Martin Kramer's Rebuttal of Mearsheimer and Walt: Is It A Worse Approach?

Martin Kramer points out 2 basic arguments for saying that Israel is an asset to the US:

1. The Holocaust and Jewish persecution creates a moral obligation that the civilized world owes Israel.
2. Israel is an outpost of democracy in the Middle East.

But there are downsides provided by those very same arguments:
1. An obligation can be a liability as well as an asset.
2. A non-democratic state, such as Saudi Arabia, can be an asset--assuring the flow of oil. By the same token, the PA and Iran are more democratic than Saudi Arabia, yet have not been assets to the US.

Those 2 arguments are nevertheless sufficient for most people.

But everywhere in the West, there is a sliver of elite opinion that is not satisfied with these rationales. It includes policymakers and analysts, journalists, and academics. By habit and by preference, they have a tendency to view any consensus with skepticism. In their opinion, the American people cannot possibly be wiser than them -- after all, look whom they elect -- and so they deliberately take a contrary position on issues around which there is broad agreement. In this spirit, many of them view U.S. support for Israel as a prime focal point for skepticism.

Take for instance John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, and their paper “The Israel Lobby: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy.” As proponents of the Realist approach, they find issues of historical oblication and an ally's respect for human rights to be irrelevant. Instead, US support for Israel is a liability, the interests of 5 million American Jews alienating the US from a billion Moslems--and AIPAC, the epitome of the Israel Lobby, blinding the US to the problem.

As a result of the Israel Lobby, the US has unwisely gotten involved in an invasion of Iraq and an unnecessarily antagonistic opposition to Iran's pursuit of nuclear power.

So what is Kramer's alternative to the classic moral obligation/democratic ally argument:

My answer, to anticipate my conclusion, is this: United States support for Israel is not primarily the result of Holocaust guilt or shared democratic values; nor is it produced by the machinations of the “Israel Lobby.” American support for Israel -- indeed, the illusion of its unconditionality – underpins the pax Americana in the eastern Mediterranean. It has compelled Israel’s key Arab neighbors to reach peace with Israel and to enter the American orbit. The fact that there has not been a general Arab-Israeli war since 1973 is proof that this pax Americana, based on the United States-Israel alliance, has been a success. From a realist point of view, supporting Israel has been a low-cost way of keeping order in part of the Middle East, managed by the United States from offshore and without the commitment of any force. It is, simply, the ideal realist alliance.

In contrast, the problems the United States faces in the Persian Gulf stem from the fact that it does not have an Israel equivalent there, and so it must massively deploy its own force at tremendous cost. Since no one in the Gulf is sure that the United States has the staying power to maintain such a presence over time, the Gulf keeps producing defiers of America, from Khomeini to Saddam to Bin Laden to Ahmadinejad. The United States has to counter them, not in the interests of Israel, but to keep the world’s great reserves of oil out of the grip of the West’s sworn enemies.

But there is a problem with the approach that the US has benefitted from Israel as a lever by which to acquire concessions from the Arab World--concessions which it would not have been able to otherwise. Kramer's approach implies a level of manipulation that cannot always be assumed to be in Israel's interest:

In a paradoxical way, the United States has been a major beneficiary of the Israeli occupation of Arab territories: Arab leaders who wish to regain lost territory must pass an American test. When they do, the United States rewards them, and the result has been a network of American-endorsed agreements based on American-mediated Israeli concessions.

Very nice, but by rewarding the Arab leaders each time, the US has taught those leaders that they need not suffer the consequences of their actions and may thereby even encourage their attacks, knowing that land lost is easily regained. If the peace treaty with Egypt is an example of one of those "American-endorsed agreements based on American-mediated Israeli concessions," one could easily make the argument that given the minimal requirements made upon Egypt and the continued vilification of both Israel and the US in the Egyptian press, combined with the enormous amount of American aid with no clear gain in return--makes the suggested American benefit suspect.

When Kramer's refers to Israel as an ally, it is not in the sense of a country with whom the US associates or cooperates with such as Great Britain or Australia, but more as a "an interest" which is manipulated to serves the goals of the US. Middle East allies are apparently different.

Reduced in her stature as an ally in this way, Kramer criticizes the Disengagement as an attempt for Israel to do something that only the US should be doing--giving Israeli land to her enemies:

That Israel looms so large as a valuable ally and asset, in a Middle East of failed and failing states, is an achievement in which Israel can rightly take pride. But it must never be taken for granted. Israel has come perilously close to doing so in recent years, by unilaterally evacuating occupied territory -- first in Lebanon, but more importantly in Gaza. Whatever the merits of “disengagement” in its various forms, it effectively cuts out the United States as a broker, and has created the impression that Arabs can regain territory by force, outside the framework of the pax Americana.

The problem, according to Kramer, is not that by personally giving back land to her enemies Israel encourages them and absolves them of the consequences of aggression; it is that Israel thereby deprives the US of the political benefit of such actions.

And then Kramer finally says plainly what he has meant all along:

If Israel is to preserve its value as a client, its territorial concessions must appear to be made in Washington.

Israel is a client, a country under the patronage of, and dependent on, the US--not an ally.

The manipulation becomes more obvious:

In Israel, by contrast, the United States is allied to a militarily adept, economically vibrant state that keeps its part of the Middle East in balance. The United States has to help maintain that balance with military aid, peace plans, and diplomatic initiatives.

To keep that "balance," Israel by definition will never be allowed by the US to be too strong or the Arab enemies threatening her allowed to become too weak. Seen in this way, a Palestinian state is the natural result of the search for balance, a check on Israel. The utilitarian pragmatic Realist approach is a success because of American lives and resources saved:

...according to the realist model, a policy that upholds American interests without the dispatch of American troops is a success by definition. American support of Israel has achieved precisely that.

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure that I'm all that much happier with Martin Kramer's interpretation of Israel's relationship with the US over Mearsheimer's and Walt's.

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tag: Israel and Martin Kramer and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and Israel Lobby.