I honestly don’t know where some people get their ideas. I hope that the viewpoints expressed by Nadia Schadlow in her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal spring from attending too many cocktail parties with German and French diplomats. Otherwise it’s completely detached from reality. Here’s the nub:

Chaos is spreading throughout the world as a direct consequence of America’s failure to deter Russia, Iran and China. The balance of power in key regions is faltering, leading to instability and global disorder. Like it or not, the U.S. is the only force that can restore equilibrium.

and

The challenge for the U.S. now is to restore balance in the world. The Biden administration’s management of the Israeli response in Gaza and the continuing war in Ukraine are crucial. America’s adversaries are watching.

The U.S. can’t be passive in its support for allies. It isn’t enough to be the arsenal of democracy. America has unique military and intelligence capabilities that can help Israel and Ukraine defeat existential threats to their sovereignty. American diplomats must convince the Arab world—particularly the Gulf states—that a region dominated by Iran and roiled in conflict will doom their growing economies. If the U.S. succeeds, it will send a clear message to China about the perils of messing with America’s friends.

Practically nothing in those passages has any referent, i.e. they doesn’t refer to anything real. In the actual, material real world there is no such thing as a “rules-based order”. There are countries that pursue their own secular national interests, bending or breaking the rules of the rules-based order to the degree that furthers those objectives and that they can. For a brief period, the merest flick of an eye in terms of world history, from 1992 to 2007 (at the very latest), the United States could impose its will on a less than willing world largely unimpeded. That was the period of American hegemony. It’s been over now for fifteen years.

There is also no “arsenal of democracy”. We and our NATO allies gave Ukraine a bunch of stuff we weren’t using and have been struggling to restock our shelves ever since. Not only are we unable to supply Israel and Ukraine at the same time, we can’t supply Ukraine by itself.

In time given the will we might be able to but it would take years for us to catch up. Add another conflict. Or imagine that Israel’s campaign against Hamas (with occasional punctuation by Hezbollah) were to spread into a regional conflict. What would we do then?

Two more points. First, Dr. Schadlow mentions the risks in Central Europe, the Middle East, and Asia but there’s a significant omission from that list. Latin America is presently being “destabilized” or, as Dr. Schadlow would put it, falling into chaos as the result of China’s efforts in the region, at least according to this statement (PDF) made to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere last year by Dr. R. Evan Ellis.

My last point is that there’s some evidence that Germany is being roused from its multi-decade fugue into fantasy. I hope to get to that in another post. I think that we and Germany would have been better off if they hadn’t been kidding themselves for the last forty years or so.

I’m inclined to agree with Tasha Kheiriddin’s argument at GZero:

As the Israel-Hamas war intensifies, there’s talk that Ukraine is being pressured to seek a settlement in its war with Russia, now in its 20th month.

On Saturday, a current and a former U.S. official, both anonymous, claimed US and European officials have spoken to Kyiv about possible peace negotiations. The speculation follows an Economist interview with Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny who said the conflict has hit a stalemate, and that unless Ukraine acquires more advanced weaponry and information technology, “(t)here will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”

She’s arguing that neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians are prepared to negotiate and, consequently, pressing for such negotiations is premature.

Sad to say, I think that’s probably right. The Ukrainians who’ve voted with their feet don’t count and by the time those who’ve chosen to remain are ready to negotiate, what state will the country be in?

At RealClearDefense Seth Cropsey argues that the Biden Administration is engaging in a policy of appeasement with respect to Iran, not unlike the policy of Britain and the United States before the German invasion of Poland kicked off World War II in Europe:

Khomeinism dictates that Tehran export the Islamic Revolution across the Ummah in a quest for global strength. Israel’s democratic particularism is inimical to Iran’s theological universality, while the U.S. is the crusader-usurper that stands with Israel blocking Iran’s strategic path.

Because Iran’s goal is regional conflict, the U.S.’ attempts to “deescalate” the situation only guarantee a wider war. The prudent move would have been to allow an Israeli strike in the north shortly after 7 October, while using U.S. naval air power and rapidly deployed tactical aircraft and air defense units to demonstrate to Iran the real cost of escalation. By contrast, the Biden administration blocked an Israeli offensive in the North while also restraining action in Gaza. This is coherent only if the Biden administration is correct that Iran seeks de-escalation, and that it will only attack if “provoked” by an Israeli or American countermeasure.

