, but our government usually finds excuses not to use its leverage with recipients of U.S. weapons and assistance. In theory, conditioning support gives the U.S. reins that it can pull on to keep the client in line, but our leaders never pull on the reins.
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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
