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.
VIENNA/NEW YORK – 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.
He goes back to the period before the American founding, unearthing figures like Increase Mather, a mid-seventeenth-century Boston preacher who saw Israel as the eventual homeland for the 12 wandering tribes. Given that there was only a smattering of Jews (mostly Sephardic) in pre-Revolutionary America, these early American Protestants’ interest in the question of Israel is striking. But Mead confidently traces its throughline up until 1840, when the first waves of European immigrants started to shift the nature of the relationship, and when the “otherness” of Jews began to dominate American perceptions.
By recounting this earlier history, Mead corrects the assumption that the unholy alliance between conservative American Jews and the evangelical right started with televangelists like Pat Robertson in the 1980s. Moreover, by revealing the deeper history of American views toward Jews, Israel, and Zionism, Mead delivers his key conceptual point: that one must apprehend how domestic politics become integrated into foreign policy. To make sense of American thought and policies toward Israel requires mapping the outsize role that Jews and Israel have played in the American imagination at different historical junctures.
This role has been prominent in nearly all periods of US history, representing an underappreciated ideological consensus that runs through the development of the country’s foreign policy as it stands today. Realists, Mead claims, inaccurately believe that the Israeli lobby is what determines US foreign-policy choices, whereas liberal internationalists see US policy as guided by the putative benefits of Israeli democracy. Mead considers both views to be empirically faulty and misconceived, because they overlook the place that Israel and the Jews have long occupied in America’s political consciousness.
In exploring how the idea and reality of Israel have shaped American politics, Mead seeks to correct many of the ahistorical, apolitical, reductive, and anti-Semitic arguments that often appear in US foreign-policy debates. He demonstrates that there is no hidden force, no all-powerful advocacy, that makes US policy toward Israel tilt in any particular direction. He points to instances when US policy toward Israel was weak and indifferent, and to others when it was strong and impassioned. The decisive variables aren’t cabals in New York and Hollywood or Jew-haters in the heartland. Politics and power are what matter, and they are always in dynamic motion. Any convincing explanation, Mead insists, must be found in this domain.
Mead is surely right that when it comes to understanding many historical flashpoints, a dispassionate approach that tunes out the noise and lets the evidence speak is imperative. And by adopting this method, he makes some surprising and unanticipated historical discoveries. For example, he shows that we can disregard the oft-told story of how US President Harry Truman was pressed into recognizing Israel in May 1948 following entreaties from his Jewish friend back home in Independence, Missouri. On the contrary, Truman’s calculus reflected a complex balancing of various political forces that culminated in his pivot from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war policy toward new Cold War realities. The heroic role that many American Jews impute to Truman is misplaced. He was not the accidental philo-Semite that many supposed.
Blind Spots
But Mead’s subtle reinterpretation of the historical record sometimes leaves him sand-trapped – a risk faced by all iconoclasts, even the responsible ones. For example, he is so eager to dismantle the myth of the all-powerful “Israel lobby” that he distorts the highly visible role that Israel advocates do indeed play in American politics. It is a fair question to ask why support for Israel has become as febrile and unyielding as it has in recent decades. But here his explanations are partial and unsatisfying.
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For example, Mead notes that, “Down through the years, there has been no shortage of books … claiming that an ‘Israeli lobby’ that prioritizes Israel’s interests over those of the United States … controls both the public discussion of US-Israeli relations and the actual policy.” But he cites no books that argue this and makes nary a mention of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 12,600-word salvo (and later book) in the March 23, 2006, London Review of Books that ignited the debate about the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the US. Instead, Mead shadowboxes with straw men (citing fringe comments about Jews controlling Hollywood and Washington, DC) and offers conventional arguments about how interest groups work in American politics.
And while Mead is absolutely right that America’s policies towards Israel are not the result of some sinister Jewish conspiracy, this does not mean that there is not a powerful Israel lobby. Looking at just this year’s midterm primary season, one would have to be blind not to see the power of various pro-Israel lobby groups. In Michigan, AIPAC spent $8 million to defeat Andy Levin, an incumbent Jewish Democratic congressman who made the mistake of modestly tut-tutting Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. And tens of millions more have been spent to defeat other candidates for both chambers. As intended, the effect has been chilling: in all too many cases, criticizing Israel simply isn’t worth the electoral risk.
Mead is right to point out that America’s policy toward Israel is often divorced from American Jews’ own policy preferences. For example, 63% of American Jews want a two-state solution and an end to settlements. But Mead then fails to explain why successive US administrations have only half-heartedly (at best) pushed to achieve these ends. Something must be getting in the way, and it is no big mystery what it is. Often a big mystery ends up being big money.
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.
Yet after going into exhaustive detail about the peace accords that were tantalizingly close to being signed in 2000 and 2001, Ben-Ami comes to a rather generalized and striking conclusion: namely, that the two-state solution is moribund, and that “all stakeholders” therefore should “shift their attention to other possible scenarios.”
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.
Mead, wearing his grand strategist hat, would likely see the Abraham Accords as evidence of an America that is adjusting to the reality of the post-American world. The tone of lamentation that runs through Ben-Ami’s prose indicates that he would agree on this point. His book and Mead’s are both relevant for an age when identity politics at home and abroad are dramatically changing the meaning of realism and liberal internationalism.
For a providential realist like Mead, history is prophecy. With today’s America feeling the unsettling effects of another major paradigm shift, Mead is seeking to make sense of the choices it faces. Francis Fukuyama’s much-debated “end of history” leitmotif has been supplanted by a more eschatological sentiment, and identity politics and decolonization narratives are overtaking the longstanding Cold War framework. Under these conditions, Mead hopes to offer a more apocalypse-attuned realism that can save the US.
