Conversations With History: John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guests today are John Mercer heimer who is the our Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago and Steve Walt who is the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard's John F Kennedy School they have just written the Israel lobby and u.s. foreign policy John Steve welcome back to the program it's great to be back Harris to be here help us understand the intellectual origins of this book you're both IR specialists the emphasis here is on domestic politics and how it influences u.s. foreign policy well basically in the wake of 9/11 almost all scholars of international relations began to think about the Middle East and US policy in the Middle East and what went wrong and Steve and I were talking about that matter in the spring of 2002 and we pointed out to each other that there's this phenomenon called the Israel lobby that has a significant influence on our policy that nobody talks about or writes about and we at that point in time decided we would try and do something and then through a variety of circumstances we ended up being commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly in the fall of 2002 to write an article and from that point forward began to do serious research and serious writing and finally in March 2006 an article came out in the London Review of Books and sort of exploded all across the globe and brought a great deal of notoriety to the subject and to us and then after we wrote the article we decided to write the book which was then published this month here in the United States and will be published in a number of European countries and Asian countries later in the year I had to take a couple of comments I had actually done some work on the Middle East my dissertation which was written here at Berkeley looked at the Middle East in some detail from an international relations perspective there's a section of that book that actually deals with the domestic politics of alliances including the domestic politics of the US commitment to Israel so I'd worked on this problem a little bit in the past John and I are both regarded as realists as people who think that for the most part states calculate the national interest rather carefully and that international politics is sort of a competitive business where if you don't calculate your interests carefully you're gonna get into a lot of trouble and a number of people have pointed out this book and the earlier article are somewhat contrary to the intellectual vision that we put forward and I think the obvious answer is this is an exception to sort of standard realist behavior and our argument in the book and elsewhere is it when domestic politics intrudes too heavily into a state's calculations and into the making of foreign policy there's some considerable danger you'll end up doing things that are not in your national interest and of course one of the main themes of the book is that's what's happened with respect to us-israeli relations over time as I read your book and prepared for this interview I whipped out my Federalist number ten which I like to quote right now from because Madison writes by a faction I understand a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community and he goes on to say in there that that to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction and at the same time to preserve the spirit in the form of popular Herman is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed so in a way that's what you're up to here too right I mean in the sense the lobby that you're talking about is a fact we actually referred to Federalist 10 in the book and say that interest groups and the interplay of what Madison called factions has been woven into the way American politics work since the founding of the Republic there's nothing unusual about what the groups in the Israel lobby are doing we often say to each other and to people in public its activities for the most part are as American as apple pie they're not illegitimate they're just the way American politics works but as Madison is hinting there sometimes when a particular group or faction or interest group is too powerful and if it's advocating things that are not in the overall interest of the country it can be harmful to society not because it's trying to be but just because it's pushing things that aren't good for the country as a whole yeah just to pick up on Steve's point I think if you look at the National Rifle Association we would argue that the policies that it pushes quite successfully are not in the American national interest either for the sorts of reasons that Madison was laying out and one could make the same argument about the farm lobby and the Cuban Lobby so when we say that the Israel lobby exists number one and number two is pushing policies that are not good for the United States we're not saying that there's anything peculiar about the Israel lobby there are many other lobbies or interest groups like the Israel lobby and we believe in some of those cases not all of them that they push policies that are not good for the overall interest of the United States and by the way it is possible that in the case of the Israel lobby that if it pushed a different set of policies this is one of Steve's favorite themes if it pushed a different set of policies those policies would be good for the United States and we and Israel would be much better off as a result but what is distinctive here and what we're talking about I don't believe that Madison was talking about foreign policy he was really talking about domestic policy and the example of the National Rifle Association it's a it's a domestic Lobby there they don't have a foreign policy so that makes this area it seems to some of the are different from the case of the NRI farm lobby so put a different lots of industries you know will push for protectionist legislation so they don't want to compete against foreign competition so they make it hard to have free trade agreements because they want to get special protection from Congress or from the executive branch now that's a foreign policy issue and anybody who's worked on trade policy understands that domestic politics matters greatly if they're successful of course they get protection all Americans end up paying more for those goods so it's not in the overall interest of the country to protect an industry that can't compete but it happens all the time and that's a foreign policy issue I don't think there's really much of a distinction between a Lobby that works to try and shape domestic politics and a Lobby that works to try and influence foreign policy but the buttress Harry's point just a bit here when Madison was