Aircraft carrier or lobby: more thoughts on U.S.-Israeli relations

Path dependence and elite socialization have forced the U.S. to bear ever-increasing costs for a proxy of questionable value.

A police drone hovers over protesters outside the Israeli consulate in New York on October 8, 2023.

I think, research, and write a lot about the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It is safe to say now that this relationship is driving the entire U.S. policy towards the Middle East. A couple years ago, I tried to explain this relationship, writing that “American elites have decided that they want to be ‘pro-Israel’ in general — and that Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies — so pro-Israel institutions get to define what that means.”

But that ultimately is circular logic. Why have these elites decided to be pro-Israel? Rob Ashlar, a writer whose work I am familiar with, and Kali de Armas, whom I am not familiar with, have been debating this question on Substack. De Armas backs the “aircraft carrier” theory, which posits that U.S. support for Israel is a natural outcome of larger imperial interests, and Ashlar backs the “Israel Lobby” or “Zionist parastate” theory, which posits that a faction within the American empire has pushed its own interests at the expense of the broader system.

In other words, is the dog wagging the tail or vice versa?

Ashlar and de Armas agree on one broad point: American elites identify Israel’s interests with their own interests. Their disagreement is about the mechanism of that identification, and the broader costs to the U.S.-led order. I agree with Ashlar that the “consanguineous and culturally co-mingled” nature of American and Israeli elites — in other words, social networks and elite socialization — make Israel different from other U.S. client states. However, I believe that both writers misapprehend the nature of the costs for the empire.

The real price of U.S. support for Israel is in path dependence and opportunity costs. The fanatical nature of American politics around Israel means that Washington cannot say no to Israeli ambitions, and the guaranteed nature of U.S. support means that Israel’s ambitions will always continue to grow. The United States is thus locked into an endless cycle of sunk costs in the Middle East, and cannot back out of projects that are more troublesome than they are worth, as it did with the war in Afghanistan.

Although Israeli wars subsidize parts of the domestic American industrial base that are important for military readiness, as de Armas argues, those resources are now being used up on weak states and substate entities in the Middle East instead of helping counter America’s more serious imperial competitors. Palestinians, Yemenis, Lebanese and Iranians took the bullets that would otherwise be fired at Russian or Chinese troops. Rather than being mutually reinforcing, these commitments are mutually competing.

American security elites had a robust debate about the tradeoffs between supporting Ukraine and preparing for conflict with China. This debate did not happen for Israel, despite the fact that the standoff munitions and missile defense systems that the U.S. military is burning through in the Middle East are far more relevant to a Pacific conflict than the artillery and armored vehicles that Ukraine uses. Whenever the “pivot to Asia” (supposedly the core U.S. strategic concern of the 21st century!) conflicts with support for Israel, the latter wins.

The case of U.S. military planner Elbridge Colby demonstrates both the mechanisms for and costs of maintaining U.S. support for Israel. Colby, the grandson of a CIA director from a family with a long history of military service, is an American blueblood if there ever was one. More clearminded than most American strategic thinkers about what maintaining U.S. hegemony would take, Colby is an advocate for drawing down from other theaters of war outside the Pacific, pointing to U.S. support for Ukraine as an example of a wasteful liability that Washington cannot afford when Chinese power looms.

Although he bent over backwards to accommodate Israeli concerns and signal his willingness to “defer more to Israel’s judgement,” Colby was preemptively attacked by pro-Israel factions as a dangerous isolationist, simply because he would prioritize something over U.S. commitments to the Middle East. Pressured heavily by Congress during his confirmation hearing, Colby ended up recanting his belief that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is more of an “existential” problem for America than a nuclear-armed Iran.

That is the revealed preference of American elites. Just as George Orwell called pacifism “objectively pro-Fascist,” the pro-Israel consensus is objectively pro-China, a bizarre contradiction in the empire’s strategic logic.

The argument that war in the Middle East is preparation for conflict with China, which de Armas cites hawks making, is not a real expression of their motives. It is a self-serving, post hoc justification. The closest analogy is President Donald Trump’s Loony Tunes obsession with using Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to fight China. The idea was floated in 2021 by then-Congressman Mike Waltz — who believed in a “generational” struggle against Islamists — amidst other bad faith, desperate arguments for staying in Afghanistan from congressional hawks.

Israel’s enemies are not proxies for China, which is happy to buy from and invest in every faction in the region, including Israel itself. Any damage done to Chinese interests by Israel is incidental, and more crucially, comes at an even higher cost to U.S. interests. Rejecting diplomacy with Iran in favor of regime change, for example, meant throwing out an opportunity to deal with a country that was quite eager to take American investment and even cooperate on certain security issues.

Worse yet, maintaining conflict with Iran until Israeli goals are met — that is to say, the forced collapse of the Iranian state, which itself would require U.S. management of the fallout — means embracing a constantly increasing and never-ending strain on American resources. Many other Israeli ambitions are similarly limitless. With Israel bombing Qatar and preparing for conflict with Turkey, two U.S. allies home to crucial military bases, the U.S.-Israeli order in the Middle East has become downright cannibalistic.

The strongest argument for Israel from the perspective of U.S. material interests is that Palestine provides a laboratory for counterinsurgency methods. But again, it comes at a high cost with marginal benefit for great power conflict. Israeli counterinsurgency methods are much more useful for the types of wars that Israel would like the U.S. to keep fighting. Do Poland and Taiwan, on the other hand, really get so much out of Israeli surveillance tech? Does that benefit justify such intense investment by their patron?

