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President obama’s core goal had been to make the millennium cool again by lowering the temperature of global and domestic politics and showing the power of carefully crafted, liberal technocratic policy to master the stresses of the twenty-first century. Abroad, the failure to respond effectively to Russia’s conquest of the Crimea, invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine, and deployment in Syria combined with Washington’s inability to find an effective counter to China’s relentless militarization of the South China Sea left Americans—and others—feeling insecure in a world suddenly dominated by geopolitical great power competition. The victory of the liberal world order that every American president since the end of the Cold War had tried to build no longer seemed assured, or perhaps even possible. At home, on a scale not seen since the 1930s, Americans were questioning the durability and even the value of basic American ideas and institutions. Gone was the old optimism that American values were transforming Russia. By 2016 many Americans feared that autocracy was on the march worldwide and that Russian disinformation had grown powerful enough to imperil American democracy at home.
The gap between the post-historical world Americans expected and the turbulent, crisis-ridden planet they actually inhabited had become impossible to ignore, and by 2016 growing numbers of Americans were moving away both from the post-historical consensus and from the political establishment that had for so long embraced it. At the same time, unhappiness with the state of the domestic economy,[1] rising racial tensions,[2] and fears that long-standing American values were on the decline intersected with the rise of social media to create an overwhelming sense of crisis and frustration.
This, it soon became clear, was more than a policy crisis. It was an identity crisis. If the mid-century model of an American economy built on the growing success and stability of a mass middle class no longer worked, what kind of society was the United States? If sixty years after the civil rights movement achieved the legislative victories of the 1960s Blacks still suffered systemic discrimination and violence, could liberal capitalism ever hope to address the deep injustices in American life? If the United States was not erecting a liberal and democratic world order that would promote the prosperity of the American people while ending the era of great power war and preventing a nuclear holocaust, what should American foreign policy be about? And if the United States could no longer see itself as a providential nation with a global mission, what did it mean to be an American?
As the post-historical foreign policy consensus lost political traction, alternative ideas—like Trump’s “America First” policy, the neo-isolationist prescriptions of the realist restrainers, and the anticapitalist ideas that inspired the Bernie Sanders movement—sought to fill the void. These ideas all had implications for Israel policy, and the Israel policy debate would become an arena in which both the old post-historical establishment and those who sought to replace it dueled for advantage.
As a result, even as virtually all parties to the American debate agreed that the Middle East was becoming a less crucial arena for American foreign policy, the salience of Israel policy in American politics was undiminished. And as American politics became more polarized overall, attitudes toward Israel became more tribal, intensifying Republican support for and identification with the Jewish state, while cooling pro-Israel ardor among many Democrats.
Trump was in many ways a unique figure, but while the substance of his Israel policy was new, he followed a well-established precedent of using Israel policy to unite and energize his supporters. It’s therefore useful to examine Trump’s Israel policy in the light of his overall political approach, and to look at how the deepening crisis of American identity intensified the Israel debate and posed troubling new challenges not only for America’s approach to the Middle East but for the position of American Jews at home.
Trump and the Crisis of Sun Belt Republicanism
Getting to grips with the Trump presidency is a trying task. Trump was such a unique and controversial figure that both his achievements and his failures defy conventional analysis. Petty, hotheaded, undisciplined, mendacious, erratic, and egocentric, he frequently sabotaged his own policy goals by the simultaneous pursuit of conflicting agendas. His presidency was more productive of polarization than of enduring success. Yet with all his many shortcomings, he understood some important truths about international politics and the state of the world that eluded his establishment critics. To millions of Americans, he was like the little boy who dared to cry out that the emperor had no clothes—that the American elite had lost its way and had no answers for the problems of the United States, much less for those of the world beyond our frontiers. This was a message that Americans were ready to hear in 2016, nowhere more than in the GOP, where the core ideas of Sun Belt Republicanism—optimism, laissez-faire conservatism, free trade, and a vigorous promotion of American values abroad and at home—were losing their hold for reasons that many Republican politicians failed to understand.
American conservative intellectuals and political elites spent a lot of time in the Obama years chiding liberal intellectuals and politicians for being out of touch, but the Republican establishment, both intellectual and political, were the ones to suffer defenestration as Trump stole the Republican Party out from under them in 2016. Through four tumultuous years in office, even as his poll ratings remained below those of most presidents,[3] he steadily intensified his hold on the party. Not even his 2020 reelection defeat could loosen his grip, not as of this writing (early 2022).
As he took over the party, Trump broke with Republican orthodoxy across the board. There was not much in Trump’s policy mix, foreign or domestic, that Sun Belt Republicans like James Baker, George Shultz, or Ronald Reagan would have recognized. The ideological fervor of Reagan’s global anticommunist crusade found few echoes in the Trump years. Free trade, robust support of American alliances, steadfast belief in promoting American values, and the commitment to the establishment of a world order seen to enhance American power and support American economic interests—none of these had their place in Trump’s policies. For Trump, the world order was no longer something a victorious America sought to promote around the world; it was a web of obligations and restrictions that threatened American sovereignty.
