Israel Matzav

It's 1938 again

Bret Stephens actually titled this Wall Street Journal piece "Post-Post-9/11 Looks Just Like Pre-World War II," but to my mind, that's just another way of warning that it's 1938 again. Hence this post's title and the picture, which I hope you all recognize. Stephens makes an important point: the Obama administration's apparent desite to abandon Israel fits in with an isolationist foreign policy that involves sticking America's collective head into the sand and ignoring what is happening to its allies. This 'strategy' is bound to come back and haunt the American people.

As in the 1920s, we have emerged (if only partially), from several years of war -- scarcely anticipated, earnestly begun, bravely fought, often badly waged and, at least in the case of Iraq, ambiguously won. It was an emotionally exhausting war justified first on grounds of national survival, then for spreading democracy. The moral clarity and political unity that went with the war's beginning collapsed into political division and disillusion.

From this there has emerged under the Obama administration a new kind of moral clarity. It is founded on conciliatory tendencies, a preference for multilateral solutions, a powerful desire to be on the right side of global public opinion, and an instinct for looking away from that which we'd rather not to see. This has put some political stress on our residual post-9/11 commitments, particularly in the case of Afghanistan, while creating an overwhelming aversion to possible confrontations, particularly against revanchist Russia and millenarian Iran.

The Locarno generation felt similarly about standing in the way of Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Italy's of Abyssinia and Germany's of Czechoslovakia. In their case, as increasingly in ours, a weak foreign policy was a function of severe economic distress. But economic considerations were as often an alibi for inaction as they were a reason for it. Folklore aside, the German economy was in considerably worse shape than Britain's for most of the '30s. But while the British were timid, Hitler was willful.

Today, Russia and Iran are in a parlous economic state, but they are also keen to seek their advantage through calculated acts of provocation and aggression. They sense that the commitments the Bush administration made to the security of our allies aren't ones the Obama administration is especially eager to honor. That goes for missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic; for the independence of Georgia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics; for the status of forces agreement with Iraq; perhaps also for the security of Israel if it opts for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.

We know how this movie ends. So here's a suggestion: If we're going to squander trillions in "stimulus," let's spend more on defense. An F-22 assembly line adds just as much to employment as a few thousand more "green" workers, with the added bonus of deterring our enemies. That's a lesson the democracies learned almost too late in the dismal post-Locarno years. Why make the same mistake twice?

Of course, Stephens' point about how to spend all that money would be valid if the point of the 'stimulus' was to bring about an economic recovery. But that's not what the 'stimulus' is about. As should be clear to all of you by now, the 'stimulus' is about handing out American taxpayers' money to favored Democratic causes in a populist bid to entrench the Democrats in power for years to come. And about 'proving' Ronald Reagan wrong.

The proof that I'm right and that all that money is not going to be spent wisely? The Dow closed at 1997 levels yesterday. The markets don't care about politics: They care about making money.

On the main point of the article, I'm not sure yet whether the administration is burying its collective head in the sand about what's happening in Israel (and Iran) or whether it's just plain rank anti-Semitism. But I don't expect any help from Washington so long as Obama is in power.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:34 AM