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Two points:

1 - I don't see that this follows; 'it’s obviously not true that if the US stopped delivering weapons to Israel it would still not agree to a ceasefire.' Lots of conflicts continue even after weapon stocks run down, just they revert to lower level responses(paramilitary death squads rather than guided missile attacks etc). In Israel it could lead to an even more brutal crackdown if the conflict then became perceived as existential (ie US provided weapons systems stop protecting from missile attacks etc) You can slaughter people with machetes and AK47s. A weaker Israel is not necessarily a more compassionate one.

2 - you assume the conclusion that supporting Israel is not in US interests. I agree in the case of Hezbollah and Hamas they are not directly US interests. Deterring and weakening Iran is though. And leaving aside the Israel lobby influence (which I don't disagree with you about in broad strokes) supporting an ally is not just about the specific event but more broadly showing a commitment to them when they need it. So imo even if the Israel lobby(as a set of institutions and influential people with policy maker access and political influence)disappeared tomorrow, it's not obvious Biden would use that leverage to the extent that he would need to.

But the broader issue here is that you don't seem to think supporting Israel is in US interests in general, which I don't think is at all clear. US policy in the region has historically been about protecting oil supplies, dealing with terrorism/security challenges, more recently keeping Iran down. The US (as you know) has often tried to do this by developing alliances with strong regional actors. Israel is clearly a militarily very strong regional power, whose interests are aligned with the US on protecting oil supplies, dealing with terrorism/security challenges, keeping Iran down.

The counter argument is the costs are greater than Israel's benefit on these issues. But how is that true? The extent to which the Israel/Palestine conflict influences international Jihadis is trivial. The diplomatic blowback also doesn't really seem a extensive as implied (lots of the important Arab states are still sympathetic to the US at the elite level) I just don't see where these costs, outside of the direct financial ones, are that would make Israel a burden on the US.

To be clear, this isn't a defence of the Israelis, who frankly I think have reverted to inexcusable levels of brutality. But that is the only argument that works here, the moral case against them, as at a purely self interested pov, it really doesn't matter much to the US if they slaughter half of Gaza and reduce Beirut to ruins.

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Oct 16·edited Oct 16Author

1) You can quibble with the word "obviously" if you want, but it's overwhelmingly likely in my opinion, because if Israel could no longer rely on air strikes against its enemies for lack of ammunition and also ran out of ammunition for aid defense it would be vulnerable to devastating attacks by Iran and its proxies since except for Hezbollah it can only reach them from the air while they can attack it from afar. Even in Lebanon and Gaza, if Israel couldn't rely on air strikes, it would suffer casualties at least an order of magnitude higher and in the case of Lebanon that's probably still optimistic. Even as things are, with no risk of ammunition shortages, there is already a pretty large share of Israelis who are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. I have a very hard time imagining that the Israeli government would take the risk that Israeli citizens start dying in large numbers, without any way to retaliate other than ground operations without air support that would result in a massive amount of military casualties, which moreover would only be possible against Hezbollah because Iran and its other proxies in the region would be out of reach. Israel is a rich country and, like other rich countries but perhaps even more so due to heightened demographic concerns, it's extremely intolerant of casualties on its side. Furthermore, as I already noted, Israel doesn't just depend on the US and its allies for ammunition in this war or even for military equipment in general, but for practically everything, so it could hardly ignore the Americans if they really decided to crack down. Of course, there is no way this is going to happen for the reasons I explain in this post, but that's irrelevant to the question we're dealing with here.

2) This argument that, other things being equal, the US has an interest to stand by its allies even if in a particular instance that doesn't benefit it, because it's important to protect the credibility of the commitments it makes, can only go so far. The US has stood behind Israel without fail against its own interests for decades and, even in this war, it has allowed Israel to carry out a rampage in half a dozen countries for the past year. Nothing terrible would happen to Israel if there were a ceasefire tomorrow and, outside of Israel and the relatively small circle of its most fanatical supporters abroad, literally nobody would conclude that the US is not a reliable ally because it threatened to cut off Israel and pressured it into accepting a ceasefire. That's just not a serious argument.

On the broader question of whether supporting Israel is in the US interest in general, I think the case is even stronger. Yes, Israel is a strong, capable and stable country, but it's not and has never been a useful ally for the US, in the sense that it has enabled it to further its goals in the region. In fact, it's precisely the opposite, with a handful of exceptions and putting aside some relative minor things Israel has been nothing but a headache for the US since its creation, as State Department officials had foreseen at the time. The reason why people who claim that the alliance with Israel is a great deal to the US always stay at the level of generalities, by saying it's a "strong regional actor" or whatnot, is because they couldn't possibly explain how concretely the alliance with Israel actually helps the US.