Israel policy, however, was different. Even as he sought to reduce the American footprint in the Middle East he offered Israel the kind of unstinting support that the Jewish state had never previously received. During his four years in office, he would move the American embassy to Jerusalem,[4] offer Israel uncritical support in its contest with Iran, drop U.S. legal objections to Israeli settlements on the West Bank,[5] recognize the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights,[6] offer symbolic recognition of Israeli claims to Jerusalem by allowing American citizens born in Jerusalem to list “Israel” as their birthplace in their passports,[7] and do everything in his power to promote the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries including the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.[8]
While a handful of Jewish donors, most notably Sheldon Adelson, provided significant financial support to the Trump campaign, the goal of Trump’s Israel policy was not to placate American Jews. Had he sought Jewish support, he would have followed a much more conventional Middle East policy. Trump used Israel policy to seal the bonds that united him to his base: the predominantly white, predominantly working-class and lower-middle-class voters in the South and Middle West who put him in the White House. By the time of Donald Trump’s election, the facade of evangelical unity had worn thin, and the term “evangelical” no longer described a coherent group. While figures in the twentieth century like Billy Graham were able to use their influence to pull disparate groups together to form an evangelical base, by 2020 this group had splintered once more. We’ve seen the role that support for Israel played in knitting the Sun Belt coalition together, bringing economic and religious populists into the alignment with pro-market and pro-business leaders that made the Republican Party a formidable force in American politics for forty years. What Trump understood, and his Republican opponents did not, was that the Sun Belt synthesis that bound pro-business southern and southwestern economic and social elites into a bloc with blue-collar populists in the South and Middle West was ripe for disruption—and that Israel policy was one of the instruments that would allow him to break the old coalition and remake the Republican Party in his image.
Sun Belt Republicanism was showing its age by 2016. After California, once crucial to Sun Belt Republican success, turned blue in 1992, the center of gravity in Republican politics would gradually shift to the South, and within the South the optimistic, pro-business ideology historically associated with New South progressivism would lose ground to a reviving populist movement that was deeply skeptical of key tenets of Sun Belt policy ranging from free trade, fiscal restraint, and easy immigration to the aggressive promotion of democracy around the world. Beyond the South, ethnic blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt, the “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s, also moved away from Sun Belt Republicanism to antiestablishment populism.
Economics was one of the factors driving the shift. As we’ve seen, the swift rise in southern living standards in the decades following World War II helped put New South progressives firmly in control of southern politics and transformed the place of the South in American life. Southern economic success drew new residents and increased southern strength in Congress and the electoral college. Detroit was hemorrhaging automobile jobs while a wave of both foreign and domestic investment into Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina was reshaping the American car industry.[9] The traditional pro-business agenda of New South leaders (attracting outside capital by creating a low-tax, low-regulation business environment with weak labor unions) was packaged as a “competitiveness agenda” and won increasing favor outside the South as Rust Belt states scrambled to reinvent themselves.
As early as the 1990s, this began to change. Manufacturing jobs were no longer leaving the North for the South.[10] They were leaving the North and the South for the rest of the world.[11] Meanwhile companies like Walmart, though headquartered in the South, were undermining the small retail sector across the country, adding small businesses to the list of economic losers. As the region’s economic prospects eroded, the appeal of appeasing northerners and their liberal sentiments dwindled as well. Factory closures, foreign competition, and the destruction of locally owned retail outlets led many southerners and blue-collar midwesterners to question the New South economic story and to look back to their populist roots.
The growing gap between the incomes and opportunities available to working- and lower-middle-class white families and the burgeoning affluence of the upper middle class[12] promoted a return to the politics of class. The old fissure between poor whites and the white gentry, a primary driver of southern politics in the century that followed Reconstruction, had been papered over in the second half of the twentieth century. It now reopened with a vengeance, ripping the pro-business consensus behind Sun Belt Republicanism apart in ways that conventional GOP leaders and thinkers, most of whom assumed that the Reagan synthesis provided an unshakable foundation beneath the modern Republican Party, were unprepared to diagnose or to repair.
Migration was another factor. Mass migration into the United States essentially came to an end in 1925 and resumed as we’ve seen in 1968 when the Hart-Celler Act went into effect.[13] By 2010, immigration had returned to levels last seen at the peak of the Great Wave, and the percentage of foreign-born American residents was near an all-time high. The new wave was significantly more geographically and culturally diverse than the Great Wave, with fewer European migrants and more from Asia, Africa, and Latin America than in the past. More, the new wave came at a time when the South was booming.[14] The Great Wave had passed the impoverished South by, and southern states had relatively little experience with migration. The booming South of the post–Cold War period was much more attractive, and states like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and the Carolinas were home to more immigrants from more places than ever before.
The anti-immigration populist backlash caught the Republican political establishment by surprise. The mythologization of the Great Wave immigrant experience and the cult of the melting pot blinded the American leadership to the inevitable cultural and social stress that attends great waves of immigration. Trump intuited the importance of the topic and, with supporters of the old Republican pro-immigrant consensus unable to reach skeptical voters on the issue, was able to make it an important part of his political program.