writing the United States was very much a white anglo-saxon Protestant country and all the hyphenated Americans so to speak had not come to the United States at that point and it was throughout the course of the 19th century that huge waves of country of immigrants from countries like Ireland in Germany and later The Pale of Settlement and Poland and Italy became to come to the country that you began to get these ethnic lobbies and of course we have the problem or those that that situation today and it's not restricted to American Jews it would include Armenians it would include Cuban Americans and we see that Indian Americans are now becoming very active in pushing American foreign policy in ways that they believe are good for India and for the United States as well the other thing I wanted to ask you about is a theme that emerges throughout your book is the way the policies and some of these institutions in a way have been frozen in time or at least evolved over time in ways that negative consequences and a lot of the images and descriptions used about the relationship which we'll talk about in a minute you know go back to an earlier period and so let's talk a little about that because at one point Israel as a strategic Cassatt but that was in the Cold War and the Cold War ended in 1989 Israel itself has changed a lot you know in this period and as you demonstrate as when we talk about the lobby the lobby has changed over time so so talk a little about that because it's very important because what you're addressing a problem we're simply the the the the institution's you're talking about and the arguments made have not evolved with it with time there's in a sense different sets of trends happening and they go in somewhat different directions I think you can make an argument for example the argument we would make is that there was a very powerful moral case for the creation of the State of Israel and for Israel's existence today based on centuries of anti-semitism and of course culminating in the tragedy of the Holocaust and so there was enormous sympathy at the time of Israel's creation and lots of sort of good feeling in the United States and over time that image has eroded most powerful you do to the implications of the occupation the post 67 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and then the subsequent treatment of the Palestinians over now many decades which has eroded Israel's image around the world and even to some degree in the United States and to some degree among Jewish Americans as well so that's one trend the second trend of course is Israel's strategic value which you could argue actually went up for a while as it grew more capable and in the context of the Cold War was something of an asset but once the Cold War came to an end its value as a strategic asset begins to decline and it becomes of course a problem for the United States particularly in generating anti Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world and the third trend is that key groups in the lobby become more powerful more influential over time AIPAC was a rather small operation in the 1950s you know a small office a one lobbyist up on Capitol Hill AIPAC is explain I'm sorry the American Israel Public Affairs Committee it's widely regarded as one of the most important elements in the Israel probably most powerful it's it's essentially a one-man show almost a one-man show in the 50s and 60s and by now in 2007 an annual budget of about fifty million dollars a very large well paid staff regional offices around the country a great capacity to help shape campaign contributions for candidates it's just an entirely different operation than it was the summation of all these trends ours in the sense although the moral case for giving Israel unconditional support has gone down and the moral the strategic case for giving Israel unconditional support has gone down the power of the lobby has gone up and American support for Israel continues to go up despite the fact that again this strategic and moral case for this level of support and its unconditional nature has been reduced much more difficult for president today to put pressure on Israel than it was in 1990 or 1980 or 1970 all the way back to nineteen 1956 when Dwight the Eisenhower really put pressure on Israel to get out of the Sinai after the 56 war it's hard to imagine an American president being able to put that kind of pressure he basically threatened to cut off all US economic aid if they didn't warrant I think 36 yeah and again it's hard to imagine an American president doing that now so so help me and the audience understand what we're talking about when we're talking about the Israel lobby because in this discourse one has trouble because of the history of anti-semitism and and but but you're pretty careful in your wording and I want to go over that what is it a lot well our argument is Harry that the lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and groups who work actively to push American foreign policy in a pro Isreal direction now we're not arguing that they're pushing American foreign policy in a direction that favors Israel and does damage to the United States we believe that policies that they're advocating the individuals and groups the Bobby Orr ones that they believe are good for the United States and good for Israel we disagree with that on both counts but that's what they believe many of our critics have said that we're talking about a cabal or a conspiracy we go to significant lengths in the piece and in more public presentations to make it clear that we're talking about no such thing this is an American interest group it's like the National Rifle Association it's like the farm lobby it's like the Cuban Lobby it's just another interest group that is operating in ways that are as Steve said before for the most part as American as apple pie another point that needs to be emphasized here is that we're not talking about a Jewish lobby a number of our critics like to use the phrase Jewish lobby when in fact we say explicitly that this is not a Jewish lobby it's the Israel lobby now why is that the case first of all not all Jews could possibly be included as part of the lobby because if you look at the basic makeup of the American Jewish community it's quite clear that about a third of American Jews do not feel any significant attachment to Israel it's just not something that matters that much to them so in no way could you include them in the lobby so not all Jews are in Lobby furthermore it is quite clear that inside the lobby are a number of important constituencies that are not Jewish the most important of which are the Christian Zionists but also a number of key Neo conservatives like John Bolton and Jim