Israel alone – for now
Mearsheimer versus Mearsheimer versus Sachs versus Sachs
The United States mediated the settlement to the Russo-Japanese War (1905). The war put an end to Russian adventurism in Northeast Asia, and it was after the settlement that the Russians redirected their energies away from Asia and to the Balkans.
I’ve read such an interpretation of events somewhere—The Sleepwalkers (2012)?—and perhaps it is nonsense, but it does proceed—wittingly or not—from an important conceptualization of diplomatic process. It suggests not that demand for war and diplomacy inspires the supply of war and diplomacy but rather that idled diplomatic capacity and war-making capacity goes looking for demand for adventurism. That is, demand meets otherwise idling supply, not supply ratcheting up to meet demand. The diplomats, generals and admirals don’t perceive much value to just sitting around, so they start looking for trouble rather than waiting around for trouble to find them. That makes for a perverse dynamic.
“If you build it, they will come” is also a formulation of demand-meets-supply. I would go further and suggest that, in the public policy sphere, “mission-creep” and bureaucratic “empire-building” amount to manifestations of demand-meeting-supply. Otherwise idled diplomats, generals and admirals may endeavor to expand their missions and extend their influence over larger and larger bureaucracies. It’s good for their business.
When examined through the lenses of empire-building and mission-creep, the Russian experience of 1905 looks like a “pivot” from Asia to the Balkans. I am going to suggest that 1973 marked an American pivot from Asia to the Middle East. By 1973, President Nixon and his people had finally drawn down the American military presence in Vietnam to near zero. But, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War (1973), the United States sharply scaled up support to Israel. So, I pose this idea: Were the managers of idled capacities in diplomatic process and war-making looking for new projects? And did they settle on the Middle East?
The American pivot involved more than just directing support to Israel. It also involved enticing Egypt to replace Soviet patronage with American patronage, and it involved drawing the Saudis further into the American sphere. By the time Ronald Reagan assumed the office of President (1981), those initiatives were all nearly complete.
This business about empire-building and mission-creep is counter-point to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2006) on “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”. In that paper—a paper that generated a lot of heat and push-back—M&W advance the idea that the Israelis ginned up a lot of demand for US patronage, and the United States ultimately ratcheted up capacity to meet that demand. My suggestion is that, as of 1973, the United States was already in the business of supplying supply. It had a lot of idled capacity, and was looking for a place to apply it. It found latent demand in the Middle East. Idled US supply was happy to occupy itself with Israeli demand.
So, to recount: The basic proposition is that “supply-meets-demand” amounts to a healthier dynamic. A crisis unfolds, and parties who maintain the competence if (not yet) the capacity to respond ramp-up capacity and respond. In the Pacific War (1941-1945), for example, it took a few years for the United States to ramp up, but, by 1944, it had ramped up and there was just no way the Japanese were going to compete. And, as of 1941, some people in leadership positions in Japan anticipated this: Japan would have to crush the British, the Americans, the Dutch ensconced in their Dutch East Indies oil fields and whomever else would deign to get in their way in one great campaign and then pray to the kami (the gods) that the British and the Americans would cut a peace deal. That, of course, did not happen. The British and the Americans slowly assembled resistance and then the Americans mounted an unstoppable, crushing campaign of their own. Although it did take a few years to build up capacity.
In contrast, “demand-meets-supply” amounts to an unhealthy dynamic. And, I would further suggest that an important illuminator of this dynamic is … John Mearsheimer:
[W]hen the Cold War ends, we have no rival great power left, so what are we going to do with all this power we've gathered? What we decide to do is go out and remake the world in our own image.
So, the United States found itself with idled capacity, and it started looking for places to apply it. Demand ratcheted up to occupy idled capacity.
This passage comes from a panel discussion from September 2024 featuring Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. I recommend the entire discussion (54 minutes), but I particularly recommend the last nine minutes. Those nine minutes concentrate on “Palestinian” issues, but it is over the course of the entire program that Mearsheimer and Sachs advance their (sometimes competing) perspectives on how to understand global affairs. Sachs seems to align more with a Chiliastic concept of The End of History: We should, for example, encourage Russia and other Eastern Bloc countries to become integrated with the global economy, and everything will be great forever after. Mearsheimer advances a view more consistent with the Wolfowitz Doctrine: The US, and great powers more generally, have a hard time tolerating other great powers. The Wolfowitz memo (leaked in 1992) posed the idea that the US should suppress the rise of any potential rivals. The usual suspects were Germany, Japan, China and Russia.
Mearsheimer did not argue that the United States should have made efforts to suppress the rise of other countries, but, he reprised the view, almost word for word, that he had advanced in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). From Goodreads:
[G]reat power politics are tragic because the anarchy of the international system requires states to seek dominance at one another’s expense, dooming even peaceful nations to a relentless power struggle. The best survival strategy in this dangerous world is to become a regional hegemon like the United States in the Western Hemisphere and to make sure that no other hegemon emerges elsewhere. In a new concluding chapter, Mearsheimer examines the course of Sino-American relations should China continue its ascent to greater economic and military power. He predicts that China will attempt to dominate Asia while the United States, determined to remain the world’s sole regional hegemon, will go to great lengths to contain China. The tragedy of great power politics is inescapable.