This assumption is as farcical as it is dangerous. Mr. Biden is committed to a policy of restraint that allows Iran to harass and probe the U.S. and Israel, escalating at a time of its choosing after it has thoroughly prepared the battlefield. Iran is proving this in Lebanon, where Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both under IRGC control, are eroding Israel’s surveillance system in the north in preparation for a major attack. It is doing so in Syria, setting the conditions for an attack on al-Tanf, a U.S. base that sits astride the Baghdad-Damascus highway on the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian border, the natural logistics route for Iran to support Hezbollah and Syria in a conflict with Israel. Iran is playing for time, setting the stage for a much broader set of operations that are meant to end America’s Middle Eastern position.

I’m not entirely convinced by Mr. Cropsey’s argument largely because I don’t think the analogy he’s using is particularly strong. Is Iran actually expansionist? I mean in a way different from any other Islamist country that professes the unity of all believers in Islam? It’s not that I don’t think that Iran is a threat, particularly to Israel, but that I don’t think it’s a threat to us. Iran is no Germany and a genuinely expansionist Iran would be receiving more pushback from the Gulf Arab states than Iran is receiving. Saudi Arabia is unlikely to join ranks with Iran regardless of what either Israel or the United States does.

In my view our policy with respect to Iran should be one of negative reciprocity. And were Iran to be so injudicious as to detonate a nuclear weapon, our policy should be to stand out of the way.

Institutions of higher learning and their students who have put their names on petitions in support of Hamas even implicitly may be in for some surprises. At Fortune Janet Lorin reports that some top law firms have warned schools:

More than two dozen top US law firms sent a letter to more than 100 law school deans telling them to take an “unequivocal stance” against antisemitic harassment on their campuses.

The letter, which was signed by firms including Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and Wachtell Lipton Rosen and Katz LLP, comes after some law students saw their job offers rescinded for comments made about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,400 Israelis. Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, has fueled protests across the country.

and

The letter was written this week by Joseph C. Shenker, senior chair of Sullivan & Cromwell, after he was contacted by Jewish law students from top universities. He circulated the draft to the other firms, each of which sent a copy to the law schools they work with on Wednesday night, Shenker said in an interview.

When asked if the firms would curtail recruiting from schools where they have seen concerning behavior, Shenker said, “People can draw their own conclusions. The letter speaks for itself.”

Contrary to whatever you may believe, “no hire” lists are completely legal in the United States.

The surprises may go deeper than that. At the Wall Street Journal Leslie Lenkowsky remarks in a op-ed:

Missouri Rep. Jason Smith denounced universities and student organizations for statements “celebrating, excusing, or downplaying” the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel. “Releasing such statements, or failing to condemn them,” he said last month, “is unforgivable and runs counter to our values as a nation.”

Mr. Smith’s comments have more weight than most because he is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax policy. That includes policies governing nonprofit organizations, including colleges and universities as well as groups issuing statements and staging rallies throughout the U.S. Statements celebrating Hamas’s violence, Mr. Smith adds, “call into question the academic or charitable missions they claim to pursue”—in other words, their tax breaks.

The U.S. has traditionally given charities and their supporters great leeway in handling controversial issues. Constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly protect their activities and require government to demonstrate a strong reason for restricting them. But Congress and the Supreme Court—as well as nearly three dozen states—have agreed that providing aid to terrorist groups like Hamas is a justifiable reason to forbid donors from supporting them.

Mr. Smith’s statement suggests the tax exemptions of organizations backing Hamas—or tolerating such activity—may be in for congressional scrutiny. Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares has launched an investigation of AJP Educational Foundation, aka American Muslims for Palestine. Mr. Miyares’s office said in a press release that it is looking into whether the group “used funds raised for impermissible purposes under state law, including benefitting or providing support to terrorist organizations,” as well as whether it was properly registered to solicit contributions in the state.

