Mearsheimer and Walt still don’t understand American support for Israel.
by Matt Johnson
A central weakness of Mearsheimer and Walt’s case is the failure to account for why Israel attracted so much American support and solidarity in the first place. This couldn’t be attributed to the Israel lobby before it existed. They believe there are only three explanations for the United States’ support for Israel: the strategic value of the relationship, the “moral case” for defending the world’s only Jewish state, and the power of the Israel lobby. Much of their argument is focused on knocking down the first two explanations so that only the third is left standing. They believe the strategic and moral arguments are so weak that they cannot possibly explain the United States’ support for Israel, which leads them to drastically overstate the influence of the Israel lobby in shaping American public opinion. If Americans only understood the extent to which they are being deceived and manipulated, the argument goes, they would cease to support Israel as strongly as they do.
Mearsheimer and Walt are devotees of a school of thought in international relations called realism, which holds that states behave according to a single variable: the distribution of power in the international system. As Mearsheimer explains in his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, states aren’t motivated by ideology or other internal characteristics: “All great powers act according to the same logic regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government.” He and Walt seem to assume that all Americans share this mechanistic view of state behaviour, and if they say otherwise, they must have been fooled by political actors who place Israel’s interests above those of the US. Consequently, they downplay the significance of political beliefs, culture and history, and the importance of shared values and institutions to international alliances. Mearsheimer: Rigor or Reaction?What John J. Mearsheimer gets wrong about Ukraine, international affairs, and much else besides.QuilletteMatt Johnson
Realist logic dictates that a great power like the United States would never provide what Mearsheimer and Walt describe as “unconditional support” for Israel. They maintain that support on the basis of shared values or genuine solidarity is a myth and that every state relationship is simply an expedient transaction to be discarded the moment the strategic winds shift. According to realist logic, US support for Israel ought to have declined after the Cold War ended as Washington refocused its Middle East policy on maintaining a regional balance of power. Instead, Israel has remained the primary recipient of American military aid and diplomatic support in violation of realist assumptions about state behaviour.
This confounds realists like Mearsheimer and Walt, but they do not stop to reconsider their analysis of what motivates policymakers in the West. Instead, they argue that what they see as Israel’s negligible strategic value means that the United States’ commitment to Israeli security is a “liability rather than an asset”—a mistake to be corrected rather than a policy justified by other values. Something must therefore be causing the US to act in ways contrary to its own interests. And that something, they have decided, is the Israel lobby, the influence of which distorts the United States’ strategic decision-making.
Given the depth and consistency of the United States’ support for Israel, Mearsheimer and Walt must award the Israel lobby extraordinary power. For example, they assert that it was the “principal driving force” behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It would be one thing to observe that Israel supported the war or supplied faulty intelligence about Iraq’s WMD, but claiming that the war would not have happened but for the influence of the Israel lobby is absurd. The Bush administration made its own case for the invasion of Iraq and obtained the overwhelming support of Congress, not to mention the endorsement of 72 percent of Americans.
In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the authors attempt to fend off allegations of antisemitism by declaring that they aren’t talking about a “cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ U.S. foreign policy.” They observe that the lobby is a “loose coalition” and not a “unified movement with a central leadership.” But these disclaimers do not alter the thrust of their argument—throughout the essay and the book, Mearsheimer and Walt refer to the Israel lobby as a single, amorphous entity that drives US foreign policy, manipulates public opinion, and punishes or even silences dissent.