Similarly, the return of race to the center of American politics helped pull the Sun Belt coalition apart. The post–civil rights movement racial settlement hoped to ease and ultimately end racial tensions in the United States by offering Blacks an end to formal segregation and full voting rights along with efforts to equalize opportunity in education, employment, and housing. At the same time, tough laws on crime and stringent mandatory sentencing guidelines addressed the concerns of those troubled by the rising crime rates of the era.
By the twenty-first century, this settlement was showing its age. Though some hoped that the election of Barack Obama would herald a new era of racial concord, the economic consequences of the financial crisis and the long-term stagnation in blue-collar wages combined with other forces to undo Black economic progress, and as we’ve seen the wealth gap between Black and non-Black households in the United States steadily refused to narrow.[15] Against this background, civil rights activists pushed for more affirmative action, fought the mass imprisonment of Blacks, and made the denial of voting rights to felons a potent political issue. Urban policing returned as a flash point in national politics after high-profile incidents of police violence ignited the Black Lives Matter movement. Historic inequities had continued to go unaddressed since the civil rights era. While the South acknowledged this to a degree, in the twenty-first century the northern establishment’s drift to the left far outpaced the South’s evolution. Relitigating the issue on the national level exacerbated the tension between the regions.
A return of Black identity politics along with the growing political mobilization of new immigrant groups helped promote a surge in what some called “white nationalism.” Just as the Great Wave and the Black Great Migration to the North helped touch off the Klan revival of the 1920s and the wave of race riots that followed World War I, racial tensions rose in the twenty-first century.
The post–civil rights movement race settlement, while it lasted, had allowed Sun Belt Republicans to sidestep this explosive issue. As that settlement eroded and questions of race and identity gained political saliency, corporate America leaned into the issue, using support for causes like the BLM movement to broadcast its virtue to the northern establishment and the world more broadly. Understanding the South’s (and much of rural America’s) cultural isolation from big business, populists were able to once again play the race card against the more moderate and pro-business Republican establishment. One could no longer take the full George Wallace approach (“I’ll never be out-[n-worded] again,” he vowed after losing an election to a less scrupulous race demagogue),[16] but there were many ways to let racially anxious voters know that one understood their concerns.
Many grassroots Republican voters were also dissatisfied with the party’s failure to make progress on cultural issues. Republican president after Republican president took office promising to turn the tide in the culture wars. Yet Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land, gay marriage was now legal everywhere in the United States, and a new movement in support of trans rights was beginning to make serious headway. On each of these issues, academia, corporate America, and mainstream media seemed united against the cultural sensibilities of Republican voters. As the gap between the establishment and white southern public opinion widened, New South political leaders faced a credibility crisis. What was the point, socially conservative voters asked, of a “conservative” party that failed to address such fundamental issues?
The fall of red California and the long series of defeats in the culture wars changed the mood of many American conservatives. Ronald Reagan had been known for his untroubled confidence in the vitality of American life and his sunny optimism about the American future. Optimism historically had not been a frequent visitor to Dixie, where the pessimism born of military defeat and zero-sum race and class polarization gave white southerners a more checkered and perhaps more insightful vision of the human prospect. The long post–World War II boom had eroded that pessimism and converted much of the bustling New South to a boisterous optimism in the Reagan era. But that optimistic outlook began to dim in the 1990s. In Southern California, once the Promised Land for migrating southerners, Republicans watched a demographic shift turn the state an ever deeper blue. The 1980s and 1990s would witness the decline of the aerospace industries that once provided well-paid employment for Southern Californians.[17] By 2016 Southern California conservatives had become much more pessimistic about the future of the United States. As fears that inexorable demographic change would produce a national permanent Democratic majority, as had seemingly happened in California, spread through Republican circles, American conservatism became angrier and less optimistic. This was a mood that Trump, like populists generally, found easy to exploit.
We’ve seen how the religious synthesis of Billy Graham and his associates enabled the rise of a new form of individualistic American Protestantism, self-consciously orthodox over and against the perceived theological errors of modernists, but significantly more open than the old fundamentalists to cooperation across denominational boundaries. On issues like opposition to abortion and support of religious freedom, Graham evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics were able to establish durable political coalitions that reinforced the Republican Party. The new evangelical consensus also helped bridge the socioeconomic divide between the more socially elite conservative denominations and the more populist religious currents previously associated with the fundamentalist movement.
By 2016, however, like the Sun Belt coalition as a whole, the Graham synthesis was showing its age. After the national religious revivals of the late twentieth century, American Protestantism faced an era of reconsideration and consolidation. The generation of preachers who followed Graham and the other figures of the revival years did not match the stature of their predecessors. As so often in the American past, the children of those converted in a great revival were less religiously engaged than their parents.