I would think that the first step might be to render such institutions ineligible for government grants. Loss of non-profit status, however, could well prove a death sentence to a struggling college. Even for a highly endowed institution like Harvard or Yale it would be a notable inconvenience.

I think that Australian diplomat Bob Bowker’s concerns expressed in his piece at The Strategist should be heeded. Here’s how he sees the aftermath of the present conflict between Israel and Hamas:

Aid will begin to flow from Western countries and the Gulf when the conflict winds down. In due course there will probably be some sort of UN and international coordination mechanism for reconstruction of housing and the restoration of education, health and medical services in Gaza.

Hamas and its militant counterparts will use that reconstruction effort to rebuild their capacity, drawing on support from around the Arab and Islamic world, and Iran.

The result of the current assault, and its most likely aftermath, will not, therefore, be a rejection of Hamas. Unless the occupation of Palestine ends, which is not in prospect, the aftermath will most probably be the emergence of Hamas Mark 2, more violent, more authoritarian and ideologically driven, and possibly more globally focused than before.

Hamas will not lose the will to fight. Nor will the Palestinian victims of its actions and the Israeli response insist, to any meaningful effect, upon an end to violence. As on the Israeli side of the equation since the horrors of 7 October, a fundamental line has been crossed.

Western rhetoric notwithstanding, there will be no two-state solution, nor much prospect of meaningful steps being taken towards achieving one. Instead, there will be recurring cycles of violence.

Israel will prevail in those conflicts with the Palestinians until, one day, it doesn’t. And when that day comes, even generations from now, the reckoning will be terrible.

I wonder if he understands the implications of what he’s writing?

One of the statements I’m seeing a lot of is that the Republicans are playing a dangerous political game by separating aid for Israel from aid for Ukraine. Why isn’t it equally true that the Biden Administration is playing a dangerous game by combining aid for Israel with aid for Ukraine?

Spoiler alert: I believe we need a constitutional amendment ensuring that all bills considered by Congress be limited to a single subject.

I do think we should support both Israel and Ukraine. I think that the position being staked out by the Biden Administration of total support for the Israeli government is effectively an “own goal” by the United States.

That position effectively removes the United States from the position of being an unbiased interlocutory. The position we should be taking is to negotiate peace between the belligerents. We’ve excluded ourselves from that role.

What other country do we expect to fill that role? China?

It is impossible to synopsize a history going back 20,000 years without gaps, omissions, or controversy but here’s the shortest possible of the area now known as Israel and called “Palestine” by the Greeks and Romans in reverse chronological order (most recent first):

Earlier than that it gets very fuzzy. We can say confidently that Babylonians, Assyrians, and Egyptians occupied the area in various periods. Precise dates and periods are pretty hard to determine.

I think it’s fair to say there have always been Arabs in the land that has been known as Israel, mostly nomadic Bedouins. I think the Hebrews have been in the land of Israel since at least three millennia ago. The “Canaanites”, who appear to be most closely resembled by Lebanon’s Maronites today, have probably always been there, too.

As you can the land has changed hands a lot. I’ll conclude with a rather inflammatory remark made by Winston Churchill:

That the dog is in the manger does not mean that the dog owns the manger or has any particular right to it.

I’m seeing a lot of calls for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Several things are astonishing to me about that. The first is that the calls for a ceasefire invariably mean that the authors think that Israel should stop making war on Hamas not that Hamas should stop making war against Israel. They seem to be unaware that Hamas has been firing missiles at Israeli civilians truly indiscriminately since October 7.

Another thing that surprises me is how various news outlets bend over backwards to exonerate Palestinians, generally, from the attacks. Here, for example, is a snippet from the editors of the Washington Post’s endorsement of a ceasefire:

Israel’s legitimate war aims do not include reoccupying Gaza or expelling its population. Nor are Palestinians generally its enemy — only Hamas. Israel’s highest officials need to make that clear to the world, repeatedly. Israeli politicos who suggest otherwise need to be disavowed. Israel has to swiftly contain violence against Palestinians by settlers on the West Bank.