Arab public opinion is so anti-Israel that, in case of a serious war against Iran, the US would in practice have to choose between relying on Israel or relying on its Arab allies to a large extent, since being openly allied with Israel in a war would threaten the internal stability of the Arab regimes and for that reason they would close their air space and limit cooperation with the US unless Israel stayed out of it. Indeed, Israel is such a useful ally that, during the Gulf War, not only could the US not rely on Israel for anything, but it actually had to pay the Israelis a ton of money and station US troops with air defense in Israel so they'd stay out of it when Saddam, who understood the point I just made very well, tried to bait them into getting involved by firing Scuds at Israel. Arab-Israeli relations have improved somewhat since then, but not so much that the US wouldn't face this dilemma again if there were a war with Iran, as we saw recently when Arab states announced they would not open their airspace to Israel to strike Iran.

Perhaps even more importantly, the only reason why the US would get in a war with Iran at the moment is because of Israel, so even if the alliance with Israel were useful in case of a war with Israel that wouldn't really be a good argument in favor of the alliance because it would just mean that Israel is a good solution to a problem that it created in the first place. Of course, not all tensions between Iran and the US are due with Israel, but whatever tensions exist independently of US support for Israel it's very unlikely that Iran and the US couldn't navigate them without going to war. I think it would be even more true if the US did not have such a large footprint in the region, which is unnecessary and has a lot to do with the tensions with Iran, but that's a broader debate.

Coming back to the alliance with Israel and US goals in the region, such as protecting oil supplies or dealing with terrorism, if you go back in history Israel has been the source of many of the problems that Washington has faced in the region. For instance, most of the times the flow of oil in the region has been disrupted (including right now because of the Houthi attacks), it was because of Israel's conflict with Arab states and, although making the argument would take forever and take us away from the immediate debate (in a nutshell that's because again Israel is dependent on the US and its allies for virtually everything since at the end of the day it's a small country in a hostile environment), the case that it wouldn't have happened if the US hadn't supported Israel is overwhelmingly strong. Again, that's a whole other debate and we aren't going to settle it here, but the case that the US alliance with Israel is not and has never been in the interest of the US has been made repeatedly over the past decades and I've never seen a response that was even remotely convincing. In fact, I think the arguments to the contrary are so weak as to be laughable, with people either staying at the level of generalities of making ridiculous points about what an indispensable bonanza US cooperation with Israel on military technology has been and that kind of things while totally ignoring the many ways in which it has been a constant headache for US officials ever since it was created.

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Any ceasefire with Hamas is merely a prelude to more war because they're never going to agree to peace. Not that Hamas have shown willingness to agree to even a ceasefire.

This means that America can pressure Israel into going back to a low level conflict with Hamas, because Hamas are currently incapable of a high level of conflict, but nonetheless America has no ability to pressure Hamas into peace, especially by withdrawing arms from Israel.

However, it seems that Israel is no longer willing to play that game and will instead maintain a high level of conflict until there is no Hamas. This need not be done with American weapons either. It could be done much more brutally with much simpler weapons and Israeli citizens could spend a lot of time in their shelters, thereby ensuring increased support for brutal methods. Furthermore, the political calculus in America would quickly swing extremely hard towards arming Israel if Israeli cities were being devastated.

This last point is the most important and is often understood by political operators but seemingly never by journalists.

It's an example of the sleepwalking fallacy. Your mental calculus only adjusts one factor and leaves everything else the same, even though adjusting that one factor changes everything else.

Or take your article on Ukraine, where you argue that Russia has escalation dominance. Your evidence is that the US and Europe aren't willing to do more for the Donbas, but I'm pretty sure Putin has realised that Western powers would now do a lot more for Kiev, if he begun to threaten it again.

In other words, Putin doesn't have escalation dominance for Ukraine, but only for patches of the East of Ukraine and that's why it's unimaginable that we'll be seeing Russian troops parading through Kiev.

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Oct 16·edited Oct 16Author

Nobody is talking about peace with Hamas at the moment, only about a lasting ceasefire, which of course Hamas would accept and has already made clear it would accept provided it had guarantees that Israel wouldn't resume as soon as it has recovered the hostages as part of the deal. At the end of the day, this is why there hasn't been a ceasefire agreement yet: Israel wants the hostages back but not if that prevents it from resuming the war later, while Hamas is willing to return the hostages but only if Israel won't be able to resume the war after it has gotten them back. Since it's impossible to structure a deal that simultaneously fulfills all of those desiderata, there has been no deal and there probably won't be one.