The widening socioeconomic gap in American life was reflected in the widening fissures in American conservative Protestantism. Educated, upper-middle-class Christians were drawn to forms of Christian belief that minimized the gaps between them and their more secular colleagues and neighbors. Educated upper-middle-class congregations attempted to accommodate contemporary political and cultural sensibilities where possible without abandoning key pillars of orthodox Protestant belief. These churchgoers would often resist Trump’s populist appeal, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents had disdained populists like South Carolina’s “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and Louisiana’s Huey Long.
Trump’s support among conservative Protestants would come from congregations that had more in common with pre-Graham fundamentalism, as well as Pentecostals, the increasing numbers of nondenomination evangelical churches, and the so-called Prosperity Gospel preachers. Profoundly alienated from the rapidly changing American mainstream, these believers often interpreted contemporary American events through the lens of biblical prophecy. Apocalyptic speculation has been a prominent feature of Christianity for most of the past two millennia, and American Christianity is no different. Although groups like the Millerites have never attracted the majority of the American faithful, some of the most dynamic movements, like modern Pentecostalism, prominently feature the End of Days. Over the past two centuries, the specific details of their envisioned scenario have changed, but there are some broad continuities. Generally, they have believed that the Antichrist, a charismatic individual of uniquely evil intent, would gain control of one or more significant forces in global affairs and lead a worldwide attack on Jews and Christians before a final battle occurs in modern Israel. Sometimes individuals like Adolf Hitler were identified as a potential Antichrist; in other circumstances, powerful forces like Communism or international bodies like the United Nations or the European Union appeared to be the perfect springboard to propel him to power. The forced imposition of a secular morality at variance with classic Christian teachings would accompany his rise and faithful Christians would face persecution as the Antichrist’s hour approached. Although usually a minority viewpoint within American Christianity, these beliefs overlap with Jacksonian distrust for centralized authority and international institutions and have a powerful impact on American politics.
For many adherents of these beliefs, the twenty-first century has been full of dark forebodings. The fall of American democracy and the submergence of American sovereignty in an anti-Christian transnational government had long figured in their apocalyptic scenarios. For such believers, it was easy to see American efforts to create a “new world order” as attempts to install the kind of anti-Christian world dictatorship that would herald the Last Days. As the beliefs of many secular Americans diverged ever more dramatically from inherited Christian morality, and as LBGTQ activists sought to label the restatement of classic Christian doctrine on these topics as a form of hate speech, it appeared to conservative Protestants that the kingdom of the Antichrist was well on its way.
As the usual liberal prescription for good governance in American life moved to embrace the enforcement of gay and trans rights, gun control, and a greater role for international governance to fight such problems as climate change, the split between Christians looking to accommodate the new approach while remaining faithful to historic Protestant orthodoxy and those who felt called to resist widened. The resisters tended to embrace Trump, in some cases as the lesser of two evils, but often as a divinely appointed champion, however imperfect, sent to defend the American church in its hour of need.
Just as the coalition of populist and New South progressives that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan had forged into the Sun Belt Republican Party was breaking up under the accumulated stresses of the twenty-first century, so the coalition of populist and conservative Christians that Billy Graham and his colleagues united under the banner of evangelicalism was dissolving.
Declining support for neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions among rank-and-file Republicans also helped Trump. Jacksonians had supported the Afghan and Iraq wars for simple reasons. When the Taliban government in Afghanistan refused to hand Osama bin Laden over to the United States, Jacksonians wanted to punish the Taliban and capture bin Laden. On Iraq, they believed George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons and had a relationship with terrorists. They saw the Iraq War as a necessary act of self-defense. But when American forces failed to find the level of WMD production they expected in Iraq, and when both wars turned into long counterinsurgency campaigns without clearly defined victory conditions in support of corrupt governments, Jacksonians felt betrayed. Jacksonian America believes in democracy and schooling for girls, but it does not believe in fighting wars thousands of miles from the United States to promote them. By 2016, Jacksonians had lost faith in the foreign policy judgment of the Republican leadership, and many returned, with a vengeance, to the view that the United States should remain aloof from foreign wars and messy political interventions unless directly attacked.
Jacksonian America had never accepted the post-historical consensus and its grand plans for world order. The isolationism against which the Clinton administration had struggled went, temporarily, into abeyance following the 9/11 attacks. But with the terror threat fading and the wars inconclusive, and with internal polarization growing, Jacksonians wanted less and less to do with conventional Republican foreign policy. They still scorned Democratic talk about multilateralism and international institutions, but they no longer saw establishment Republicans as trustworthy opponents of the Democratic agenda at home or abroad.
The power of these sentiments in Republican politics was amplified by a surge of neo-isolationist sentiment exemplified by politicians like Kentucky senator Rand Paul. Often aligned with realist restrainers, sometimes making common cause with the anti-interventionist left, and particularly strong among younger generations for whom the Cold War was ancient history, the neo-isolationists railed against the global alliances and commitments that the old Republican establishment believed were the foundation of American security.
By 2016, millions of GOP voters were ready to strike out in a new direction. Donald Trump was in the right place at the right time.
