Israel today is no longer the weak biblical statelet it
once was. While structural vulnerabilities of size and geography remain, Israel
today is a middle power, a technological leader that fields an advanced
military with powerful capabilities. It has defeated every attempt made by
hostile neighbors to inflict defeat and destruction upon it. More to the point,
Israel chose wisely in the contest of great powers during the Cold War, and has
helped amplify and project U.S. power, particularly in the eastern
Mediterranean.
Yet despite the enduring strength of the U.S. as a global
superpower and local patron, Israel’s strategic environment has changed in
critical ways over the last decade. And save for a brief interregnum, which
coincided with the first two years of the Biden administration, Benjamin
Netanyahu has been at the helm, navigating Israel through this new terrain.
During this decade, Israel saw some long-standing threats
sharpen, namely the threat from Iran, and security challenges on Israel’s
borders become more acute. Israel’s strategic environment changed radically with
the return of the Russian military to the region, ensconced in the same theater
of operations as Iran on Israel’s northern border. While Russia is a shadow of
its Cold War self, it is still a formidable nuclear power. But Russia, in
itself, has not been Netanyahu’s toughest challenge. The Israeli leader’s
biggest problem, rather, has been in managing relations with his superpower
patron.
The prevailing Democratic Party narrative tells a different
story, of course. That narrative holds that Netanyahu committed a cardinal
sin—a variant of King Hezekiah’s offense—by leading a rebellion against his
American suzerain. In the Democrats’ telling, Netanyahu came to Congress at the
invitation of the Republican Party and colluded with them to challenge a
sitting Democratic president. In so doing, he factionalized Israel’s position
in the U.S., turning it into a “political football,” or a Republican equity.
The problem with this version is that, unlike Hezekiah,
Netanyahu didn’t pick a fight with the empire. The empire picked a fight with
him, and with the country he leads.
Barack Obama entered the White House with a clear vision
for how he wanted to reposition the U.S. in the Middle East. He envisioned
creating a “new equilibrium”—that is, rearranging the balance of power—in the
region by realigning the U.S. away from the states that the American global
power had traditionally included in its alliance system, and toward Iran. Such
were Obama’s declared aims, in order to achieve a goal that he called
“balance.” That is, to move the U.S. closer to an expansionist regional middle
power that’s been in conflict with Israel, and whose explicit objective is the
Jewish state’s destruction.
After decades of operating under a set of rules in a
mutually beneficial arrangement with the global superpower, Israel woke up to
find that the new emperor had changed his mind, and decided that he would now
empower Israel’s enemy and partner with it in multiple theaters throughout the
region. In fact, Russia’s return to the Levant, and the expansion of Iran’s
entrenchment there, emerged not as a result of a confrontation with the U.S.,
but rather with its acquiescence and protection. It must be stressed that while
the motives for these actions may be open to interpretation or debate, it is simply
a fact that they happened. Realigning the U.S. away from Israel and toward Iran
is what Obama decided to do, and he did it.
By the time Netanyahu flew to the imperial seat in March
2015 to deliver his speech about Iran, Obama’s realignment plan was already in
its final stages. The distaste and contempt the U.S. president and his team had
for the Israelis had become quite explicit. Famously, senior officials called
Netanyahu a chickenshit, gloating about how they successfully prevented him
from taking action to stop Iran’s nuclear program. The new emperor personally
spoke with palpable disdain for formerly allied regional clients, denigrating
them as freeloaders who wished to leverage the power of the empire for their
narrow sectarian goals. Years of undermining Israel’s actions in its own
defense with deliberate intelligence leaks were capped by Obama knifing the
Israelis at the U.N. as he prepared to hand over power to his successor.
Netanyahu’s petition to Congress was a desperate cri de
coeur, an appeal to sanity in the imperial capital by a loyal ally who, even as
he knew that realignment was a done deal, could not fathom the emperor’s
irrational whim. And indeed, the deal was done a few short months after Bibi’s
speech. In other words, far from constituting a nefarious plot to somehow
thwart the emperor’s campaign, the episode was an expression of impotence by a
man who had been unable to change the course of empire and therefore looked to
history for whatever measures of vindication or solace.
