Is Israel the Ideal "America First" Ally?

And more from this week...

I don’t know how this war between Israel and Iran will turn out, though early returns suggest the country threatened with elimination is doing rather better than the one issuing the threats. What I do know is that it has thrown into sharp relief the question of what the end of U.S. global hegemony and the arrival of an “America First” foreign policy means for the U.S. relationship with its allies. A lot of commentators stuck in the old world seem confused.

So your one thing to read this week is a column today from Daniel McCarthy in Compact: This Is Israel’s War, which makes the key point:

Ironically, however, many opponents of US involvement in Middle East wars share a premise with supporters of intervention. The common assumption is that America really can, and should, control events in the region. … That line of thought is wrong. This is Israel’s war, and the decision to embark upon it was Israel’s alone. America does not and should not have a veto on other nations’ foreign policy, though there are occasions when our own interests demand that we exert influence over others. In this case, our interest lies in staying out of a conflict that Israel is perfectly capable of winning on its own.

You see, the entire liberal world order constructed by the Very Serious People of the foreign policy blob relies upon a set of corollaries, all stemming from the assumption that the U.S. can and should control events around the world. The “can” here is an assumption that U.S. power is so great as to afford it global hegemony. The “should” is an assumption that a global stability advancing American interests will be best preserved if the United States is everywhere and always calling the shots.

If you believe those things, then you will also be enthusiastic about the United States assuming the burden of security for its allies. You don’t just tolerate that Germany and Japan refuse to invest in maintaining their own militaries capable of deterring Russia and China in their respective regional theaters. You celebrate it.

This was the crux of my disagreement with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, when I suggested that Europe had taken advantage of U.S. benevolence and he responded, “The idea that we want Germany to be able to fend off Russia on their own places us in a very tenuous position, does it not?”

“Why?” I asked.

“I have a book at home about Germany,” he said, “and their position as a global military power where we didn’t have sway and they did what they wanted and it didn’t work out.”

This is when I called my gracious host a racist for suggesting that Germans could not help but behave like Nazis, and he tried to explain “this is not me saying Germans will do it… I didn’t say they’ll become that,” which is of course exactly what he had just said. A good time was had by all.

Having asserted responsibility for everyone else’s security, you then in turn assert the accompanying right to dictate their foreign policy. Other countries, accepting their status as client states in return for the promise of U.S. defense, must not take action that would necessitate U.S. defense, which would be an unreasonable imposition. And, as client states with no independent capacity of their own, they have no ability to act independently and thus no choice but to defer to U.S. demands.

There is an internal coherence here, to be sure. From within this worldview, anything less than an all-out defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression is a dereliction of duty that risks untold (and, admittedly, unspecified) calamities. Likewise, the U.S. must defend Taiwan. Failure to fulfill these obligations would be a morally grievous breach and a strategic blunder. Other countries, believing they could not rely upon the U.S., would begin rebuilding their own capabilities. They might go on to use those capabilities in ways not aligned with U.S. interests.

Turned toward the Middle East, this lens has always had difficulty bringing Israel into focus. Yes, Israel benefits significantly from U.S. military assistance. But no, Israel has never demanded that the U.S. take primarily responsibility for Israeli security or relied upon it to do so. To the contrary, Israel has always insisted on retaining the independent capacity to protect and advance its own interests and generally rejected deployment of U.S. military personnel into its conflicts.

A rational observer might look at this situation and think, now there’s a real ally. But if your conception of the alliance is that everyone hands their rights and responsibilities over to the United States, this drives you nuts. An ally, in the blob’s thinking, is someone who does what you tell them, purportedly because it “trusts” you and is “aligned” with you, really because it has no choice. The Israelis, typically referred to by the blob as those damn Israelis, never got this memo. As a result, their freedom of action in a Middle East that the U.S. felt obligated to secure, as it was obligated to secure the whole world, was a constant headache.

Through this lens, Israel’s decision to launch a massive attack on Iran even as the U.S. was conducting negotiations, and given President Trump’s determination not to entangle the nation in foreign conflicts, is outrageous—and a serious challenge for the MAGA coalition. Politico’s top question in this morning’s Playbook was “Are we about to see major fault lines in the MAGA coalition?” The conflict:

has a real chance to divide the MAGA coalition against itself. Trump campaigned “on ending what his base has long derided as U.S. foreign adventurism, leading the rebellion against an establishment that long favored international interventions,” POLITICO’s Rachael Bade writes. “Now some of his most vocal supporters fear Israel may have trampled his ability to make good on that promise.”

This is only hard if the United States sees its obligation, and interest, as maintaining peace by fighting wars in the Middle East. But that is not the Trump administration’s view.