On the rest, if Israel could no longer count on the US for supplies, it could fight the war in a more brutal way but it would have to incur casualties at least an order of magnitude higher and it would find itself at the mercy of attacks by Iran and its proxies without the ability to meaningfully retaliate or protect itself, except in the case of Hezbollah because ground troops can reach it and only at the cost of even worse casualties than in Gaza in a scenario where it has limited air and artillery support due to a shortage of ammunition. The economic cost would also be much higher because such a war would be far more "labor-intensive", since Israel would have to rely on manpower on the ground a lot more and keep a much larger number of people mobilized.

It's true that, if Iran and its proxies started to devastate Israeli cities, the Biden administration would quickly find itself under a lot of pressure to resume arms deliveries to Israel, but it would never get to that point. There are lots of people in the Israeli national security establishment who are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza even now and, if the US credibly threatened to withhold support to Israel, the Israeli domestic political balance of power would shift decisively in their favor. Netanyahu wouldn't be able to do game theory by calculating that, if he refuses to cave to US pressure, Biden would have to resume arms deliveries anyway once Israeli cities start getting devastated, because too many Israeli elites would not want to take that chance or risk huge military casualties and the debilitating economic effect even for a temporary period and US officials know it. This kind of 4D chess is just not a realistic model of how politics actually works.

I don't want to spend too much time on Ukraine, because that's not the topic of this essay, but for what it's worth I agree that it's unlikely we'll see Russian troops parading through Kiev and indeed I say so in my article on the topic. However, I don't think that's really because the US and its allies would radically increase their support for Ukraine if that became a serious risk, as much as because it's unlikely that Putin will commit the kind of resources he'd have to for that to be a realistic possibility. The US and its allies were quite willing to let Kiev fall in 2022 and, in all likelihood, they would again if the Russians seemed poise to take it.

That's because in my opinion the only scenario in which that would happen, putting aside a scenario in which Putin switches to total war mode which again I don't believe he will, is one in which Ukraine collapses suddenly and utterly as a result of attrition. In such a scenario, there is nothing the West could except intervene directly, which they wouldn't and probably couldn't anyway, at least not in time because it's not as if they have 500,000 troops ready to be deployed in Ukraine in a few weeks or less. I think the reason why it probably won't happen is that the Ukrainians will probably give up before anything of the sort can happen, but if they don't or Putin isn't willing to make a deal then I don't think the West will save Ukraine.

EDIT: In fact, I don't even think Iran and its proxies would even try to devastate Israeli cities if the US cut off military supplies to Israel, because as you note this would only invite a resumption of arms deliveries by the US and they wouldn't have to. Even if Israel didn't agree to a ceasefire but continued the war by relying more on ground troops, they could just let it get drawn into a quagmire in Lebanon, where it would not only suffer a huge number of casualties but also incur massive reputational damage because such a war would no doubt result in more shocking types of war crimes.

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Dumb bombs, artillery and heavy-handed population herding would work fine in Gaza and would eventually put the Palestinians into a position where they have to agree to actual peace and on Israel's terms.

That's better than the alternative of this all going on with intermittent ceasefires for another 80 years.

But it's much worse than what's happening now.

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But Israel is dependent on the US and its allies even for dumb bombs and artillery. A lot of the US arms deliveries to Israel during the war have consisted precisely in that kind of items and not just precision-guided bombs. Even if Israel managed to set up a sufficient domestic production capacity for that kind of things, which would take a long time and that it probably couldn't do if the US didn't want it to because even for such things it's very dubious that it can produce all the inputs it needs, if it started to massacre Palestinians in the kind of way you envision, Western public opinion would become much more anti-Israel and that would facilitate devastating sanctions.

We're engaging in total political fiction here obviously, none of that is going to happen, but the idea that, in the absence of the domestic political constraints I'm talking about in the post, the US couldn't constrain the behavior of a country like Israel, which is almost entirely dependent on the US and its allies for virtually everything, is not very serious. To be clear, I don't even think that the US should cut off Israel completely, on the contrary in my ideal world — in which those domestic political constraints don't exist — the US would keep Israel dependent but also keep it on a tight leash to make sure it can't destabilize the region. But we don't live in that ideal world, so it won't happen.

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No one thinks the US (absolutely) could not constrain Israel. They just think the constraints would have to be so extreme, in order to overcome Israeli fears of this situation continuing for decades, that it would destroy US foreign policy. Equivalent to telling China that it can invade Taiwan or the US leaving NATO or withdrawing protection from the Gulf States.