Woolsey who we would include in Lobby are not Jewish so this is not a Jewish lobby it's the Israel lobby it is defined not by ethnicity or religion it is defined by its political agenda and its political agenda again just to be perfectly clear is to push u.s. foreign policy in ways that benefit Israel and at the same time are believed to benefit the United States I would just add a couple points obviously it's a heterogeneous coalition to some degree there differences between different groups and individuals in it so some organizations for example the Zionist Organization of America but very hardline group that believes Israel should basically control all of the occupied territories in perpetuity and many of the Christian Zionists if not all Christian Zionists these hardline Christian evangelicals also favor that there are other groups that also want the United States to have a special relationship with Israel want American foreign policy to be very pro-israel who nonetheless favor a two-state settlement think that Palestinians should have a state of their own think the United States should push for that although they tend not to think the United States should ever really squeeze Israel hard on that but nonetheless that's the outcome they would like to see so it's not a single unified organization with a leadership that you know sort of hands out orders to the rank-and-file it's a loose coalition and I believe you're suggesting when you're describing the lobby that that in in this period when there's been a historical evolution since say the 67 war to the present the balance of power within the what we can call the faction that is the supporters of Israel to use Madison's term namely faction that the the the balance of power within those groups has shifted and so you get an output that may not be universally agreed on which is what you were just jesting if you looked at the spectrum of organizations within it the most powerful and influential the ones with the largest budgets tend to have the most influence on the policy process tend to be on the hardline end of the spectrum and they've moved in a more conservative direction or a more hardline direction over time there are a number of other organizations Americans for peace now Brits ethically Shalom the Israel Policy Forum that are on the more moderate even dovish side of the spectrum and there we actually would agree with many of the policies they favor but they're not as influential not as powerful not as wealthy in their capacity to shape events in the course of this evolution during the Cold War or the latter part of the Cold War especially Israel the the strategic rationale for the support of was it was an asset in the region as we competed with the Soviet Union for influence and power with the the end of the Cold War that rationale no longer existed so what replaced it and how has that played into our current dilemma well the rationale that the lobby put forward after the Cold War ended was that the Soviet threat was replaced by the terrorist threat and that the terrorism threat that Israel and the United States faced was essentially the same threat so we were in effect partners in a war against terrorism that was the argument that the lobby made in the 1990s but certainly after 9/11 and our basic argument is that that's wrong and that one of the principal reasons and Harry I want to underline the word one here one of the principal reasons it's not the only reason that we have a terrorism problem today is because of our unconditional support for Israel especially with regard to its policies Israel's policies towards the Palestinians in the occupied territory so we disagree with that new rationale that the lobby has adduced and I guess if you if you're fighting a war on terrorism then you you you you are looking for a global mission in a way and you're saying that one terrorist group is just like another which would seem to raise problems for the United States if it wants to behave responsibly globally and actually deal with the problem obviously John and I are no defenders of terrorists of any kind but one of the mistakes the United States made and it's not a mistake I think it's unique to the us-israeli relationship was in the aftermath of September 11th to basically declare that the enemy here was terrorism with a capital T and as you just indicated that implies that all terrorist groups are fundamentally identical the fact is that terrorism is not a single movement or a single organization it's just a tactic that many different groups of many different political stripes have used throughout history and some terrorist organizations in the past in fact got help from the United States because we their objectives and of course many people have pointed out the original Zionist mission included Zionist terrorists who used traditional terrorist methods against the British when they were trying to carve out their own state in Palestine who who became prime minister to whom I ultimately became Prime Minister so again terrorism is not the enemy there may be states movements groups whose objectives are hostile to ours and who try to attack the United States and obviously a problem for us but it was a mistake that we made to try and view this all as one single undifferentiated problem now of course many Israeli leaders and key organizations in the lobby liked that because they could say look we have a terrorism problem you have a terrorism problem it's the same problem but of course it's not right some of the organizations that Israel has a problem with don't attack the United States don't try to attack the United States and that raises then the question of what's the best way of dealing with each individual terrorist organization through some combination of you know offensive action but also attempting to try and find political solutions that would make them less influential less powerful or might in some cases cause them to put down their arms and abandon those tactics the same way that the original Zionists did once they got their own state sometimes think that we use labels we say Israel but we're in a way talking about factions within Israel we say the United States but we're talking about a faction in the national security bureaucracy and so on and it seems that we get alliances across international boundaries in this age of globalization which then creates labels that don't actually help us understand the problem I think that sometimes the case but what do you have in mind in particular here well I I think you you side for example cases where former heads of security apparatus in Israel have criticized the the policies of Israel toward the occupation in the United States it's not clear that had there been a different