On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, Brad DeLong wrote:
> >> > A good case can be made that the annual payment to Egypt (which
> >> > could never be made without a larger one to Israel) bought the
> >> > end of general war in the middle east and made the Middle East a
> >> > one-superpower zone. We essentially bought [imperium]....
> >
> >> And what good for the United States--speaking as a flinty-eyed State
> >> Department realist--is "condominium" over the western Middle East?
> >
> >What good was the end of the prospect of general war in the Middle East?
> >What good was ruling out a war that could lead to the end of the world?
>
> I agree with you, but I don't think that the realists do: the only
> thing that could make a war in the middle east world-threatening
> would be if the superpowers let themselves get dragged in, and if the
> U.S. is focused on the gulf, it wouldn't be dragged into anything
> happening in Israel.
>
> It's only the non-realist aspects of American policy that make the
> realists interested in calming things down, and paying $6 billion a
> year to try to make sure that things *are* calmed down...
Perhaps. But I'm not sure the non-realist aspects aren't explained more realistically than you originally indicated -- i.e., by a cold war desire to always side with the strongest army, given the choice (especially when cultural issues make it also the one with which we could work the smoothest); and by the fact that this particular country had a strong domestic lobby. Both things only manifested themselves post-1967. Such domestic lobbies are relatively rare, but not unique. Our policy toward Northern Ireland and Armenia has similarly diverged from what you might expect on pure realist principles. We will likely always be better disposed towards Armenia than Azerbajian, even though the oil's on the other side there too.
Once you have military and domestic lobbies like these, that are clearly entrenched for the long haul, I think a true realist has to accept them as initial givens -- not as "non-realist elements." Camp David accepted this initial alliance as one of many initial givens and built on it. Not accepting it as given leads to what I consider nonrealistic non-solutions, like positing Israel's defeat in war as something we didn't have to worry about because it wouldn't drag us in. It also means dismissing as if it didn't exist the the Cold War establishment's obsession with tit-for-tat "reputation." In other words, it means positing a world run entirely by irenic state departments, where the political and military establishments meekly obey their superior wisdom. In their dreams.
Other posters on this list would no doubt propose that chucking the alliance with Israel would have been an alternative solution to the problem. I agree that would have been an consistent alternative to the Camp David payments. But besides involving large difficulties of its own (like the immediate encouragement of general war in the Middle East), it is not one to which I think you, or your flinty-eyed friends, would subscribe.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com