Israel Policy and the Trump Coalition
From his entry into presidential politics through his post-presidential political career, the overthrow of the Republican establishment and the reconstruction of the GOP as a party of populist nationalism tightly bound to his personal brand were the principal focus points of Donald Trump’s political activity. The success of these efforts made Trump a transformational figure in American political history. Despite his reputation for indiscipline and impulsiveness, to a remarkable degree Trump consistently shaped his rhetoric and policies across the range of foreign and domestic policy to mobilize the political constituency that enabled him to master the Republican Party. Trump used Israel policy, as he used trade policy, China policy, migration policy, and many others to communicate with his base. Trump’s foreign policy approach troubled American relations with important allies and was often counterproductive in policy terms. It contributed to the mobilization among Trump opponents that enabled Democrats to take control of both branches of Congress and the White House between the House elections in 2018 and the Georgia Senate runoff elections in 2021. It was, however, a success in making Trump the most powerful figure in Republican politics since Ronald Reagan, with a hold on his party that survived his 2020 defeat.
Both Israel and Middle East policy were of particular importance to a candidate bent on challenging the Republican establishment in 2016. Israel remained popular with populist Republicans and both Iran and jihadi terror were hated and feared, but the party base decisively rejected George W. Bush’s transformational Middle East policies and the neoconservative political ideas behind them. More than that, a critical mass of ordinary voters in the Republican Party had lost faith in the post-historical consensus and the globalist policy agenda that came with it. Neither in the Middle East nor anywhere else did a majority of grassroots Republicans support a policy of global transformation in the service of a cosmopolitan post-nationalist agenda they saw as a threat to their values and traditional beliefs.
The Middle East offered Trump rich opportunities. While foreign policy generally was of little interest to many of the voters Trump wanted to reach, Israel retained its talismanic power. Both religious and nonreligious southerners and Republicans generally cared more about Israel than about almost any other foreign country. Additionally, the region had changed in ways that offered genuine opportunities for American policy that Trump’s establishment rivals had not perceived. While unconventional Trump interventions on topics like trade policy and relations with NATO allies often had mixed or poor consequences, the results of his Middle East policies, however controversial in the region or among his opponents, led to dramatic headlines and diplomatic developments that looked like historic successes to his base.
Trump would use Middle East policy to communicate three important ideas to his base: that he could and would deliver results that establishment Republicans only talked about, that he rejected the cosmopolitan globalism of the post-historical consensus, and that his unconventional foreign policy methods could simultaneously confront American enemies and reduce American commitments around the world.
Throughout his campaign and administration, Trump took care to distinguish himself from what his supporters considered the insincere conservatism of the establishment GOP. On issues like the barrier along the Mexican frontier, Trump would struggle desperately to show progress. On Supreme Court appointments, where conservative activists had been frequently disappointed by the moderate voting records of past Republican-appointed justices like Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor, Trump took great pains to distinguish himself by appointing justices more likely to support conservative constitutional ideas.
Middle East policy offered Trump an additional and important opportunity to separate himself from what some called “conservative squishes,” and hypocritical politicians across the spectrum. Israel had proclaimed Jerusalem as its capital in 1949, even as the cease-fire line left the city divided.[18] The United States, out of concern for Arab opinion, rejected both Israeli and Jordanian attempts to define Jerusalem as a political capital. (In the Jordanian case, the Arab-occupied Old City and East Jerusalem was to become the “second capital” of the kingdom that from 1948 to 1967 controlled the West Bank.)[19] The American embassy to Israel was established in the coastal city of Tel Aviv.
Candidate Bill Clinton attacked George H. W. Bush for failing to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital during the 1992 election, but once in office let the matter rest. In 1995, both houses of Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Jerusalem Embassy Act, ordering the American embassy moved to Jerusalem within five years. Clinton left the embassy in place for the rest of his term. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush attacked the Clinton-Gore administration for failing to move the embassy. Eight years later, the embassy remained in Tel Aviv. And candidate Barack Obama called Jerusalem the “capital of Israel,”[20] but the American embassy remained where it was as Obama, like Clinton and Bush, signed waivers every six months to delay implementation of the 1995 law.[21]
For Trump, this situation was a perfect opportunity. The election season rhetoric about moving the embassy, and the passage of a law that was never implemented, showed the American political system at its most demagogic and cynical. Politicians routinely whipped up the voters when they needed their votes, then routinely disregarded some of their wishes once safely in office. That ostensibly conservative and pro-Israel Republicans connived at this charade with Democrats like Clinton and Obama made the Trump case: establishment Republicans viewed their conservative backers as stupid cattle to be manipulated at will.
Moving the embassy was, for Trump, a no-brainer. In December 2017, he formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (without specifying the boundaries of Israeli Jerusalem or changing the American position on the holy sites in the Old City),[22] and the new embassy opened in May 2018 on the seventieth anniversary of the Israeli declaration of independence. John Hagee, leader of the powerful pro-Israel evangelical group CUFI (Christians United for Israel), gave the benediction.[23] The American consulate in Jerusalem, previously a freestanding unit that managed American relations with the Palestinians, was folded into the regular diplomatic structure under the authority of the American ambassador to Israel.[24]
Whatever the long-term consequences of the shift, in the short term it was a clear political victory for Trump. Nine of eleven former U.S. ambassadors to Israel warned against the embassy move and Middle East experts and commentators prophesied that the move would set off another intifada and wreck American relations with the Arab governments.[25] When none of this happened, Trump had tightened his hold on his political base, further discredited his establishment Republican rivals, and produced another piece of evidence for his naked emperor polemic—that the settled establishment foreign policy consensus was blind to major changes taking place in the world.