administration after 9/11 if the neoconservatives hadn't been so influential then we then our policies might have taken an entirely different course and so what so in this moment in time you get agreement across boundaries and you get a powerful output that appears to be much broader than it may in fact be just two quick points on this one is I do believe we can never be certain but I do believe that if Al Gore had been elected president in 2000 that in the wake of Zion oh that was elected yes but if he had been the president after 9/11 that we would not have attacked Iraq because as you know Al Gore was an adamant opponent of the war in Iraq as were Steve and I but I believe that's correct that we would not have attacked Iraq so I agree with you there but with regard to Israel itself a good example to support your point is that there are a very large number of individuals inside the national security establishment in Israel who believed that Israel should cut a deal with Syria over the Golan Heights for the purpose of splitting Syria from Iran and getting Syria to help Israel deal with the palace excuse me with the Hezbollah problem in Lebanon and also just creating a peace agreement between Syria and Israel much the way you have a peace agreement between Jordan and Israel Egypt in Israel so there are significant differences among Israeli elites on key policy issues there's no question about that and inside the United States you have those differences too yeah I think Kerry was actually an even more interesting question which is almost a theoretical question of how you conceive about foreign policy which to what extent does foreign policy get shaped by what one might call transnational coalition's and there's a literature on this that isn't about the Middle East it's a more more general literature I do think when two countries become very closely intertwined as the United States has been with Israel and it has it it has been with a number of its NATO allies the British being the most obvious one you obviously get channels of influence that run both ways between people who are you know one step down in bureaucracies who are constantly working with each other and are gonna try to influence each other's thinking in various ways and can even invoke each other to try and gain political support back home back in the bureaucracy and I think we see a number of instances in us-israeli relations in anglo-american relations where that sort of thing happens and you know one of the the points we've underscored and trying to write the book is that there's lots of aspects of this relationship that are both interesting but also of great importance for both countries the problem is that nobody wants to talk about them and the real danger here is we'll end up doing lots of things and lots of people will think you know this isn't so smart we really shouldn't be doing this but no one can bring it up out into the open and talk about it and our basic view is look when countries start conducting foreign policy without being able to talk about it candidly they're gonna make mistakes every now and then if not all the time and not be able to correct those mistakes quickly enough we think that's been a huge problem for the United States in its Middle East policy more generally we also believe of course this has encouraged Israel to do a variety of things that were quite foolish as well and that Israel would in fact be better off if we had a more open discussion in the United States about American policy and American support for Israel and it should be emphasized that that open discussion does occur regularly in Israel and if you if you read pirate's on a daily basis in English you see that very clearly absolutely and not just Haaretz other newspapers and you know media outlets in Israel where there is a wide open debate and where you can say all sorts of things very similar to what we've said and no one will condemn you and no certainly no one will accuse you of being an anti-semite or anything like that that happens all the time in Israel but it doesn't happen very often in the United States if you were looking to look at the op-ed pages of all the major newspapers in the United States you would find no equivalent akiva elder Gideon Levy Amira Hass and Bradley Burstyn just to pick four examples of individuals who write regularly for Haaretz we just don't have an open discourse on the editorial pages in the op-ed pages of our major newspapers about Israel about its policies and about the us-israeli relationship in the end by the end result of this I believe is that we do significant damage to US interests and to Israeli interests in your book when you and will talk a little more about Israeli u.s. relationship with regard to the benefits that Israel gets from the relationship but you you you talk a great deal about recent relations that should be important for us in the Middle East Iran Syria the Lebanon to set to a seven war to a six sorry - or six yeah that that cases in which for you and for your analysis and maybe for a broader international relations community our policy the way we're pursuing our national interests with regard to these countries does not make a lot of sense so talk a little about that because for example in the case of Iran there were initiatives that the Iranians were willing to make at the time of the Iraq war that we did not respond to yeah I'll I'll say a few words about Iran and Steve can say a few words about Lebanon because those are two very prominent cases in the book and we've already talked a little bit about Syria it's quite clear that starting in the early 1990s the Israelis came to believe that the greatest strategic threat that was facing them either at the moment or on the horizon was Iran and they began putting pressure on the United States in the early 1990s to pursue a confrontational policy towards Iran and Bill Clinton went along with this and George Bush has gone along with this nevertheless at the same time the Iranians were looking for opportunities over the course of the 1990s and in the early part of this decade to change this confrontational relationship they had with the United States and trying to work out some sort of modus vivendi it wasn't like they wanted to become kissing cousins with the United States or anything like that but it is clear that they thought that this confrontational relationship was counterproductive for Iranian interests but every time that the Iranians tried to improve relations with the United States the lobby moved in and made it almost impossible for the president be he Bill Clinton or George Bush to do anything serious to improve those relations in the wake of 9/11 the Iranians made it clear to us that they wanted to help us deal