Positing that the U.S. supports Israel because of the boon to the military-industrial complex is a circular argument. Sure, bureaucratic inertia and entrenched interests keep the system in its current configuration. But why has the system decided to distribute resources this way in the first place? Is it the best for the overall health of the system? Even if the defense industry is strategically necessary to build up, or politically necessary to appease, why does it have to happen through hot wars in the Middle East? Wouldn’t the hot war in Ukraine or cold war with China be sufficient?

After all, industrial capacity is not necessarily fungible. Trump is learning the hard way that the Iron Dome, tailored for Israel’s wars against lightly-armed guerrillas, does not make a good model for continental missile defense. That is to say nothing of the physical basing infrastructure, the allocation of human capital into specific regional/language expertise (every Harvard kid who learns Persian is one who didn’t learn Mandarin), the creation of bespoke intelligence-gathering capabilities, and other expensive investments that cannot be moved from the Middle East to other theaters.

However, Ashlar overstates the cost of domestic and international discontent with U.S. policy. Attachment to a “deeply reviled pariah state,” he writes, is “ruining Western global political standing in the process.” But as one of the commenters on his article asks, “who ultimately cares what a few ants think?” Neither protests nor diplomatic censure have really damaged U.S. state capacity, and in fact have probably reinforced pro-Israel political commitments through a feeling of siege.

Indeed, Ashlar’s own essay offers an explanation of how Israeli isolation is not a cost from the perspective of American elites. Citing Josh Messite, he points out the importance of the War on Terror as America’s post-Cold War organizing logic. American elites fear a Third World (and particularly Muslim) horde that wants to take away everything they’ve built out of irrational jealousy. The Palestinian is supposed to stand in for that entire horde, and Israel is a symbol of how far America will go to stop it. Willingness to stomp on Palestine in the face of widespread disapproval is a useful loyalty test for both domestic supporters and foreign clients.

Of course, rather than being a dispassionate calculation of U.S. interest, this logic comes at the expense of preparing for the next great power conflict, and is born from a strong ideological identification with Israel.

That brings us to the importance of elite socialization and social networks. The elite identification with Israel is both genuinely felt and something that has to be maintained through political work by specific actors within the system. Much of the professional pro-Israel activism in America is focused on grooming the next generation of elites to identify with Israelis, whether by sending low-level officials on free junkets to Israel, sponsoring the think tanks that train early-career foreign policy apparatchiks, or identifying rising stars in Congress to shower with support and attention.

This socialization becomes self-reinforcing and expands outwards from the people who are directly targeted. Philippe Lemoine calls it, rather crudely, the “Nagging Wife Model” of the Israel Lobby. While only a few American elites have a kid in the Israeli army, most Americans in high places know someone who has a kid in the Israeli army, or visited Israel, or religiously identifies with Israel. Especially when the issue seems like an emotional minefield, it is easier to simply defer to those peers.

Israel Lobby theorists often overstate the role of direct coercion, such as bribery and blackmail. Although these things happen in the breach, they are usually a sign of elite socialization failing. The famous 2018 documentary series The Lobby covers, in large part, the pro-Israel movement’s response to pro-Palestine student sentiment. Encouraged by the Israeli government, Israel’s supporters resorted to astroturfing and hostile surveillance on campus because universities were no longer organically producing pro-Israel students. These tactics, unsettling as they were, were ham-handed and ultimately failed, as the April 2024 encampments demonstrated.

The paranoid Great Replacement style conspiracy theories about Jews being pushed out of liberal institutions reflect this failure. Educated Americans are no less likely to have Jewish peers nowadays, but they are more likely to have friends who are Palestinian, or have been to Palestine, or religiously identify with Palestine. You can be “cancelled” in either direction now. The pro-Israel consensus within the Jewish diaspora itself is starting to visibly crack up, which bolsters the permission structure for supporting Palestine.

Crucially, this unravelling has imposed an immediate personal cost on many American elites, in parallel to the structural strains of Israel on the empire. Precisely because Israeli ambitions are so totalizing and extreme, the bar for loyalty has increased. Being “pro-Israel” used to mean symbolic deference to the more Americanized side of a conflict that felt very far away. Now it means active support for morally objectionable and practically costly U.S. interventions abroad, as well as submission to increasingly intrusive surveillance in the virtual and physical spaces where young elites congregate.

The baseless conspiracy theory that Israel assassinated conservative organizer Charlie Kirk demonstrates a similar development in non-liberal elite spaces. By all indications, Kirk was a true believer in Christian Zionism, but felt pressure to address increasingly anti-Israel (if not pro-Palestine) voices within his base. Even bare minimum gestures towards accommodating (and ultimately neutralizing) dissent provoked a backlash from pro-Israel conservatives, who were demanding 100 percent alignment. To someone unfamiliar with the typical hyperbole of pro-Israel advocacy, the threatening tone of this backlash and Kirk’s public frustration seemed intense enough to point to murder.

But even if Americans can now articulate the costs of supporting Israel, path dependence makes it hard to do anything else. Trillions of dollars and many elite careers have been made from maintaining U.S. empire in the Middle East, with Israel as its crown jewel. Those investments have created powerful constituencies with material interests in maintaining the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Yet those interests decidedly do not overlap with the health of the empire as a whole. And the harder they make themselves to remove, the more painful the overall adjustment will be.