Trump approached other questions involving Israel in much the same spirit. Recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, downgrading relations with the Palestinians, abandoning the old-fashioned peace process in the interest of an approach more compatible with the views of the Israeli right, and indicating that the United States might recognize the legality of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and back further annexations all worked to highlight the differences between Trump and the establishment Republicans.
Additionally, making Israel policy a linchpin of his approach to foreign affairs helped limit the impact of radical hard-right voices who hoped to hijack the Trump movement. Throughout his presidency Trump had a difficult relationship with those whose alt-right populism went considerably further than anything he was ready to espouse. Alt-right events like the infamous tiki torch march in Charlottesville, Virginia, pushed Trump into difficult choices. If he accepted their support, he alienated center and center-right voters who liked much of Trump’s populist agenda but were revolted by open racism and antisemitism and concerned about the radicalism springing up on the far right. But if he repudiated the far-right groups too openly he risked provoking an organized movement to his right that could cause him significant political problems.
Support for Israel proved to be a useful wedge issue for Trump. There are individual exceptions, but the further one travels out toward the alt-right political fringe, the more common and the more virulent antisemitism tends to become. The conspiratorial mindset that dominates this section of American politics has no immunity against the antisemitic tropes that have animated past far-right movements in the United States and elsewhere. But antisemitism of this virulent type is repugnant to most of the American right; Trump’s firm embrace of Israel consolidated his conservative support and made it more difficult for the alt-right to pressure him.
The second dimension of Trump’s Israel policy also helped solidify his connection with his base—and to reach out beyond his core constituency to attract other voters who rejected the cosmopolitan globalism that, many believed, was distorting American foreign policy. The reaction against the post–Cold War strategy of building a liberal world order had been gaining force on the right since disillusion with George W. Bush’s idealistic Middle East policy began to set in. Jacksonian America did not think global democracy was possible, did not think it was America’s business to promote it, and rejected the idea that American sovereignty should be bound and contained in a web of multinational institutions and international law.
For many years liberal internationalists and neoconservatives failed to grasp the political force of these sentiments. The Brexit vote in the U.K. and Trump’s 2016 election demonstrated the power of this electoral force, but many still underestimate its potential impact in the United States and beyond. The new populism was not simply the product of economic dissatisfaction. It drew much of its power from the growing gulf between the American corporate and political establishment that emerged in the post–Cold War era and large sections of the American public for whom the priorities and the values of that multicultural, cosmopolitan, and post-Christian establishment were fundamentally alien.
The popular demand to be ruled by people who share one’s values, mores, language, and culture has been the strongest single political force around the world in the last two hundred years. Under the label of “nationalism” it disrupted and destroyed the multicultural empires that dominated Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the nineteenth century. Under the label of “anticolonialism” it smashed the European empires that, as recently as a century ago, held most of Asia and Africa in subjection. Under the label of “anticommunism” it broke the Soviet Union into its constituent republics. Under the label of “populism” it has seen traditional elites displaced by indigenous political movements in parts of Latin America, taken Britain out of the European Union, may well take Scotland out of the United Kingdom, and imposed the Trump presidency on the United States.
It is not always a wise or a prudent force. From the nineteenth century on, the larger and more cosmopolitan entities disrupted by the forces of identity politics were often both better governed and more economically viable than the smaller states that replaced them. From the standpoint of pure economic rationality, the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Raj of South Asia, the Yugoslav Federation, and the Soviet Union would have been significantly better off had those multinational states reformed rather than disintegrated.
Very often, the new leadership that comes with these movements is less effective and even less honest than the leaders it displaces. Bolivia’s Evo Morales was a poor administrator. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was a historically bad ruler. Algeria has not been particularly well governed since independence. Some of the republics into which Tito’s Yugoslavia disintegrated were shambolically administered and fell under the control of criminal gangs.
Yet these disadvantages have not diminished the perceived value of self-governance. The demand for self-government is different from and often stronger than the demand for good governance. Few Uzbeks or Azeris wish to return to the Soviet Union. A certain nostalgia for the old empires may quietly persist among certain families or circles in the former European colonies, but with all the corruption and state failure that some postcolonial countries have experienced, there is a remarkable scarcity of petitions seeking the old colonial masters’ return. First-time Trump voters largely stayed loyal in 2020 despite evidence that the Covid response was mishandled; support for Brexit held up in the U.K. even as trade disputes flared with the EU.