with our problem in Afghanistan they wanted to improve relations and during the course of these discussions there was even evidence that they were willing to recognize the State of Israel and have decent relations with Israel if some sort of agreement could have been worked out between the Palestinians and the Israelis so there's no evidence that the Iranians are hopelessly committed to opposing the existence of Israel forever but anyway we were unable in large part because of the law be to reach any kind of accommodation with the Iranians and the most important result of that is that we believe that it has made it extremely difficult if not impossible for the United States to shut down or limit Iran's nuclear ambitions and there's no question about it this is a hard nut to crack no matter how are you approach it but our argument is that if you had more cooperative policy you place more emphasis on diplomacy and on improving relations and removing the American threat and removing the Israeli threat you're more likely to get a solution but again the Israelis have pushed us hard and the lobbyists pushed us especially hard to have good relations with Iran the only footnote add to that of course is the other outcome that this Paulo our policy has led to is the election of a hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and it's hard to see that as a good development for the United States or for Israel given some of his very objectionable statements over time again one of these unfortunate events let me let me turn that to Lebanon it's clear that Israel had a problem with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon which was hostile and was arming itself getting missiles from various places and posing a growing threat so we don't deny that they had a real thing to worry about plus the fact over these cross-border provocations going both ways but the question is what was their response going to be and they developed a response that they then implemented in the summer of 2006 which had two parts to it trying to disarm Hezbollah by bombing it and then bombing civilian areas in Lebanon to punish the rest of Lebanese society so that the government of Lebanon would finally put the squeeze on Hezbollah and this strategy was deeply misguided right it was doomed to fail from the beginning it was easy to anticipate that was they weren't going to be able to accomplish their military objectives and of course punishing the rest of Lebanon for what Hezbollah was doing actually just made Hezbollah more more popular the problem was that the United States because of the impact of the Israel lobby was not in a position to tell the Israelis this was a stupid policy that wasn't gonna work and secondly once the war started and then it was clear that the strategy wasn't working the American government wasn't able to put pressure on Israel to get a ceasefire quickly a ceasefire that and by the way would have saved Israeli lives because Hezbollah was launching rockets into northern Israel instead the American government both the Bush administration and Congress swung overwhelmingly behind Israel delayed a ceasefire and anyone who tried to raise questions about this anyone like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International it criticized Israel's disproportionate response or a handful of congressmen who said that you know really they thought Israel was kind of going overboard and threatening the democratic government in Lebanon anybody who said this was immediately slammed by key organizations in the lobby the United States would have been a better friend to Israel if we had either pushed them to come up with a better response to Hezbollah or if we had shut the war down as quickly as possible that's what a good Ally would have done but because of the impact of the lobby the United States was unable to be a good friend to Israel in that particular case and that again damaged our image in the region but it also as many Israelis recognized was a strategic disaster for them both of these cases bring to mind the an argument that's made against you and your work in the sense that what you're you're working with here is a reductionist notion of what is causing the the the behavior of the United States in both cases that the Israel lobby is the tail that's wagging you know the dog and so on so so I think by interests in a general way we should address that problem because we have American exceptionalism we have you know ideas about transforming the Middle East we have a nationalist chauvinistic nationalist like Cheney you know and Rumsfeld who aren't part of the lobby so so how do you answer people who say sure the the lobby may have been a factor you know in both of these cases but it really wasn't the the key factor it was an element in the equation but look we have a president he's elected by the people we have a Congress and so on and and so we have to take these factors into account the idea is the institutions and the personality that are running the country well two quick points one is that in most of these cases were not arguing that the lobby was the only factor this is most apparent in the Iraq war a lot of people seem to think that we're saying that the lobby alone or the lobby in Israel alone caused the Iraq war nothing could be further from the truth our argument is that the lobby and Israel were two major driving forces behind the war by themselves they could not have made the war happen but we believe that in their absence in other words if the lobby and Israel had been not pushing for the war had not been pushing for the world we would not have had the war so we stay away from mono causal arguments even though we're often accused of this by our critics but to get to the Nitty Gritty of your question Harry I think that what you have to do is you have to take every case and you have to get in side the case and you have to look at what happened and what we have to do is bring to bear evidence that shows that a particular President or a particular set of policymakers were pushing American policy in one direction and it appeared to be headed in that direction and then the lobby weighed in and pushed it back in the other direction and if we can't provide evidence to support those kinds of arguments then we're not going to carry the day just to give you one example of where I think this happens we show I think quite clearly that in the spring of 2002 this is April 2002 shortly after Ariel Sharon had ordered the Israeli Defense Forces the IDF to reoccupy Palestinian lands that had been given over to Arafat as a result of the Oslo peace process President Bush told sharone in no uncertain terms that he had to get out of those areas immediately and condi rice repeated that