rEALISM AND REALITY, NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET:

Losing Patience with Israel: More than democracy, Washington wants stability in the Middle East. That means leaning against the interests of the Jewish state. (Robert D. Kaplan, 8/03/09, Atlantic Monthly)

Not since the days of Henry Kissinger’s Mid-East shuttle diplomacy in the 1970s has America’s foreign policy toward Israel been characterized by such an attitude of unsentimental realism.

After eight years of fighting, the stalemate in Afghanistan and the loss of 4,000 American troops in Iraq – not to mention the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – has rendered the search for stability, rather than democracy, paramount, and created a climate in which interests are to be valued far more than friends. [...]

As for the matter of Israel’s influence on U.S. policymaking, that will only wane as a new generation of immigrant elites – from Asia, the Muslim world, and the Indian Subcontinent – take their places inside America’s civilian bureaucracy and military ranks. Israel is not central to the analytical concerns of these young, newly minted Americans. To them, it is just another country with which America must engage according to its interests. If anything, for this new generation—and, in fact, for the Obama Administration – it is countries like China, India, and Indonesia that are becoming the principal areas of focus.

What is most interesting here is that not only has Mr. Kapolan forotten what he wrote about how wrong Kissinger's Realism got things--"(In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite -- notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan"--but that he ignores what realism means for the Han and the Hindu, for whom the prospect of Israel nuking Arabs/Muslims could hardly be a more satisfactory outcome. That's the trouble with Realism, it's just isolationism in fancy dress.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2009 8:36 AM