A sharp reader has pointed out that another scholar holds the patent on an idea I found so exciting in Walt and Mearsheimer’s book. This is the idea that after the cold war–a period in which Israel was our invaluable asset against the Soviet Union–neocon supporters of Israel needed to reposition the state as an invaluable asset in the ensuing global order. It turns out that Leon Hadar of the Cato was saying this way back in 1991. And again in ’93, in Foreign Affairs:
From home and abroad voices have begun to counsel the Clinton
administration that with communism’s death, America must prepare for a
new global threat–radical Islam. .. intent on launching a
jihad against Western civilization.
And in a ’92 paper for Cato, Hadar pointed out the upside for Israel:
Israel could become the contemporary crusader nation, a
bastion of the West in the struggle against the new transnational enemy, Islamic fundamentalism. According to Daniel
Doron, "With the momentous upheavals rocking the Muslim
World, the Arab-Israeli conflict is a sideshow with little
geopolitical significance."
Which is exactly what Ken Pollack did in his book, The Threatening Storm. Or that Paul Berman did in Terror and Liberalism. Boy, those neocons have been influential! In his ’91 paper, Hadar goes into something I missed in W&M’s book, the social history of the neocons and the issue of Jewish identity:
That neoconservative "nuclear family" [basically the Podhoretzes] was
later joined [in the 70s] by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walt
and Eugene Rostow, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams (Podhoretz’ son-in-law),
Kenneth Adelman, and other Cold Warriors and advocates of hawkish
Israeli policies. Individually and, later, as a group, they have
had a major impact on the foreign policy of several administrations,
beginning with that of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Israel became a central cause for these neocons after
its victory in the 1967 war turned most of them into born-again
Zionists. Neocons like the Rostow brothers and Ben Wattenberg, who
served in the Johnson administration, helped LBJ drum up support
for the Vietnam War among Jewish liberal Democrats who had been
opposed to that military adventure. This was done by convincing
such liberals that only a militarily strong and perpetually interventionist
America can guarantee the security of Israel.
The corollary was that a strong Israel is a strategic
asset" as far as American interests in the Middle East are
concerned, helping Washington to contain Soviet expansionism in
the area. This was reduced to the neoconservative dogma that what
is good for Israel is good for America, and vice versa. Neocons
have treated questioning of this dogma as the equivalent of a declaration
of war and immediately have sought, by innuendo, to brand such questioners
as "anti-Semitic."
Ironically, many of the Jewish neocons were and are
assimilated Jews with little interest in Jewish civilization or
religion. Israel, as a political cause, has become a substitute
for religion for them, and by extension for many other American
Jews.[my emphasis]
