Israel Matzav

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama's new alliance system

Victor Davis Hanson has an interesting theory that draws a connection between President Obama's attempts to socialize America and his abandonment of the United States' traditional alliances.

Thus, the flip side to nationalizing health care, banks, and student loans at home is to look sympathetically at those who long ago did the same abroad. Seen in that light, the growing rejection of Britain or Israel is the logical symbolic bookend to the Obama administration's multicultural, statist agenda here at home. Another answer is that, like academics who rarely venture out from the university lounge, the members of this administration think our enemies and rivals listen to reason and logic and were deemed difficult only because of a sort of anti-Enlightenment denseness in past administrations, and especially the Bush administration.

Whatever the cause, the effect is now clear: there is no such thing any more as allies and rivals, much less friends and enemies. That Manicheanism is part of our Neanderthal past. We won’t judge anyone abroad on what he does or says — unless he represents forces of traditional privilege and is sympathetic with traditions within the United States that we are desperately trying to shed.

The problem is obvious. The thuggish regimes that we court, given the value systems that have made them what they are, will interpret all this as either disingenuousness or the decadence of those who don’t even believe in themselves. And so the pressures on us to engage in ever more appeasement will only magnify. Because America now apologizes for everything, and China and Russia for nothing, soon the impression will be fixed abroad that America has a lot to atone for and its authoritarian rivals nothing to answer for. Pressures for constant concessions and reparations will mount on democratic us, and lessen on autocratic others.

I think that explanation works for every ally except for Israel. First, because there is an unmistakable element of anti-Semitism in the Obama administration and among his advisers that cannot be attributed to socialism. And second, because Britain also has nationalized health care, Israel has many nationalized companies such as the Electric Company and the Ports Authority (and yes, our health care) that operate on what can only be described as a quasi-socialist basis to this day.

There's more to it than just socialized medicine in America and the free market among its putative allies.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:31 PM