After The Fact

Daniel Larison writes:

“Quite often, America’s most pro-Israel politicians are people who don’t get much Jewish money or many Jewish votes. Sarah Palin had an Israeli flag in her office when she was Governor of Alaska; this didn’t help her much with Joe Klein, and it didn’t make her the toast of the Upper West Side. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was the most consistent supporter of a hard-line pro-Israel position among the top presidential contenders in 2008; somehow, the Jewish vote didn’t come through for him.” ~Walter Russell Mead

If Mead limited his argument to arguing that there are and always have been ardently pro-Israel Christians in the United States, no one would bother contesting the claim, because it is so obvious. Once again, he has thoroughly demolished an argument about U.S. Israel policy that no one of any consequence in America is making. However, he remains committed to his genuinely odd notion that U.S. foreign policy is guided by popular consensus rather than entrenched interests, and then he makes statements like the one quoted above. It is hard to think of any policy overseas in the last seventy years that has flowed out of a pre-existing public consensus. More than almost any other kind of policy, foreign policy is something fashioned at an elite level and then rationalized or justified to the public after the fact. Public opinion on foreign policy issues does not existy fully formed, but it is constantly being shaped by what the political class and media tell the public about these issues. Mead is actively creating the consensus that he pretends has always existed.

Presumably, Mead understands the religious and ideological reasons why Palin and Huckabee are hard-liners on anything related to Israel, and he must also know that groups such as CUFI exist to represent the views of hard-line Christian Zionists and to bring pressure to bear on politicians. CUFI doesn’t speak for all evangelicals, and probably doesn’t even speak for most of them, and the hard-line positions of Palin and Huckabee do not simply grow out of a pre-existing consensus among their conservative constituents. These are positions that they have learned to adopt, or have been conditioned to adopt, because they understand what is expected of Republican politicians with ambitions of higher office. Part of what is expected is unfliching support for allies no matter how harmful the alliance or allied policy is to the interests of the United States. To the extent that Palin and Huckabee are already predisposed to the same kind of reckless hawkishness they endorse with respect to Israel and Palestine, they will be happy to oblige.

To the extent that a consensus on Israel exists on the right, it is something that has been fashioned by conservative political and intellectual leaders over decades, and it is something that has been reinforced through a steady diet of slanted or incomplete news coverage, government propaganda, and the constantly repeated claim that Israel is a reliable ally. Young conservatives receive this information from virtually every conservative media outlet they encounter, they have it reinforced for them by virtually every conservative columnist they read, and they are taught to look askance at any self-styled conservative who offers a dissenting view. This sort of ideological conditioning is hardly unique to this issue, and it certainly isn’t unique to the right, but it is helpful to focus on this example to understand where part of the rigid, uniform, fanatical support for “pro-Israel” policies in America comes from.

One side of the issue has dedicated, organized activists, and the other side does not have anything like the same intensity or organization. One side has effectively dominated the public discussion of the issue for decades, not because they happen to be telling the public what it already wants to hear, but because they have been trying to shape public opinion for decades. Most politicians are not going to try going against the tide by actively courting the displeasure of organized activists on an issue that doesn’t actually matter to them much one way or the other.

It is useful to look at a different case of irrational U.S. acquiescence to the uncompromising policies of another government and unflagging support for said government to understand how some of this works. The United States has no conceivable national interest in the Caucasus that merits the degree of support our government has given to Georgia over the last seven years, but that has not stopped a strong bipartisan consensus from forming around the idea that the U.S. must show unwavering support for Georgia no matter what it does. This has already had disastrous effects for U.S.-Russian relations and for Georgia itself in 2008. The complete failure of this approach has not discouraged members of both parties from insisting on toeing a Georgian nationalist line that can only undermine U.S. relations with Russia and encourage Georgia in its own dead-end obsession with winning back lost territories. Obviously, there is no national consensus for unstinting support for Georgia, about which most Americans know little or nothing, nor is there broad pro-Georgian sentiment that has made this happen, as Mead’s thesis would require. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t powerful interests that have a stake in getting the U.S. to meddle into the Caucasus to the detriment of the U.S., Georgia and Russia. Of course, there is a Georgia lobby, and it doesn’t need to be especially large or powerful to wield outsized influence thanks to the lack of much concerted opposition.

“Changing America’s mind about the Middle East” isn’t hard because Americans have such deeply-rooted, firm beliefs about the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship or anything else in the region. It is hard because so few Americans care about U.S. policy in the region enough to give it much thought, much less bother with promoting alternatives to the status quo.