Trump’s political appeal depended ultimately on the kind of us-versus-them politics that drove nationalist, anticolonial, and populist movements to victory in so much of the world, and that continues to reverberate widely today. Enough Americans had become sufficiently alienated from national elite culture and policy that they felt increasingly like the colonial subjects of an imperial regime. Trump’s political genius, or perhaps his luck, lay in his ability both to perceive that the United States had reached this grim state and to mobilize this alienation into a movement.
However, his position is more complicated than, say, that of the African anticolonialists who were able to translate victory over the colonial ruler into lifetime tenure in power. Many Americans may feel that the globalist elite is for all intents and purposes a group of alien overlords whose rule must be overthrown, but many others do not. America is a land of many cultures, and many Americans regard Trump and his white, conservative, and populist supporters as hostile and alien interlopers. In America, identity politics cuts in more than one direction. American identity is contested, and the Confederate flags sometimes seen at Trump rallies underlined the degree to which Trump’s movement represented a slice of America rather than the nation as a whole.
In this way, Trump’s position—and problem—was similar to that of other populist nationalist figures in countries where gaps existed between the “official opinion” of an established elite and the “commonsense” opinions and emotions of a large share of the public. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, appealing to the Islamic values and folk culture of Turks who dissented from the Kemalist secularism of the entrenched Turkish elite, Narendra Modi in India appealing to Hindu nationalist sentiment against the entrenched secularism and soft socialism of the Congress Party establishment, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel were similarly situated. These leaders were engaged in a permanent quest for issues that drew the line between the cosmopolitan values of the hated elite and the “true” values and sentiments of the nation in a way that maximized the breadth and the intensity of their public support.
It was in this context that Trump saw Israel policy as a major opportunity. As we’ve seen, the idea of a special relationship with the Jewish people and the Jewish state is a thread that runs through American history and is closely associated with ideas of American exceptionalism and providential nationalism at the core of American ideology.
Making unwavering support of Israel a major element of his public stance offered Trump a chance to advance his claim to represent the “true” America against its false-hearted foes at home and abroad while underlining his polemical case against the cosmopolitan globalists and their nefarious allies at the U.N. and elsewhere.
Trump’s pro-Israel stance also sought to pin his opponents to the most unpopular aspects of the “cosmopolitan globalism” of the American establishment and the international Davoisie. Israel is frequently targeted by international institutions like the United Nations Human Rights Council for actions, real or alleged, against the Palestinians. To most Americans, this has always looked like antisemitism, and this perception has gone far to delegitimize these institutions in American opinion. This perception reminds many Americans that their nation is different from other nations, and reminds them of why they want to preserve those differences.
By claiming a uniquely strong affiliation with Israel, Trump was wrapping himself in the American flag in a way calculated to expand the appeal of his populist movement and to reinforce the identification of his political opponents with the least popular aspect of the globalist, multilateralist agenda.
Finally, Trump’s pro-Israel policies helped him develop a strategy for the Middle East as a whole that satisfied the hawkish instincts of his Jacksonian supporters without alienating the neo-isolationist wing of the Trump coalition.
Trump’s foreign policy was so unconventional and, as his critics noted, so disorderly, that many mainstream critics could find no coherence in it and saw it as a mass of slogans and impulses. These critics were not wholly wrong, but, obscured as it often was by Trump’s own inconsistent behavior and restless opportunism, the warring factions in his administration, and the entrenched resistance of a bureaucracy that fundamentally rejected the Trumpian approach, Trump did possess and in his unique way sought to impose a strategic vision for American foreign policy.
The post-historical consensus Trump came to disrupt was essentially a synthesis of Wilsonian and Hamiltonian ideas about world order. Hamiltonians had long seen the possibility that the advantages of trade could create a world order based on mutual economic interest, and that promoting that kind of order would advance American security and prosperity. Wilsonians do not entirely dissent from this view but argue that no world order could long endure—or would be worth having—that did not ultimately rest on the protection of human rights within countries and the rule of law in relations between them. The post-historical consensus blended these two viewpoints for an era of unipolar American power.
From both personal conviction and political necessity, Trump was at war against the post-historical consensus. He did not share its optimism about world prospects in the post–Cold War era. He instinctively distrusted international institutions and believed that there was, at most, a very limited role for rule-driven institutions and law in the affairs of sovereign states. Alliances like NATO which presupposed a permanent pool of shared interests binding its members together from generation to generation struck him as unrealistic and he simply did not believe that the goal of American foreign policy was to create an international political system that one day might limit, condition, and ultimately replace American sovereignty. He did not accept the fundamental Hamiltonian axiom that trade, at least potentially, offered an opportunity to replace the win-lose dynamic of traditional state competition with a win-win dynamic based on mutual economic advantage. Trade, for Trump, was win-lose.
His base largely agreed, and voter disenchantment with post-historical foreign policy was one of the driving forces behind Trump’s rise. But in office, Trump would need to do more than recycle criticisms of the foreign policies of the recent past. He would need to replace those policies with new ideas and new methods that his political supporters would see as responsive to their concerns.