An America First foreign policy scales back simultaneously the rights and responsibilities that the United States asserts. It would make no sense not only to declare that the U.S. will no longer ride to everyone’s defense, but also to demand that everyone must still do what the U.S. wants. The U.S. would have no moral claim to such a position (why should countries listen to us if we are not shouldering their security burdens?) nor any way of enforcing it (or else what?). The key is that the demand is no longer necessary. If the U.S. is not on the hook for the fallout from the action another country takes, it need not worry so much about the action.

In fact, an America First foreign policy welcomes the Israeli approach. As I wrote back in March:

The United States must emphasize that there is no magic number for countries to spend that proves they are “doing enough.” The goal should not be burden sharing but burden owning. Japan’s goal should not be to spend 2% of GDP on defense, at which point the U.S. promises to defend it from China. Germany will not have done its part by bringing the size of its armed forces up from 180,000 to 200,000—a goal it has already pushed back from 2025 to 2031, and which moved further away as enlistment managed to shrink last year. No, Japan’s defense spending will be sufficient when it feels secure from China. Germany’s spending will be sufficient when it can successfully deter Russia.

The model here should be Israel, the American ally that generally asks us to stay home, it can handle its own business, thank you very much. Israel allocates an enormous share of GDP to its defense (more than 5% annually, even absent ongoing conflicts) and has universal conscription, not because that’s what’s necessary to pass some political test, but because that’s what’s necessary to defend Israel. Of course, the U.S. also provides Israel with military aid, mostly in the form of weapons systems, but that represents a small fraction of Israel’s total spending (less than $4 billion versus more than $20 billion), and basically nothing compared to what the U.S. spends on its own military commitments on behalf of its allies in Europe and the Pacific. Israel is also an invaluable intelligence and technology partner.

Could Japan and Taiwan face off against China in the same way Israel holds its own in the Middle East, with the United States playing a comparably complementary role? The only reason they cannot is that they have never had to and never tried.

The neoconservatives eager to see Israel take the fight to Iran can cheer that it has done so. The restrainers eager to see the United States step back from conflicts in the Middle East can cheer that it has done so. Not a problem.

And, as a corollary of this new and different framework, the U.S. has a much better chance of staying out of conflicts where it does not want to engage. The idea that Iran could or should respond to an Israeli attack by attacking U.S. bases fits comfortably into the internal logic of American hegemony, but makes no sense when Israel is launching its own attack. Look at Speaker Mike Johnson’s statement: “Israel decided it needed to take action to defend itself. They were clearly within their right to do so. Iran will face grave consequences if it responds by unjustifiably targeting U.S. interests.” A world where countries whose values and interests are generally aligned with ours have greater capability to act more decisively with less involvement from us can ultimately be in our best interest too. Certainly this appears to be the case here. It would be the case if Germany could help Ukraine drive back the Russians. It would be the case if Japan could credibly defend Taiwan.

Recall the assumptions underlying American defense of a liberal world order: first, that U.S. power is so great as to afford it global hegemony; second, that a global stability advancing American interests will be best preserved if the United States is everywhere and always calling the shots. Neither of these things is true.

The Trump administration’s pivot is borne partly of necessity—U.S. power is no longer sufficient to preserve global hegemony even if desirable. But it is also borne of a different and perhaps healthier understanding of what American interests truly are and how best to advance them. American First does not require that the U.S. pursue its own interests and press the rest of the world into pursuing those same interests. Rather, it recognizes that the U.S. will pursue its own interests and, in part, it can best do this by leaving its allies to pursue their own interests as well.

This will still entail partnership. Obviously, the U.S. continues to support Israel, as it would Japan or Germany, and even involves itself in supporting low-risk defensive actions like shooting down incoming ballistic missiles. This is rational for a more restrained America and has a very high return on investment, seeing as it would prefer for its ally to prevail. But partnership does not require domination. Admittedly, this all might be less fun for the grandmasters who so enjoyed moving their chess pieces around the board. Forgive the chess pieces for liking it a bit better.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

Don’t Let Trump’s Brutality Fool You. The Internationalization of American Schools Is a Real Issue. | David A. Bell, New York Times

For the most part, this is a surprisingly fair and thoughtful, if begrudging, acknowledgment that “it has taken Donald Trump’s crude and vengeful swipe at Harvard to draw much attention to the subject” of foreign students in American universities. I would take issue, though, with the suggestion that, “like many large social changes, this one happened without much conscious planning or debate.” Really?

Few things in American society have been the subject of more conscious planning and debate over the past three decades than the demographic composition of American universities. But admissions committees just looked up one day and said, “huh, I guess there’s a lot of foreign students here”? Please.

The former head of one Ivy League school recently told me proudly of his efforts to dramatically increase foreign enrollment as most consistent, in his view, with the institution’s mission. Patrick Deneen has noted, Princeton changed its slogan in 1996 from “in the nation’s service” to “in the nation’s service, and in the service of all nations.” The change in student body composition was done on purpose, in proud dismissal of any particular attachment to the national interest.

