Finally, it is the case for America as the world’s cop. You often hear people say America should not be the world’s policeman. I totally disagree. If we’re not the policeman, then the people who will volunteer for the job will have names like Putin or Khamenei or Xi or Baghdadi. America is the only country in the world that has the wherewithal and the democratic decency to fulfill that job responsibly. And we have lived in a relatively peaceful world for almost seventy years because America has been doing that job.
How has your experience as a Jew and a writer who lived and wrote in Israel impacted your thoughts and writings?
I was raised in a very secular home, but my parents were very pro-Israel. So it isn’t so much my Judaism that informs my journalism. It’s something closer to the reverse. It was only through my experience as a journalist in Israel, first for The Wall Street Journal and then becoming the editor of The Jerusalem Post, that I came to feel much more strongly both about Israel and about Judaism because what I observed was that Israel was a country that was being maligned and attacked.
Israel was a country that didn’t simply have a right to defend itself, it had an obligation to defend itself. So both my Israeli and Jewish affinities were strengthened because professionally I was in a job of trying to tell the truth about a conflict and about a situation. I’m not a defender of Israel because I’m a Jew. I think that’s incidental. I’m a defender of Israel because I think I’m an honest journalist.