message to our own what we then show is that the lobby moved in and in effect humiliated George Bush forced him to back off and actually say at the White House shortly thereafter that Ariel Sharon was a man of peace so I think that what we did in that case is we showed that it was really the lobby that had turned Bush around on this issue and that Bush actually understood at than what the Israelis were doing as a result of operation defensive shield was not good for the United States but he couldn't act on that belief because of the power of the lobby I want to take his question in a slightly different direction I mean I think that the context does matter here John referred to the Iraq war the context post September 11th was clearly critical the United States is in this very unusual position or we have enormous power in the world we're militarily very confident we've won a series of wars quite handily going back to the first Gulf War so there was never any real doubt that if we wanted to out Saddam Hussein we could do it behind those yeah yeah no virus and it was just clear that the military task of toppling him was not beyond our capabilities running Iraq of course was a separate matter but getting rid of Saddam we all knew we could do and third we were very scared after September 11th the whole Middle East seemed to potentially dangerous something had to be done about this terrorist problem weapons of mass destruction it was very easy to work the American people into a state of real fear that's all strategic context that then allowed key individuals and key groups in the lobby to sell a particular approach to that problem that they would not have been able to sell in other circumstances I would add one of the point to this the United States is an incredibly wealthy and powerful country and one of the things I think you do learn from realism right is that the world is a competitive place but when you're in very good shape when you're very powerful you have much greater latitude much greater margin for action and you can do a lot of things that may be kind of stupid you may even pay a price for doing them and you're still going to be ok and you could make the argument that domestic politics matters more in the United States case precisely because we have such latitude if we had the Cold War back alright if we had a real great power adversary that we thought was really dangerous we would have to be much more focused on not letting our national interest get diverted not miscalculating you'd probably have a somewhat more open discussion in a funny way we have the luxury of allowing special interest groups of all kinds to distort American policy precisely because the United States is so big and powerful all right it's still costly it may still lead us into considerable problems but it's you know something one of these I think realism would tell you is that the United States is precisely in the position where you got to be real careful because it's possible to miss calculate and think you can get away with it anyway so the other thing that realism tells you is that when you do pursue policies that are caused by domestic political interest groups that you invariably get yourself into a lot of trouble almost all so you you've given me the opportunity to have you put on simultaneously your domestic politics that in your international politics that in a sense you're saying that in both realms there isn't a balancer so that there's no one out there balancing America's global power which would discipline us and on the other hand domestically what I'm hearing you say is there's that what happens with interest group politics and foreign policy is there's really one only one interest root interest group voice and it's not being balanced on this particular issue that's right it's not that there aren't countervailing forces within American domestic politics there are Arab American groups that try to lobby you could argue their peace groups for example it can sometimes very critical of what Israel has done our critical of unconditional support but if you look at the balance of power internally between the various groups in the Israel lobby and what you might put as the countervailing forces it's overwhelming on one side just to give you one you know sort of fact on this between 1992 and 2005 pro-israel political action committees gave about 55 million dollars to campaign new to candidates for office in American elections congressional and presidential elections Arab American groups in that same period 92 to 2005 gave 800,000 so 55 million versus 800,000 that's not the only fact you could point to but it suggests what the balance of power is it is often said of course what about the oil lobby and what the Saudi Lobby and these on foreign policy issues are just nowhere near as powerful we talked about this at some length in the book oil companies are very energetic there is an oil lobby out there they do a lot of work in Washington but it's mostly on domestic politics environmental regulations tax policy drilling rights things like that the bread and butter of what drives an oil company or an energy company on foreign policy they tend not to be very and energetically engaged and this is why the legislative former legislative director of AIPAC man named Douglas Bloomfield told BBC News in 2003 AIPAC has one great advantage we really don't have any competition that's probably overstating it just a little bit but it captures the essence of the imbalance of power inside the United States they cover everything but but you you identify and I wanted to just mention this how the lobby works and and its impact us health and you say constraining what presidents are willing to contemplate forcing them to take steps they might otherwise avoid making it harder to sustain initiatives that the groups oppose shaping perception so the key officials will willingly favor the policies that these interest groups are pushing so this is phenomena common to all interest groups and what you're saying it's it's it's it's very powerful in the case of Middle East policy well let me explain basically how the lobby operates it pursues two strategies the first is to influence the policy-making process and the second is to shape to dominate the discourse about Israel in the United States in ways that make the Israelis look like the good guys the Arabs look like the bad guys and make Americans think that the wise policy is to support Israel unconditionally but just to say a few words about the first strategy which is to dominate or to influence the the making of policy you talked mainly about how the lobby influences the executive branch the president and his advisors and of course they do that very well where the lobby has its