No, I guess I wouldn’t, because at that point you’d have to contend in a much more difficult way with the Palestinian population. The tragedy is that “quality of life” is a kind of western metric. Not everyone looks to that metric as an ultimate ambition. It would be nice if Palestinians cared about quality of life, access to good schools, good doctors, better infrastructure, and an advanced economy as opposed to their goal being “let’s kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map.”
Coming to grips with that is the beginning of wisdom when you talk about politics. People have radically different goals for themselves and their societies. In the Islamic world that often involves the slogan “the Jews love life and we love death.” That’s a very powerful statement and one that not enough of us have come to grips with.
Do you think the new Republican-controlled Senate and House will be a reliable buffer for Israel against the administration?
Not really. We have a system of government in the U.S. where the executive branch holds the whip hand in foreign policy and Israel has always understood that. Israel has always worked hard to cultivate relationships with members of the House and Senate. They’ll continue to do that. You’ll have a friendlier tone from this Congress than the last. But let’s face it: the last few congresses have all been extremely friendly toward Israel.
What’s important is to make the case for Israel more forcefully and to give it the articulation that the next presidential candidates ought to have: Why Israel is not just a moral interest for the United States but a strategic one. Why Israel is ten times the asset that other Western allies are. There’s a kind of mentality that Israel is a sort of supplicant and so grateful for America’s help, and yet America’s alliance with Israel provides Americans with tangible goods and benefits. For starters, when you look around the world we don’t have troops to defend Israel like in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and many other places. No Americans have ever died defending Israel, because Israel defends itself. The kind of technology, military technology, we get from our alliance with Israel, epitomized by Iron Dome, is something that sooner or later will be saving American lives.
You’ve written about the damage Obama has caused to America’s international standing. Where do you think American loss of dominance will hurt us most in the long run?
This brings me to the theme of my new book, America in Retreat. America’s loss of dominance hurts us everywhere when you have a president who came into office explicitly urging us to shrink our global footprint. He calls it retrenchment, nation building at home. I call it retreat. And the consequence of retreat is that you create power vacuums around the world, and power abhors a vacuum. So those vacuums are being filled by ISIS, the ayatollahs in Iran, Putin, and a much more assertive Chinese leadership.
It hurts us not only because these aggressive states and regimes think they’re pushing on an open door and can do whatever they like, but also because we lose credibility with our traditional friends and allies around the world who have to start looking around for other security guarantees. And that’s a dangerous world for the U.S. and for everyone.
I’ve written this book as a manual for the next set of presidential candidates, Republican or Democrat. It’s an argument for why the era of American power and dominance is good for the world and good for the United States. It tries to explain what is wrong with the Obama administration’s foreign policy and why the disorders we see now are the direct result of his foreign policy. And it is an explanation of where this world might be going if we continue on our current course. It’s also an argument against the neo-isolationism that is brewing in certain corners of the Republican Party.