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But I think that's just a crazy view. All it would take is for the US to credibly threaten to supply Israel with arms and suggests that it might revise the nature of their relationship unless it accepted a ceasefire and everything would end very quickly with a pretty high probability, because Israel would grudgingly agree to do as the US says as it has done many times in the past. Of course, that's not possible for the reasons I already noted, but there is nothing intrinsically extreme about such a step.

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There's nothing extreme about making private threats, but there would be something extreme about following through on those threats.

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How can Israel “accept a ceasefire and end the war” when Hamas refuses to do so? If only one side ceases fire, the war doesn’t end.

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The same way defunding the police will stop crime.

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Exactly, and like with "defund the police" a lot of bystanders see the protesters and wonder if maybe listening to the hysteria might be a good idea.

"The protesters sure do seem passionate" and "maybe those police are mean", but then the inevitable consequences happen and everybody learns once again why the police exist and the Democratic Presidential candidate starts proudly referring to her "background in law enforcement" while Democratic municipalities greatly increase police funding.

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Oct 27·edited Oct 27

I agree with your argument up to a point. I agree that this is the general argument about lobbies: costs are diffuse, while benefits are narrow.

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A similar point can be made about US policy towards Cuba. By a large majority, US public wants the govt. to lift the embargo and re-establish diplomatic relations with it. Such has been the case for literally decades. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1630/cuba.aspx

In the UN, just like on Palestine, the US is completely isolated on the Cuba embargo.

But the embargo continues and relations are still very limited.

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Coming back to Israel, the US doesn't care much what Israel does to the Palestinians. They're basically powerless: they have no military strength and no economic strength.

When it comes to the wider Middle East, the argument is less applicable. I think US has much more "credible" leverage in this case. One can definitely make the case that the US govt. "interests" (I don't like this term, but I'll use it here) are more important than Israeli ones.

The US is apparently happy with Israel's campaign in Lebanon and green-lit its intervention there. So I don't think there's a disconnect between the two, and looking at it doesn't offer us much insight. To really test different explanations, you need to look at a case where the US and Israeli interests diverge significantly. And then see who prevails.

Let's take Iran. The US pushed through the Iran nuclear deal over the objections of Israel. Trump repudiated it because there is no daylight between him and the Israel lobby. Biden admin did try to resurrect it, though things didn't quite work out. One can argue about how seriously they tried, but still.

As for military actions against Iran, it seems to me that the US would like a more restrained action from Israel. Israel seemed to comply somewhat both in the April actions and the more recent actions. I am not very confident in this area because I've not studied it too much, but that's my impression.

That suggests to me that the US does have a fair bit of leverage over Israeli actions if it really wants to do it.

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Your collective action analysis is good, and this sentence is magnificent: "Democracy in general works, [...] not as a mechanism to allow people to govern themselves but as a political technology that allows elite groups to compete for power without bloodshed."

However, there is a serious game-theoretic flaw in the setup. Strategic decisions depend on the assumptions one makes about the courses of action available to other parties and the probability assigned to each choice. Calculating probabilities—predicting opponents' choices—is a function of backwards (endgame) induction. This induction, in turn, is based on preexisting information, environmental information revealed during the game's evolution, and any information the players choose to signal. This last word is vital: signal. During the game, the players may, and will often benefit from doing so, let the other parties know what they are willing to do. But this hinges on one important thing: credibility. If you assume that I am willing—and able—to continue fighting, then that will influence our negotiations of any ceasefire. If, in the other hand, there are signals I might not be willing or able, then you have the upper hand already. That outcome will be vastly different.

Whether Biden, Netanyahu, or Hamas knows this, I do not know. I am quite confident the latter two are well versed in strategic games. And I'd be amazed if noone in the White House is familiar. Unless the Americans wish to experiment with Middle East ex Israel and its consequences,† it is likely they will continue to back Israel up until, during, and after any ceasefire.

† I don't believe Israel will ever disappear. As another commenter put forward, reducing Israel's military sophistication will only increase the brutality in the theatre of war. But for the sake of argument, a Middle East without them would be completely unpredictable, new, uncharted territory. That's seems a highly unattractive scenario.

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This may have drowned in my comment: Threats of withdrawing support will signal information to the "game" players that will seriously alter the outcome, even the possibility, of a ceasefire negotiation.