greatest influence is actually on Capitol Hill the lobby is very effective at going up there and putting pressure on congressmen and Congresswomen and Senators to support policies that are pro-israel and if any of those legislators are running for reelection and the lobby believes and here we're talking mainly about AIPAC but if APEC believe that those legislators are not sufficiently pro-israel they'll do everything they can to help those legislators go down to defeat in the next election and it'll help get people elected who are likely to be pro-israel so you see that inside the executive branch and inside Congress they work hard as other interest groups do to influence outcomes and then we get to the second broad strategy which is controlling discourse there are a lot of people in the media who are naturally sympathetic to Israel someone like William Safire who wrote for The New York Times didn't need any encouragement from a PAC or the conference of presidents and major Jewish organizations to be pro-israel he was naturally quite pro-israel and by that you mean that's where his ideas about national interests were you're not suggesting anything yeah he would see the interest of the two countries as a session tended to favor rather hardline Israeli policies and a very hard-edged American approach towards the Middle East but what the lobby does is it goes to considerable lengths to make sure that other op-ed columnist and editorial writers don't say things that are hostile to Israel or hostile to the us-israeli relationship if somebody writes an editorial that's deeply critical of Israel if it was the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times you can rest assured that a bevy of organizations like camera would write letters and generate email and letter-writing campaigns and so forth and so on telephone calls would come and furthermore the lobby goes to considerable lengths to try and influence the discourse on university campuses after 2002 when there was a bevy of criticisms against Israel on campuses they went to great lengths to what they call take back the campuses so basically what the lobby does is try to control try to influence the policy-making process as much as possible and to create a situation where the discourse is as pro-israel as possible and they do a very good job and as you've said though this is as American as apple pie insofar as its behavior when you talk about say media coverage in the United States many people think given you know bizarre conspiracy theories like the protocols of the Elders of Zion that we're saying something like you know there's Jewish control of the media which we're not saying at all in fact groups like camera exist the committee for accuracy on Middle East reporting in America it's a watchdog organization they exist to put pressure on media organizations precisely because there isn't any kind of control you have to lean on people just last month CNN broadcast a documentary that compared Christian Muslim and Jewish fundamentalism Christiana Amanpour was the anchor and it had three separate episodes one on Jewish fundamentalist Christian fundamentalist and then one on Muslim fundamentalist and immediately in the aftermath a number of prominent organizations in the lobby including the conference of presidents began organizing protests directed at CNN and in particular asking people to write companies that had bought advertising time and to complain to the advertisers now if you're CNN this is something you have to take very seriously and the purpose of course is to make sure that the next time you think about doing a show like this you'll think well maybe we ought to make sure it's a little bit more favorable because we don't want to get that avalanche of mail and those other protests and that's only one of many other examples where radio stations and newspapers have faced boycotts and other forms of pressure from well-organized groups who want to make sure that their coverage is as favorable to Israel as possible now that everybody should have one other point they're not the only group that does this kind of thing you would find the same thing in other politically hot topics as well what we always keep coming back to is that this is ultimately not the way we're supposed to do business in the United States where you're supposed to have open discussion of issues and by failing to allow open discussion of these issues we end up with policies that aren't in America's interest but we also believe that we've ended up with policies that have also been been very harmful to Israel to take take the most obvious example many Israelis and many Jewish Americans understand that the entire settlement enterprise was a real strategic and moral disaster for Israel and American presidents have always opposed it but they've never been able to put any pressure on it because the political cost of trying to do it would be too great that's in part because we can't even talk about that very openly here in the United States so what is our national interest in the Middle East that we're not dealing with adequately well we have three major interests in the Middle East one is to ensure that the flow of oil out of that area of the world continues unabated second to prevent nuclear proliferation in the region and we're especially worried about the possibility that some terrorist organization like Al Qaeda might get its hands on nuclear weapons and third we're concerned with defeating the terrorist threat that is directed against the United States and if possible dealing with other terrorist threats as well we believe that was provided to the proliferation problem and was regard to the terrorism problem for sure that our policy of giving Israel unconditional aid has made it more difficult to deal with those problems the best case of course is the terrorism problem there is little doubt that America's unconditional support for Israel's policies towards us the Palestinians it's brutal treatment of the Palestinians and it's colonization of the Westbank enrages huge numbers of people in the Arab and Islamic world causes some of them to become terrorists serves as an ideal recruiting device for terrorist organizations and provides support for the Osama bin Laden's of the world and the end result of this is the United States has a major league terrorism problem and it's not driven that terrorism problem is not driven simply by American support for Israel's policies towards the Palestinians but it is driven in good part by that and that just is one example of how a particular American national interest which is to stop the terrorist threat against us is hindered by our relationship with Israel so so what is the answer to opening the debate the dialogue in