Regardless, full points for this line: “Do we need to turn university economics departments into mini-Davoses in which future officials of the International Monetary Fund from different countries reinforce one another’s opinions about global trade?”

Private Market Funds Lag US Stocks Over Short and Long Term | Alexandra Heal, Financial Times

When American Compass launched in 2020, one of the first projects we released was Coin-Flip Capitalism, which rather controversially asserted that the high-finance private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund industries were failures, steering hundreds of billions of dollars in fees to the nation’s top business talent while producing results no better than an index fund. We published a “Returns Counter,” presenting the trackable data that we contended would bear out this claim over time.

People did not like this. One donor, a denizen of said industry, called to express his disappointment at our “poor-quality work,” though after 90 minutes of discussion he could not tell me what exactly was wrong with it. The Wall Street Journal published “Populists Don’t Know Much About Private Equity,” by two University of Chicago professors who lectured that, “It matters where society allocates scarce resources, but it also matters that analysis of these questions is based on the facts.”

When we released our follow-up “Guide to Private Equity,” underperforming investor Clifford Asness responded, “I do encourage you to read his blood and soil organization's latest tract on finance. It's every populist piece of utter nonsense all in one place. Very convenient.”

Well, we were right. The failure is not a fluke, or unpredictable. We predicted it. Even though, somehow, the highly sophisticated (and remunerated) people paying hundreds of billions of dollars in fees to prop up a multi-trillion dollar industry could not. As the Financial Times reports, five years later, “The data shows that the S&P 500 outshone private markets funds for the last three months of 2024, as well as on a one, three, five and 10-year basis. … The underperformance comes after investors globally have poured trillions of dollars into private markets, betting that they can provide higher and less volatile returns and access to more companies than equity markets.” So yes, our financial system really is that ridiculous.

Bonus tweet: As venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya notes, “This is even worse when you sensitize this to illiquidity. VC is even worse than that. Can’t make any money as a GP outside of fee accumulation. Can’t make money as an LP unless you have targeted access to the few companies per year that matter.”

Bonus link: Yale Is Rushing to Sell Billions in Private Equity Investments.

Why The Left Suddenly Loves Free Trade | Matthew Gasda, Café Americain

The speed and fury with which the American Left has embraced free trade in the face of Donald Trump’s tariffs is a classic “which is worse?” Either the Left really is pro-globalization and free trade now, workers be damned, or its Trump Derangement Syndrome is so strong that it will take the other side of absolutely anything he does, workers be damned. “What policy lever did the WTO protesters in Seattle in 1999—or readers of Naomi Klein—imagine would end globalized, free, or what used to be called “unfair” trade? Do they have a better idea than high tariffs?”

The Limits of Consumption Deepening | Philip Pilkington, American Affairs

In the same spirit as my work on the Cost of Thriving Index, Pilkington introduces the useful concept of “consumption deepening,” whereby GDP is expanded through the conversion of evermore non-market relationships into market transactions, generating the appearance of economic growth while in fact worsening the quality of life. His example of the simultaneous decline in healthy sexual relationships among young people and surge in pornography industry revenue is evocative to say the least.

Immigrants Are The Most Hawkish Voters On Immigration, A 40-Point Shift Since 2020 | Harry Enten, CNN

Your datapoint of the day: In 2020, foreign-born voters trusted Democrats over Republicans on immigration policy by a 32-point margin. They now trust Republicans by an 8-point margin and are the group with the strongest lean toward Republicans on the issue.

CRINGE CORNER

The Gentle Singularity | Sam Altman, OpenAI

I’m sure Sam Altman is good at many things. But neither writing nor marshaling evidence appears to be among them. I just don’t understand how you start an essay with, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.” Does he not have an editor? A takeoff does not follow the crossing of an event horizon. A “plunging” perhaps, or a “collapsing toward.” But that would set the wrong tone for the fluff that follows, consisting of equal parts (a) vague and unimpressive descriptions of what has been accomplished, (b) claims that require evidence but have none, and (c) silly repurposing of science-fiction cliches.

AND AT COMMONPLACE

Inside Florida's War on 'Dirt Cheap Labor' by Ethan Dodd. How Florida’s E-Verify mandate is working in practice.

The 'Realignment' Shouldn't Mean Medicaid Cuts by Patrick Brown. The Senate can still protect working-class families in the tax fight.

Who Gives a Ship by David Cowan. The U.S. must build ships that fully embrace autonomy to regain naval dominance.

A Northern Warning by Jonathon Van Maren. The ‘slippery slope’ of medically assisted suicide abuse is in fact an inevitability.

On the American Compass Podcast this week, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) joins me to discuss how his own background has informed his worked-focused agenda and some of the interesting new proposals he is pursuing, including a requirement to seat workers on corporate boards.

Visit commonplace.org, follow us on X @commonplc, and subscribe for regular articles directly in your inbox.

Enjoy the weekend!