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My prediction of what happens if the US (and the west) cuts off all military supplies to Israel:

On the one hand Israel now has to seriously reserve it's limited advanced ammunition. This isn't as devastating as it sounds - it can still keep it's current fleet of planes going (at a reduced rate since spare parts are limited) for 50 years, and it already produces a large percentage of its military equipment domestically. Neither does it hugely rely on the US for budget - 80% of military spending is paid for by Israel. But it just doesn't produce enough stuff locally, so stuff will be available, but in short supply.

OTOH it now doesn't need to worry about what the USA thinks, so long as it stays away from such horrific behaviour that the USA starts sanctioning it's economy in general (it still needs to sell services to the USA) or intervening militarily (don't want the USA to impose a no-fly zone).

This leads to a change in strategy. In Gaza Israel implements a complete siege, preserving it's ammunition, and bringing Hamas to its knees at low cost in Israeli casualties, but much higher civilian death.

In Lebanon Israel forces the population north of the Litani essentially at gunpoint, and occupies southern Lebanon indefinitely.

You correctly point out Israel will have limited ability to strike at Iran, but fail to notice that Iran also has limited ability to strike at Israel. It's MRBMs have caused very limited damage so far, and there's no reason to think Israel couldn't weather them indefinitely (albeit at hundreds of casualties), especially given the enormous cost per missile to Iran.

Israel will maintain the ability to carry out limited strikes against Iran using it's aging tanker fleet, stealth aircraft, and domestically produced/stockpiled weapons. This won't be enough to do all that much to Iran, only make it bleed by blowing up oil tankers or such like, but Iran won't be able to do that much more to Israel.

Israel will maintain an absolute military advantage against neighbouring countries. It was able to defeat them with ease long before it got hold of advanced weapons, and is much more militarised and has better trained soldiers.

Altogether this will hurt Israel, but won't deliver the knockout blow to its military abilities as you seem to think.

The real threat for Israel is western sanctions destroying its economy. I think if that happens, there's a risk of much nastier things occurring, like Israel marching Palestinians out of the west bank by gunpoint and plain genocide, as Israel both loses any incentive not to do that, but also risks losing its military edge if it doesn't act while it still has one.

Of course, whilst cutting off military sales to Israel might well be in US interests, full economic sanctions aren't. It mildly hurts the US economy (there's about 50 billion dollars of trade between the two countries), but doesn't actually solve any US problems, and makes US allies a lot more worried about allying with such a fickle partner, instead of one like China which will happily ignore your human rights record, so long as you keeping paying your bills.

Of course this is all about what will happen if the US does this stuff without giving Israel any choice, but that doesn't mean the US can't threaten this stuff as leverage. Threatening to stop all military sales to Israel unless it wraps up the current wars might well work, but there's a risk if played wrong it becomes impossible to do due to domestic Israeli politics. You've got to whisper to Bibi that this is what's going to happen, and then he pretends it was purely to secure the release of the hostages, rather than announce it out loud and force Bibi not to appear to bow to foreign pressure.

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I don't have time to write a long reply because I've already spent way too much time talking about this, but I think your predictions are politically totally unrealistic.

Netanyahu and most Israeli elites would cave because they know that, if they defied the US by continuing the war despite the end of arms deliveries, they would have to change tactics in such a way that either they would suffer casualties at a level that is not politically sustainable or commit such enormous and obvious war crimes that it would inevitably lead to the end of the special relationship with the US, economic sanctions, etc. Israeli elites are way too aware of the importance of that relationship for Israel to jeopardize it.

So you may be right that if they did continue the war anyway and the relationship with the US completely unraveled things would become incredibly nasty, in fact I think you're probably right and I even think there is a serious chance both the unraveling of the relationship with the US and the nasty shit will happen down the line because of adverse trends in Israeli domestic politics, but it wouldn't come to this because the Israeli elites are not yet prepared to accept that.

There are already many people in the national security establishment who are in favor of ending the war and have been clamoring about it in the media for months. The idea that, if the US credibly threatened to withdraw support, it wouldn't sufficiently change the balance of power in the Israeli elite to make the government fold and do as the US says is crazy talk. Of course, the US would have to be smart about it, but in a world where Israeli leaders believe that American threats are credible it would not be hard for the US to get what they want without publicly humiliating Israel and creating strong political incentives for defiance.

There is more I disagree with in what you say, on what Iran and Hezbollah could do to Israel or the economic consequences for Israel of the end of US military aid, but that's not really important.

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There's another possibility: US aid helps Gazan civilians. Israel is committed to winning this war (severely disabling Hamas) one way or another. Without American help, they might resort to less precise methods.

Instead of shooting rockets down with the Iron Dome ($$$), they could just carpet bomb the general vicinity of where the rockets are coming from ($).

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