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Walter Russel Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Knopf, 2022.
VIENNA/NEW YORK – 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.
He goes back to the period before the American founding, unearthing figures like Increase Mather, a mid-seventeenth-century Boston preacher who saw Israel as the eventual homeland for the 12 wandering tribes. Given that there was only a smattering of Jews (mostly Sephardic) in pre-Revolutionary America, these early American Protestants’ interest in the question of Israel is striking. But Mead confidently traces its throughline up until 1840, when the first waves of European immigrants started to shift the nature of the relationship, and when the “otherness” of Jews began to dominate American perceptions.
By recounting this earlier history, Mead corrects the assumption that the unholy alliance between conservative American Jews and the evangelical right started with televangelists like Pat Robertson in the 1980s. Moreover, by revealing the deeper history of American views toward Jews, Israel, and Zionism, Mead delivers his key conceptual point: that one must apprehend how domestic politics become integrated into foreign policy. To make sense of American thought and policies toward Israel requires mapping the outsize role that Jews and Israel have played in the American imagination at different historical junctures.
This role has been prominent in nearly all periods of US history, representing an underappreciated ideological consensus that runs through the development of the country’s foreign policy as it stands today. Realists, Mead claims, inaccurately believe that the Israeli lobby is what determines US foreign-policy choices, whereas liberal internationalists see US policy as guided by the putative benefits of Israeli democracy. Mead considers both views to be empirically faulty and misconceived, because they overlook the place that Israel and the Jews have long occupied in America’s political consciousness.
In exploring how the idea and reality of Israel have shaped American politics, Mead seeks to correct many of the ahistorical, apolitical, reductive, and anti-Semitic arguments that often appear in US foreign-policy debates. He demonstrates that there is no hidden force, no all-powerful advocacy, that makes US policy toward Israel tilt in any particular direction. He points to instances when US policy toward Israel was weak and indifferent, and to others when it was strong and impassioned. The decisive variables aren’t cabals in New York and Hollywood or Jew-haters in the heartland. Politics and power are what matter, and they are always in dynamic motion. Any convincing explanation, Mead insists, must be found in this domain.
Mead is surely right that when it comes to understanding many historical flashpoints, a dispassionate approach that tunes out the noise and lets the evidence speak is imperative. And by adopting this method, he makes some surprising and unanticipated historical discoveries. For example, he shows that we can disregard the oft-told story of how US President Harry Truman was pressed into recognizing Israel in May 1948 following entreaties from his Jewish friend back home in Independence, Missouri. On the contrary, Truman’s calculus reflected a complex balancing of various political forces that culminated in his pivot from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war policy toward new Cold War realities. The heroic role that many American Jews impute to Truman is misplaced. He was not the accidental philo-Semite that many supposed.
Blind Spots
But Mead’s subtle reinterpretation of the historical record sometimes leaves him sand-trapped – a risk faced by all iconoclasts, even the responsible ones. For example, he is so eager to dismantle the myth of the all-powerful “Israel lobby” that he distorts the highly visible role that Israel advocates do indeed play in American politics. It is a fair question to ask why support for Israel has become as febrile and unyielding as it has in recent decades. But here his explanations are partial and unsatisfying.
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For example, Mead notes that, “Down through the years, there has been no shortage of books … claiming that an ‘Israeli lobby’ that prioritizes Israel’s interests over those of the United States … controls both the public discussion of US-Israeli relations and the actual policy.” But he cites no books that argue this and makes nary a mention of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 12,600-word salvo (and later book) in the March 23, 2006, London Review of Books that ignited the debate about the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the US. Instead, Mead shadowboxes with straw men (citing fringe comments about Jews controlling Hollywood and Washington, DC) and offers conventional arguments about how interest groups work in American politics.
And while Mead is absolutely right that America’s policies towards Israel are not the result of some sinister Jewish conspiracy, this does not mean that there is not a powerful Israel lobby. Looking at just this year’s midterm primary season, one would have to be blind not to see the power of various pro-Israel lobby groups. In Michigan, AIPAC spent $8 million to defeat Andy Levin, an incumbent Jewish Democratic congressman who made the mistake of modestly tut-tutting Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. And tens of millions more have been spent to defeat other candidates for both chambers. As intended, the effect has been chilling: in all too many cases, criticizing Israel simply isn’t worth the electoral risk.
Mead is right to point out that America’s policy toward Israel is often divorced from American Jews’ own policy preferences. For example, 63% of American Jews want a two-state solution and an end to settlements. But Mead then fails to explain why successive US administrations have only half-heartedly (at best) pushed to achieve these ends. Something must be getting in the way, and it is no big mystery what it is. Often a big mystery ends up being big money.
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.
Yet after going into exhaustive detail about the peace accords that were tantalizingly close to being signed in 2000 and 2001, Ben-Ami comes to a rather generalized and striking conclusion: namely, that the two-state solution is moribund, and that “all stakeholders” therefore should “shift their attention to other possible scenarios.”
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.
Mead, wearing his grand strategist hat, would likely see the Abraham Accords as evidence of an America that is adjusting to the reality of the post-American world. The tone of lamentation that runs through Ben-Ami’s prose indicates that he would agree on this point. His book and Mead’s are both relevant for an age when identity politics at home and abroad are dramatically changing the meaning of realism and liberal internationalism.
For a providential realist like Mead, history is prophecy. With today’s America feeling the unsettling effects of another major paradigm shift, Mead is seeking to make sense of the choices it faces. Francis Fukuyama’s much-debated “end of history” leitmotif has been supplanted by a more eschatological sentiment, and identity politics and decolonization narratives are overtaking the longstanding Cold War framework. Under these conditions, Mead hopes to offer a more apocalypse-attuned realism that can save the US.