Israel advances its own agenda; can America do the same?
President George Washington cautioned in his enduring Farewell Address:
A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions—by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained—and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.
Is there any question that the United States exhibits this kind of intense loyalty toward Israel? By law, we guarantee Israel a “Qualitative Military Edge” over its regional rivals, despite Israel already being the predominant military force in the Middle East. Officially, we stubbornly avoid recognizing or detailing Israel’s nuclear capabilities, a disclosure routinely made about other nuclear powers such as Pakistan, India, North Korea, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom. What is acceptable speech in Israel’s Knesset is strictly prohibited within American power circles!
Why is this secrecy so critical? Open discussion about Israel’s nuclear strength might temper the tendency to view Iran’s nuclear pursuits as aggressive rather than defensive. Iran could legitimately fear that lacking nuclear weapons, it is vulnerable to U.S. invasions aimed at regime change, as occurred in Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Venezuela in 2026. Historical grievances run deep. Iran recalls the CIA’s 1953 coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of the much-reviled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Iran is also likely mindful of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, wherein Ukraine abandoned the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile to become non-nuclear in return for guarantees from Russia, the U.S., and the UK to uphold its independence, sovereignty, and borders. These assurances proved worthless when Russia took Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Numerous members of Congress display Israeli flags inside or outside their offices. The United States annually grants Israel approximately $3.8 billion for military and missile defense within a 10-year agreement from 2019 to 2028, despite Israel’s military supremacy over its neighbors by a vast margin. The U.S. turns a blind eye to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s potential need to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as highlighted in James Bamford’s book Spyfail. We provide arms to Israel that facilitate its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and fuel its wars against Iran and Lebanon. During a February exchange with Tucker Carlson, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee asserted that Israel has a “biblical right” to territory spanning from the Nile to the Euphrates, adding “it would be fine if they took it all.” Such claims resemble a loaded weapon, readily exploitable by China to justify an invasion of Taiwan, which might prompt a U.S. nuclear response.
Our conflict with Iran, conducted alongside Israel, was instigated by Israel. Iran has never posed an immediate or existential threat to U.S. sovereignty. Are we essentially waging a proxy war on behalf of Israel?
It is time to end our misguided affection for Israel, guided instead by the pragmatic foreign policy wisdom of British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
Original article: The American Conservative
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