Is Israel in the American interest?
Martin Kramer is the scholar of the Middle East whose work we have occasionally noted here; Azure is the excellent magazine published by the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Azure assistant editor Noah Pollak wrote us yesterday:
I’m the assistant editor of Azure magazine, and I’m also an everyday Power Line reader. I posted Martin Kramer’s essay on the U.S.-Israel relationship on the Azure website as a preview of the upcoming issue, which is about to go to press. Martin Kramer has written a very strong piece which takes apart Walt and Mearsheimer on their own terms, within the framework of the realist school of foreign policy that they claim the U.S.-Israel alliance offends. In doing this Martin offers a dash through the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship and discusses the implications of the Hezbollah war as well. You guys do such a great job covering Israel and its relationship to the U.S. that I thought you’d enjoy it.As Noah Pollak's message suggests, Kramer's essay takes the Mearsheimer-Walt realist thesis at face value and engages it: "The American interest." It's a fascinating essay with an unexpected twist or two.
In "They too dare to speak out!" I tried to point out two aspects of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper that are mostly beyond the scope of Kramer's interest in his essay. Especially in its heavily footnoted Kennedy School form, the essay is a pseudoscholarly work by authors who seem unfamiliar with basic facts. There is also an striking animus in the paper's alternative history and its accompanying errors. Kramer's essay notes one element of the Mearsheimer-Walt argument that bears on both aspects of the Mearsheimer-Walt essay that I tried to capture:
[S]peaking of Iraq, we are left with the argument that the United States went to war there at the impetus of Israel and the “Israel Lobby.” This is simply a falsehood, and has no foundation in fact. It is not difficult to show that in the year preceding the Iraq war, Israel time and again disagreed with the United States, arguing that Iran posed the greater threat. Israel shed no tears over Saddam’s demise, and it gave full support to the United States once the Bush administration made its choice. But the assertion that the Iraq war is being waged on behalf of Israel is pure fiction.Thanks to Noah Pollak for the privilege of introducing Kramer's interesting essay.
