Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington to collect his
payoff for being disgruntled over the agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program,
which was signed by that country and the world’s great powers. Although President
Obama and Netanyahu seem to personally dislike each other, because of Israel’s
clout in the American domestic political system with a presidential election
year approaching, Obama feels he needs to kiss and make up with Netanyahu and
slather Israel with even more military aid and hardware to compensate it for
its supposedly eroded security. Really?
Netanyahu doesn’t seem at all red-faced about the fact that the United States
already provides Israel, a wealthy country, with an annual largesse of more
than $3 billion in military aid. And Obama will likely need to increase this
martial welfare to compensate Israel for actually enhancing Israeli security
by at least delaying its major rival from getting a nuclear weapon! (This whacky
situation is as bad as the U.S. borrowing money from China and giving trade
concession to U.S. East Asian allies, so that the allies will allow the U.S. military
to incur the costs of protecting them from…well… China.) Most of Republican
criticisms of Obama’s weakness in foreign policy are rubbish, but he could be
rightly pilloried for letting the Israeli client state extort even more cash
from the debt-ridden American Empire, which is already irrationally overextended
overseas and $18 trillion in debt.
Alliances are supposed to be mutually beneficial for the security of their
members and should not become an end in themselves. The American founders were
against permanent and entangling alliances, because they could drag an intrinsically
secure United States, which was and still is far away from the centers of world
conflict, into needless wars. Always unclear has been how U.S. security is enhanced
by slavishly supporting Israel against oil-bearing Iran and Arab states.
And such unflinching U.S. genuflecting toward Israel to satisfy the domestic
electoral needs of both American political parties gives a foreign power undue
influence over the American political system. If China, Russia, or Iran baldly
attempted such blatant influence on U.S. elections, American politicians, pundits,
and the public would be outraged. However, when Israel is the foreign power,
all is swept under the rug.