Netanyahu could not have imagined that Donald Trump would
defeat the emperor’s anointed successor, and that within a couple of years in
office the Republican president would trash Obama’s deal with Iran, halting
realignment in its tracks. In turn, Trump’s single term fostered a belief that
things might return to the way they had been before. Unlike the fantasy of a
U.S. alliance with a resurgent Iran—a country whose economy was a shambles, and
whose internal politics was organized around hatred of the U.S.—America’s
former arrangements had a clear grounding in reality. Israel could offer its
patron the fourth most powerful army in the world and a highly innovative tech
sector, while the Gulf States, who were equally threatened by Iran, controlled
OPEC+, and a large share of the world’s oil and gas. It is to acquire assets
like these that great powers bother with local politics in the first place.
In fact, the Trump interval would only underscore that
there was no going back. What had happened wasn’t that Netanyahu had
“politicized,” which is to say factionalized, American foreign policy. In
reality, the American empire had fractured and was now projecting its own
factional divisions onto the world outside its borders. In place of prior
unitary conceptions of “America’s national interest,” there were now only the
interests of parties, which saw the world beyond America’s borders in terms of friends
and enemies in their own internal battles. Having publicly staked nearly the
entirety of party leader Obama’s second term on Iran, Democrats would now be
friendly to Iran and hostile to Iran’s enemies, Israel and Saudi
Arabia—regardless of whether Iran, Israel, or Saudi Arabia were themselves
friendly or hostile to America, a concept that had increasingly become an
abstraction. As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan described it, “We’ve
reached a point where foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is
foreign policy.”
The fracturing of empire is a seismic event that creates a
ripple effect. America remains a global superpower. Whatever it projects
outward is felt acutely. And now it’s projecting its fracture onto the world,
which it views and classifies according to the categories of its domestic
fissure. The foreign ally of the faction out of power becomes the foe of the
ruling faction. The ruling faction also fosters its own loyalists abroad
against those it perceives to be allied with its domestic rivals. We’ve seen
this manifested in Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as in other states like
Hungary and Poland in Europe and in Venezuela and Brazil in South America.
Netanyahu has already faced an attempt to unseat him funded by
Obama’s State Department in the 2015 election. But in the years since, the
Obama faction has developed a new playbook for political warfare against its
domestic opponents, which now, inevitably, is deployed abroad.
The Obama faction’s sustained, multifaceted campaign
against then-President Trump seamlessly fused the domestic and the foreign. The
faction organized the campaign around the conceit of protecting “democracy” (or
“our democracy,” with its implicit opposition to and delegitimation of any
system, democratic or not, in which “the other side” wins) against the
onslaught of “authoritarianism,” or more crudely, “Putin.”
The initial conceit, which drew its original force from the
now-discredited conspiracy theory in which the Russian leader was alleged to
have “stolen” the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton by buying
ads on Facebook and through “bot farms” that amplified
false stories (“fake news”) on Twitter, was then developed into a
universal taxonomy that organizes foreign states into friends and foes: The
forces of democracy against the club of regressive anti-democrats. People like
Donald Trump and his pals—Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, Mohammed bin Salman,
and, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu—are the foes of democracy, i.e., Putin’s
friends. “Our friends” are those factions that align themselves financially or
ideologically with the Democratic Party in the United States.
In turn, foreign allies of the empire’s ruling faction
utilize this American-made conceit and its American-designed tools (the
anti-Trump playbook), thus showing that they are de facto Democrats. According
to the empire’s new system of classification, the domestic rivals that they run
this playbook against are therefore identified as allies of the American ruling
faction’s own domestic rivals, i.e., Republicans. All of international
relations, and internal political competition within states, can therefore be
neatly reduced to the question of Democrats versus Republicans.
BY
TONY BADRAN
FEBRUARY 08, 2023
Source: How Biden Subverts Israeli Democracy | The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com | Caroline B. Glick | 29 Shevat 5783 – February 20, 2023 | JewishPress.com
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