American commentators exhibit cognitive dissonance: they claim foreign democracies act based on external incentives, yet they also complain that domestic politics prevent America from acting in its own foreign interests. A recent exchange illustrates this point.
Zaid Jilani, a left-wing writer who has always been anti-Israel, recently tweeted that “Westerners under age 50 basically hate Israel. Israel cannot survive without EU trade and U.S. military cover. It’s just a matter of time until the West forces Israel to end the occupation.”
Notice how he treats Israel as a monolithic entity, analyzing how it would behave according to its foreign incentives and respond to U.S. military aid.
Except Israel has 10 million citizens, with 70 percent voter turnout among its adult population in its elections. As the joke goes, the number of political parties in Israel exceeds the number of its citizens, and the number of opinions exceeds the number of parties.
Israelis have their own politics with politicians as self-interested as ours. They have constituents who do not want to withdraw from the West Bank, and they care more about remaining in the Knesset than about U.S. military aid. This means they would risk losing our support to do what their constituents want.
Those who do not care about such constituencies also have their own reasons not to push the issue. Some of their voters don’t want religious settlers to leave the West Bank and come to their cities among secular Israelis. They also worry that forcing settlers to leave would spark a civil war in Israel.
These are nuances that require studying domestic Israeli politics, but Jilani is an arms chair tweeter and too lazy to do that. So he acts as if Israelis have no agency, and they will do whatever we force them to do.
People ignore other countries’ domestic politics at their own perils. President Donald Trump kept asking Europeans to help open the Strait of Hormuz. The argument appeared sound: It was in Europe’s interest to open the strait to get the oil to come out.. There was a problem with that: They couldn’t help Trump and stay in office.
Trump has never been popular in Europe. Let’s unpack this.
It is partly inevitable because the Europeans never like Republicans. Also, Trump has been harsh on them to spend more in their own defenses, which he got them to do finally, but they resent that. Democrats want to have it both ways on this: They believe it is good that Europeans are spending more, but bad that Trump has been so undiplomatic about it. Every president since Harry Truman tried diplomacy but achieved no results. In fact, they also kept warning that if they did not listen when we asked nicely, we would have to be mean about it, which is what Trump did. On this, Trump has the better argument.
But also, as I have written in the past, Trump has picked up unnecessary fights with Europeans over Ukraine, making fun of French president Emmanuel Macron, and especially threatening to invade Greenland.
Greenland belongs to Denmark, which means that Trump was threatening to invade Denmark, sinking his approval rating there to 3 percent. The U.S. Navy does not have frigates (the main reason becasue we are short sighted), and it needed frigates to open the Strait of Hormuz. Denmark has about a dozen heavy frigates that we could use. But if the government of Denmark was seen helping the guy who was threatening to invade their country, it would fall the next day. And these European politicians, just like politicians everywhere else, are happy to run their economies to the ground to stay in office. Every politician will do anything to stay in office.
This includes American politicians. During a private setting in 2017, a conservative journalist was pushing a prominent Republican Senator to criticize President Trump. She cited the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke’s speech before the electors of Bristol, arguing that a good representative votes the right way, even if his constituents disagree, and then explains his decision to them later. The conservative journalist then asked why the Senator, the good conservative that he is, would not do the same. The Senator’s very brief response ended the debate: Burke lost the next election after he gave that speech.
Democracy remains undefeated in cynicism. It is not ideal. As Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones.”This is not an argument against democracy at all, just an explanation of how things work. Intellectuals from the ivory towers are never taken seriously because, despite the lip service they give to democracy, they are contemptuous of how the sausage is made.
