And with this we are officially down the rabbit hole.
Representative Ron Paul, in his statement responding to the President’s speech last Thursday, opened by blasting the administration for “once again . . . prov[ing] that it does not understand a proper foreign policy for America.” Usually a line like that, in a statement by Ron Paul, would transition into an exposition about how any foreign policy is too much foreign policy. He does get there eventually.
But first the Republican Presidential Candidate wanted to make a point about the U.S.-Israeli relationship:
Israel is our close friend. While President Obama’s demand that Israel make hard concessions in her border conflicts may very well be in her long-term interest, only Israel can make that determination on her own, without pressure from the United States or coercion by the United Nations. Unlike this President, I do not believe it is our place to dictate how Israel runs her affairs. There can only be peace in the region if those sides work out their differences among one another. We should respect Israel’s sovereignty and not try to dictate her policy from Washington.
Unstated but implicit in Paul’s statement is that he envisions a world of severely degraded U.S.-Israeli defense and diplomatic ties. The United States would have very little to say about Israeli foreign policy, because in this world the United States would have very little to say to Israel in general. U.S. companies would trade with Israeli companies freely, but otherwise Jerusalem would be left to fend for itself economically and diplomatically. In an era of mass delegitimization that would be a disaster for Israel.
Paul’s foreign policy is based on a deeply misguided gamble. He believes that pulling out of the Middle East would reduce anti-American fervor to such a degree that the United States would be net safer, versus an interventionist policy, from the metastasization of political Islam. That seems untenable for all the familiar reasons.
Al Qaeda and its allies have anti-American grievances that go beyond the U.S. presence in the Gulf or U.S. support of Israel. They have even prominently criticized global capitalism, a particularly problematic nitpick given Paul’s singular focus on deepening global capitalism. Given Salifist aspirations toward reestablishing the Caliphate, if they didn’t come after us they would still go after our allies, and eventually we could no longer remain indifferent to those battles. Even if political Islam did burn itself out or find itself overwhelmed by commerce, as Paul sometimes predicts, we would still have to deal with Iranian and eventually Chinese interference with global energy supplies. Those are dynamics that, minimally, would not be conducive toward the trade-based international order that Paul insists would keep global peace. And so on. These are not original points. Neo-isolationism is not the most coherent idea.
But all of that said, still. Even Ron Paul—an arch-isolationist not known for boundless affection toward the Jewish State—felt moved to emphasize the close bond between the U.S. and Israel after listening to the President’s speech. Seeing Israel thrown under the bus in a vain attempt to jumpstart the peace process, or as a sop to its enemies in the Muslim world, was too much for a politician who would begin his presidency by ending the special bilateral relationship. The spectacle was that unseemly. Surreal.