I have scoured the archives of the New York Times and Washington Post for editorials written during World War II making similar claims about the Germans, e.g. that we aren’t making war against Germany but against the Nazis. “Germans” and “Nazis” seem to be used interchangeably until after the war when a distinction began to be made.

In a related vein the New York Times columnist David Brooks is calling for an “Arab-led intervention” to administer Gaza:

And then the third thing which the administration is thinking about is what comes after. And so that’s a very tricky situation, but somehow it can’t be the U.S. side, it can’t be Israel then, obviously, but, somehow, somebody has to organize probably an Arab-led intervention force to administer Gaza.

And that force has to do counterterrorism, which is going to be calling upon a lot of it, because we don’t want Israel to be doing counterterrorism in Gaza after this. And so these are all different ways you can separate the population from Hamas. And that’s what — that has to be the strategy here.

Let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Imagine that such a thing took place (the evidence against it ever taking place is overwhelming). What would happen then?

One last point in this post. The assertions that leadership decapitation or, indeed, any sort of armed opposition to terrorist groups are ineffective are everywhere. I suggest that they study Jordan’s handling of Black September. It’s one of the few examples of the actual elimination of a terrorist group. It was not non-violent.

Update

At Newsweek Josh Hammer says something about a ceasefire that needed saying:

In reality, there is an extraordinarily simple way to expedite the end of all hostilities in Gaza: Hamas releases all hostages taken on Oct. 7 and unconditionally surrenders to Israel, just as Germany and Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Powers to end World War II. If Hamas did that, the war would end tomorrow. There would be no further casualties. The conversation would instead shift to what the Gaza Strip will look like once freed from Hamas’ jackboot.

As a reminder Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2007. Gaza’s problems didn’t end when Israel’s occupation ended there.

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner laments over the lack of alternatives that are both workable and benign in Israel’s war with Hamas, largely following Ezra Klein’s podcast:

I’m not hopeful that any strategy will solve what, for 75 years, has been an intractable problem. But, ultimately, unless Israel is willing to kill every Palestinian man, woman, and child—and they clearly* aren’t—then, ultimately, some political solution is the only conceivable solution.

The problem, of course, is that it’s simply unthinkable that Israel’s government—or any democratically elected government whose population has been attacked in such a brutal and horrifying fashion—would respond in that fashion, at least in the short term. As much as I think Netanyahu is a thug whose policies have set back the cause of peace for decades, there’s simply no way that even the most beneficent Israeli leader could persuade his people right now to respond to mass atrocities by turning the other cheek and seeking to build a bridge to the future with the Palestinian people.

With the exception of the first comment, Michael Reynolds’s, in the ensuing thread most of the comments reflect comforting nostrums. Neither the post nor the comments really come to terms with the underlying problem. There is no resolution that will be effective in securing Israel against terrorist attacks short of exterminating the other party.

Let’s not mince words. A “one-state solution” can only have one outcome: a unified Palestine that is not liberal or democratic and in which Jews are at best a persecuted minority. Why? Because the Palestinians either outnumber the Israeli Jews already or will soon and their population is growing faster. Gaza’s experience has been tersely expressed (in another context) as “one man, one vote, one time”.

A “two-state solution” is unworkable and won’t result in an end to terrorist attacks against Israel. The West Bank settlements aren’t the problem. A Jewish state of Israel is the problem. Take the banner flown by pro-Palestinian demonstrators seriously: “From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free”. There is no room for a Jewish state of Israel in that goal.

The above is why I take the position that I do. We should support Israel. Israel as presently constituted is a liberal, democratic state that is multi-ethnic and multi-confessional. Our efforts WRT to Israel should be dedicated to keeping it that way. However, the objectives of the most radical faction of Israelis, sometimes referred to as “the ultra-conservative”, is not particularly well-aligned with U. S. interests in the Middle East. Therefore, we should support the Israelis with reservations rather than unconditionally.

The Palestinians have a similar problem. The agenda is dictated by the most extreme faction of Palestinians. As a result a Palestinian state while being unworkable would not be stable or a liberal democracy and would likewise not be aligned with U. S. interests in the Middle East. I for one would find U. S. support of a Palestinian state deeply problematic.