Should Israel Still Support The United States? ~ MAKE MONEY BLOG$

Last week, I addressed the current U.S./Israel Alliance Crisis in light of some not even remotely current commentary from the founding generation of American leaders.

George Washington left America with a simple set of principles for forming and breaking attachments with foreign powers. The alliance should be in our interest. The alliance should not violate the principles of justice. The alliance should not be permanent. Treaties should be honored once they’re made.

In some ways the history of foreign affairs thinking in the U.S. is the history of various distortions of Washington’s original “interest, guided by justice.”

As one variant, Liberal internationalism from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama could be described as “interest as defined by the international standard of justice,” subsuming any distinct U.S. national interest under various utopian global institutions, from the League of Nations to the United Nations.

Opposite of that, America-first isolationists such a Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul believe in a system which holds that “interest is inconsistent with foreign alliances.”

A third variant is what the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick called the blame-America-first San Francisco Democrats, who were at their core advocates of “justice unguided by interest.”

The other side of the 1970s geopolitical debate was the Nixon/Kissinger school of realpolitik which could accurately be described as ‘interest regardless of justice.’

Bush-era neo-conservatism seeks to atone for the moral vacuity of realpolitik and amounts to a philosophy of “justice equals interest,” which assures us that only when American armies have sallied forth into the world and drained the swamps of tyranny will our people be safe.

The address last week from Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to have strummed every discordant string of the foreign affairs harp, each making its case for and against the alliance based on its individual fragment of Washington’s original insight. The liberal interventionists point to the shift in global consensus against Israel and tell us that we need to imitate the rest of the world.

Anti-Imperialists search for the small gnats of Israeli mistreatments of Palestinians while they swallow the camels of anti-Israeli terrorism from the Palestinians.

Neo-cons tell us that Israel ‘deserves’ our support because they are allegedly the only democracy in the Middle East as though the fact that they elect their governors gives them claims on our troops as well as their own.

Realpolitikers tell us that Israel is willing to do the dirty work that we Americans are morally forbidden to do.

All of this leaves aside the real questions: First, does our alliance with Israel serve our interests? Second, does our alliance with Israel commit an injustice? If the answers are “yes” to the former and “no” to the latter, then the alliance should be continued. When either of those answers change, the alliance should be ended, so long as no treaty is violated.

The best national interest-based case for the alliance has been made byForbes columnist George Gilder. In a recent interview with Steve Forbes,Gilder discusses his new book, The Israel Test and makes some potent observations about Israel.

Forbes: So what are some of the companies that you feel are in the forefront of this transformation?
Gilder: Well, there are several in Israel because Israel’s really genius under the gun. That is a very productive environment. EZChip is one. EZChip is a wonderful company that’s completely in the fiber speed paradigm. In the United States, there’s a company called NetLogic, which raises the fiber speed paradigm from just switching packets across the network to actual deep packet inspection….
Forbes: Now, you’ve made the point, as a handful of others have, that knowledge is about the past, entrepreneurship is about the future. Even looking at the world today in terms of foreign policy: You say “Middle East” — people think oil. You’ve made the point that Israel, with its brains and what it’s doing in high technology, is really a functional part of the U.S. economy, which is where the real value is.
Gilder: Well, it’s just wonderful that Israel has become a new Silicon Valley just as our own Silicon Valley gets paled over by green goo. Israel is moving to the forefront in developing new technologies that are based on fundamental advances. And these technologies instantly propagate to the United States. So, Israel is a substitute for a somewhat temporarily declining Silicon Valley…Israel is the key asset in the Middle East. This idea that oil, a fungible element that can be sold anywhere, is comparable to the genius of the Jewish people in Israel is just an absurdity.
Israel is where it’s at in the Middle East. And the leading edge of the U.S. economy today is in Israel, surprisingly enough. I was surprised to discover it, but in the last five years I’ve been increasingly turning to Israel for my new companies.

So while Silicon Valley gets covered over by green goo, fighting the non-threat of global warming, Israel faces an existential crisis which forces them to find technological solutions to real problems like terrorism and nuclear proliferation. How do you identify the face of a terrorist among 100,000 other faces in a crowded soccer stadium? What if he’s had plastic surgery? How do you block a nuclear weapon housed in a ballistic missile, or an attaché case? While the tech minds of California struggle to rescue people from the threat of a ten degree increase in global temperatures over the next 50 years, the tech minds of Israel struggle to protect us from the threat of a million degree increase in temperature in a crowded city over a nanosecond.

And while Israel creates the chips for deep packet inspection which guard against the first genuinely new weapon of the 21st century, cyber-war, anti-capitalist privacy nannies and net neutrality levelers push that technological leading edge South and East to Israel.

Increasingly the question is not whether we need Israel for our national security, but whether Israel needs us for theirs. For the moment, it seems like we need each other, and as Washington taught us, that’s the only basis on which an alliances should be based.

source: forbes.com
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