Basically, great powers have a hard time restraining themselves. But, here’s a question: Can we come up with examples of great powers that had managed to restrain themselves from trying to indefinitely suppress rising powers? Or, is it only “great powers” that do this kind of thing rather than, say, less-than-great powers? Do less-than-great powers pursue different objectives such as promoting the “balance of power” between great powers? So, what is a “great power”—a power that pursues great power politics? … Do we not find ourselves talking in circles and in tautologies: great powers distinguish themselves by doing great power things. All other powers who do not pursue great power objectives are not great powers. Hmm…
Tautologies aside, the tragedy in Mearsheimer’s view of how the world works is that there is no Chiliasm. There is no End of History. A great power, for example, can endeavor to suppress all other rising powers, but it is not going to work. There is no absorbing state in which the one great power persists in being the one great power.
Jeff Sachs, meanwhile, remains an ardent believer in the Chiliasm, and that was very much in evidence in his account of how to solve the Middle East: Force the Israelis to commit to a “two-state solution,” two states delineated by “the 1967 borders.” The concept has already been enshrined in “international law.” Further, “You stop the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. You stop the Israeli apartheid state, and you have two states living side by side…” But, one country frustrates this “solution that could bring peace,” the United States.
My question to Jeff Sachs: Given the history of the last 30 years, do you really believe that the Palestinian leadership would be satisfied with implementation of a two-state remedy? Would they not merely consolidate their position and then relaunch efforts to implement their preferred one-state solution from the River to the Sea?
I would suggest that, thirty years ago, the prospect of a two-state remedy going some way toward actually resolving hostilities had appeared much more plausible. The Oslo Accords of 1993 had launched a process that both the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton took very seriously. It was the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), still nominally led by Yasir Arafat, that proved over the remaining course of the 1990’s to not take the Oslo process seriously. But, even as of 20 years ago there remained some prospect of the Israelis and Palestinians eventually cutting a deal. It was under a Likud government that the Israelis unilaterally extracted themselves from the Gaza Strip and ceded much autonomy to the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. But, factions within the PLO fought with each other over what their governance would look like, and the Hamas faction managed to assume control in Gaza. It was not long after that that both Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the North (in Lebanon) started their joint campaign of periodically and indiscriminately launching rockets into Israel. That was 2006.
“Hezbollah claimed in 2006 that the purpose of the rocket campaign was to raise the costs on Israelis of living in Israel and to encourage the Israelis to leave. From the Associated Press (July 24, 2006):
“We are going to make Israel not safe for Israelis. There will be no place they are safe,” [Hezbollah's representative in Iran Hossein] Safiadeen told a conference that included the Tehran-based representative of the Palestinian group Hamas and the ambassadors from Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Authority…
“We will expand attacks,” he said. “The people who came to Israel, (they) moved there to live, not to die. If we continue to attack, they will leave.”
Big talk, perhaps. Such was my own thinking when I first read this AP piece back in 2006. The ravings of a small cabal of cranks do not make for a sustained campaign. But, it was what happened next that shocked me: The “international community” swept in and condemned the Israelis for retaliating.
The BDS initiative (“Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions”) got rolling at just this time. That was no accident. Hamas also got into the business of periodically shooting rockets into Israel. The combined BDS-and-rockets campaign seems designed to produce this dynamic: shoot rockets, publicize Israeli retaliation, call for BDS. Wash-rinse-repeat.
It was through this experience of shock that I myself lost all confidence in “two-state” initiatives. The critical mass of opinion both in Gaza and the “international community,” I learned, really does favor the BDS-and-rockets campaign. These factions have no interest in anything but the traditional one-state solution: drive the Israelis into the sea.
What to do then? Since 2006, various Likud governments in Israel appear to have committed to a new long game: Start generating “new facts on the ground”—specifically, new settlements on the West Bank and try to contain the hazards generated by Hamas in Gaza. Even so, it wasn’t obvious where the unilateral Israeli process (the business of assembling “new facts”) and the unilateral Hamas campaign (BDS-and-rockets) would go—not until the launch of the Abraham Accords under the Trump administration.”
* * *
Many things have happened since Mearsheimer and Sachs met on stage a few weeks ago. Among other things, the Israelis pulled off a stunt that could just have well been pulled from a movie script: They incapacitated most of Hezbollah’s leadership in what must be one of the most targeted strikes on an opponent’s leadership hierarchy. This was the business, of course, of the exploding pagers. How did the Israelis manage to get Hezbollah to buy an entire system of pagers that the Israelis themselves had rigged up? Someone in the procurement department must surely have been taken out and shot for letting himself get suckered.
The “international community” swept in and labeled the l’Affaire Pager “terrorism.” Of course. But it still surprises me. Hezbollah, with Iranian patronage—and with American patronage starting with Obama—has been allowed to abuse Lebanon and to abuse Lebanese so that it might fit into the larger effort of (mostly) Shia factions to encircle the State of Israel. And the Israelis were supposed to quietly go along with this all the way to their eventual annihilation. Very unsporting.
Lee Smith came out with a piece in Tablet last week that went far toward addressing the question of “Why now?”—as in why would the Israelis assault Hezbollah now? One reason would be that leadership from the United States has disappeared, and the leadership that has prevailed starting with Obama has been pro-Iranian and pro-Hezbollah. Hence, better to act now while the United States drifts aimlessly and before pro-Iranian and pro-Hezbollah factions again assume some measure of control of the Executive. Everyone awaits The Election.
The election alone will surely not put us on the path to peace in the Middle East, but there is some expectation that the Trump administration would restore the process launched by the Abraham Accords and would stop subsidizing the Iranian regime. Under the Abraham Accords, the “Palestinian issue” had retreated from the front pages. Surely the events of 10/7 were designed to place the “issue” back on the front pages. Mission accomplished.
As for peace in Ukraine?: A Trump administration might be able to channel the opposing factions into a peace agreement that really does not have to be too complicated.