Would Americans die in Israel's defense?
The Israeli-Iranian air combat last night crossed a new line in U.S. foreign policy.
“Yesterday’s air raids in the Middle East set a lot of records,” I wrote for Reason today. Iran carried out its first-ever direct attack on Israel from Iranian territory, and CNN described the Iranian drone swarm as the largest in history. It was also a milestone in American politics: For the first time ever, U.S. troops engaged in direct combat defending Israel.
Of course, the United States has long supported the Israeli military, fought other wars that benefited Israeli interests, and sometimes absorbed the consequences for Israeli operations. But Washington has also been very careful to avoid the impression that American troops were directly fighting for Israel.
This separation is partly for geopolitical reasons; in order to keep Arab partners on board, the United States has historically had to avoid looking like Israel’s co-belligerent. Partly it’s for domestic reasons. Although American politicians are loud and aggressive in their symbolic support for Israel, they’ve tried to hide the material costs of that support from the public.
The ideology that drives the U.S.-Israeli relationship also demands this separation. Jeffrey Goldberg, a veteran Israeli prison guard and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, wrote in September 2011 that:
I know of American troops fighting and dying on behalf of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq's Kurds and Shia (and so on), but not on behalf of Israel. No American soldier has ever died in the defense of Tel Aviv. Nor would Israelis want American soldiers to die on Israel's behalf -- self-sufficiency being a governing idea of Zionism…
This ideology always involved a little bit of self-deception. Goldberg’s article, for example, was responding to debates over the Iranian nuclear program. Although Goldberg was offended at the idea that U.S. troops were being asked to fight an Israeli war, that’s exactly what was happening behind the scenes: Israeli leaders were threatening to bomb Iranian nuclear sites in the hope that the United States could finish the job.
Over the past decade, there’s been fewer and fewer reasons to keep up the pretense. Due to the failure of the Arab Spring, the Palestinian cause fell far down the list of Arabs’ priorities, and Arab governments stopped caring what their citizens think anyways. Similarly, U.S. leaders learned that they didn’t have to sell things like wars and pacts to the public when they could just present them as a fait accompli.
Zionism changed, too. The cartoonist Eli Valley has written about how Israeli politics are becoming consumed with two contradictory mindsets, doomerism and triumphalism. (“I am pariah! I am messiah!”) Both of them take agency — and thus the idea of self-reliance — out of Israelis’ hands. Besides, after decades of U.S. largesse, who would look a gift horse in the mouth?
Perhaps another metaphor makes more sense here: Killing the golden goose. The American public was passively ok with the pro-Israel consensus, and blissfully unaware of the danger of war with Iran. Leaders in both Israel and America mistook that acquiescence for actively supporting maximalist Israeli goals.
Now that the question has been forced on the public — first by the massive scale of the war in Gaza, then by the threat of expanded regional conflict — many Americans are feeling blindsided. And that’s already been having weird effects on U.S. politics. Once the magnitude of last night sinks in, things will only get weirder.