comment on Zionism discussion

[Brad DeLong]

>Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>>  The principal national security and economic policy interest of the
>>  United States in the Middle East is to keep the oil states happy and
>>  the oil flowing cheaply. Israel is a substantial hindrance to that
>>  interest. American support for Israel has other roots--domestic
>>  political roots, guilt-over-not-entering-WWII-earlier roots, and a
>>  (miscalculation) that an Isreael confident of American support will
>>  be much more willing to deal.
>>
>>  But to say that Israel is an "outpost" of the American "empire" is
>>  totally dorky--reveals a systematic failure to think. Since George C.
>>  Marshall was Secretary of State, American diplomats have, way down in
>>  their deepest hearts, thought just how much easier the projection of
>>  American power and influence into the Middle East would have been if
>>  Israel had never been established. Israel is a source of weakness in
>>  America's "empire": it is not a functional part of it...
>>
>.
>This is wrong.

No. It's right. It's what the flinty-eyed containment realists in the 
State Department thought in 1947, it's what they thought in 1967. And 
it's what they thought in 1987.

America supports Israel for other reasons than as a means of 
projecting diplomatic and military power into the middle east...

Brad DeLong


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