the United States obviously the lobby is a legitimate faction in Madison sense so so so so how do we proceed you know in the case of a group that has done a very good job of following what our system is about well our contribution to this is to write a book that among other things write a book to try and open this up and one of the themes that we strike in the conclusion of the book is to hope that many people in the United States who feel an attachment to Israel and commitment to it in some way will think more and start talking more openly among themselves as John said a while back if the key organizations in the lobby were pushing a different set of policies we would have no objection and we think that would be much better for Israel as well our basic view on the us-israeli relationship of course is that the United States should be treating Israel like a normal country right that we should treat it the way we treat other democracies we should back them when they do things that we think are good and we should oppose them and be willing to withdraw support if they're doing things that we don't think are in our interest we should again treat it like a normal country we're not talking for abandoning Israel or anything like that we're talking about again treating it as a country that's a successful normal democracy and the only way to have that begin to be American policy we believe is for all Americans to start talking about this more openly and for people not to treat this as a taboo that you can't bring up and have a policy debate the same way we would debate our policy towards Japan our relationship with China what we're doing in Latin America or any other part of the world I just could say one key point Harry we've touched on this before but it can't be emphasized enough is that States make mistakes States whether you're talking about the United States or Israel or Britain Germany you pick your country those States occasionally pursue foolish policies you're not omniscient they're not omniscient and therefore it's very good to have open and freewheeling debates where critics are allowed to take out after the policy of the day because it may avoid a disaster number one or number two if you get into a disastrous situation it may help you figure out a smart way to get out of it but open debate is a good thing but what we have in the case of us-israeli the us-israeli relationship is a situation where it is very difficult to have a meaningful debate without those people who criticize Israel in the United States for its support for certain Israeli policies being called anti-semite which is by what is by the way why you see the presidential candidates in the current election having such a lively debate on US policy towards Israel the largest the largest recipient of American foreign aid $500 per Israeli per year and yet there's no discussion even though all of them recognize that American Middle East policy as badly is gone badly off the rails they all kind of agree on that and they have different prescriptions but the one item that of course is never questioned is the special relationship and that suggests that there's something getting in the way of an open discussion given all the other things the presidential candidates disagree on it is kind of surprising that they don't ever disagree on that we just have a few minutes left one last question brief answers you're tenured at Chicago you're tenured at Harvard what what have you learned about evidence and public discourse and civilized discourse as a result of this exercise well this is a debate that's taken place very much in the public realm not not in the academic realm Steve and I have each written three books and before we wrote this book and the debates surrounding those books largely took part in the academic realm and in that realm not always but most of the time the debate involved evidence and logic this debate is one where we believe evidence and logic usually doesn't come into play and what we have discovered is that our our opponents so decide so to speak our critics use basically three tactics to go after us number one they smear us and you see very little of that in the academic world - they constantly misrepresent our arguments it is truly amazing how often people accuse us of saying X when we said the opposite of X and number three were frequently accused of doing shoddy scholarship which interestingly as a charge we were never accused of before we wrote this book we consider these three charges basically to be this word maybe a little bit strong but it captures the essence I think of what we think these charges are bogus charges really they don't carry much weight but nevertheless they're leveled at us all the time and we're forced to constantly deal with them instead of being in a position where we can deal with the substance of the book I'd say just a couple of things quickly first of all it's this whole issue is sometimes discussed as a sort of Jewish versus non-jewish issue one of the things that I've learned about this of course that's the wrong way to think about it does because of course you have Jewish Americans and non Jewish Americans on all sides of this issue that's one thing that's become clear the second thing is leaving aside some of our more prominent critics who were often unfortunately rather visible in mainstream media circles but leading aside that I've been struck by how the vast majority of people that I deal with not everyone but the vast majority welcome this discussion even the people who may have some disagreements with some of what we've written think it actually is something ought to get out there and ought to get talked about I think our correspondence is in sort of eighty percent favorable some of it very very favorable so I've actually been struck by how I think most Americans and vitally public opinion polls would bear this out most Americans don't want the United States to give any country including Israel unconditional support and they welcome an open and civil debate on this and many other topics and again we hope that that's the ultimate outcome of the book on that note I want to thank you both for taking the time we could have gone on for several hours with you program is one hour and let me show your book again the Israel lobby and u.s. foreign policy and I want to thank John and Steve for coming back to our program and telling us about their book thank you for having us Harry lots of fun to talk to you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

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Keywords: foreign, policy, international, relations, domestic, politics

Id: 7ddFhjIyYKc

Length: 59min 3sec (3543 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2008