That was not easy to do. Trump’s base was united in its critique of post-historical foreign policy whether neoliberal or neoconservative, but it was deeply divided over what should come next. One large group of Trump supporters belonged to the Jacksonian school in American foreign policy. While opposed to ideological crusades and grandiose schemes for world order, they believed in a strong national defense and believed that the United States needed to act vigorously around the world where its interests or the interests of its true allies were involved.
Many Trump supporters, however, were Jeffersonian neo-isolationists. They believed that the United States was woefully overextended and that so-called allies, especially in NATO, were playing Uncle Sam for a sucker. In 1947 Europe might have been so weak that American support was required to hold Stalin at bay, but by 2016 the wealthy, selfish countries of the European Union were rich enough to take care of themselves. Jeffersonian neo-isolationists wanted the United States to define its interests as narrowly as possible, to withdraw from contested theaters like the Middle East, to scale back and even to eliminate the American commitment to Europe, and to avoid military engagement wherever possible.
Trump’s political fortunes depended on keeping both wings of his coalition active and engaged, and if possible, he preferred to avoid making choices that decisively aligned him with one wing to the exclusion of the other. With regard to Europe, both the Jeffersonian neo-isolationists and the Jacksonian hawks were angry at what they saw as freeloading behavior by wealthy NATO allies like Germany who refused, as many Americans saw it, to take serious responsibility for their own defense while stiffing America on trade, and Trump-era policy was consistently cold to NATO as well as to the human rights and climate change agendas popular among many Western Europeans.
On China policy, Trump came to a different place. China was an issue that united Jacksonians behind the need for forward defense and a tougher foreign policy, while it divided the neo-isolationists. Some of them believed that the China threat was being hyped and did not see the need for serious American commitments in the Far East, but many others believed that the rise of a hostile communist superpower in Asia was one of the rare cases that justified significant American efforts far from our shores. Trump would pursue a consistently hawkish policy toward China, but, in part with an eye to the neo-isolationist wing of his base, he would accompany that hostility with efforts to get American allies like South Korea and Japan to increase their contributions to the joint defense, and with a confrontational stance on trade. The policy mix looked inconsistent and self-defeating to most professionals in the field, but the audience Trump most hoped to impress saw a consistent effort to conduct American policy along what they perceived as a commonsense basis.
The Middle East was a world theater that divided the Trump base. Jacksonian hawks loved Israel and believed that American honor and interest were engaged in the defense of the Jewish state against its enemies. They also hated Iran, a legacy of the constant hostility of the Islamic Republic against the United States from the time of the seizure of American diplomats during the 1979 Revolution, refreshed by Iran’s support for Shi’a militants involved in attacks on American personnel in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. If Jacksonian America had one enemy on earth, it was the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Neo-isolationists were not so sure, and their opposition mattered to Trump. Of the relative handful of Republicans in the foreign policy world who sided with Trump—and who did not sign Never Trump letters pledging their undying hostility to Trump during the 2016 race for the GOP nomination—many were critics of the neoconservative orthodoxy of the Republican establishment. Most paleoconservatives had dissented from the Iraq War and their critique of Bush administration policy in the Middle East only intensified as that administration lost its way. They were suspicious of Israel’s influence in the Republican Party and in some circles were not universally free from Vulcanist conspiracy thinking.
Yet in part because it was Obama’s policy and in part because the Iran deal struck so many Republicans as an unsatisfactory agreement, opposition to the deal was one of the points that united Republicans across the divides separating Trumpers and Never-Trumpers, Jacksonians and Jeffersonians. Trump made opposition to the Iran deal an important part of his campaign and observed that anti-Iran and anti-JCPOA rhetoric evoked rapturous applause from those who attended his rallies. Given that the problem of Iran dominated international politics in the Middle East as well as in Washington, it was inevitable that Iran policy would be the leading issue in Middle East policy during Trump’s tenure. The approach he found did not “solve” the Iranian problem on his abbreviated watch, and critics argued that a U.S.-Iran war might have been inevitable in a second Trump term, but Trump’s Iran policy kept Republicans enthusiastically united, burnished his pro-Israel credentials without alienating his neo-isolationist supporters, demonstrated the extent of American power in dramatic fashion as European countries were unable to evade Trump’s unilateral sanctions, caused even some of his critics to acknowledge that the Obama administration had underestimated its leverage over Iran, and promoted the Arab-Israeli reconciliation that stands as one of the most notable accomplishments of his controversial career.
The key to Trump’s Iran policy was the ability to leverage two assets: the unique American ability to give unilateral sanctions global effect by denying the use of the American banking system to sanctions violators, and the sense of existential fear that Iran’s relentless march toward regional hegemony and nuclear weapons created among Israelis and Arabs alike. The power of American sanctions allowed Trump to enforce his unpopular views of Iran on restive allies in Europe and elsewhere without spending American money or using American troops. The Gulf Arabs’ hatred of Iran combined with Israel’s formidable military and intelligence power meant that American proxies could deliver credible threats of force without direct U.S. commitments or involvement.
For Trump, this was close to an ideal policy mix, and it served as a demonstration of the kind of American foreign policy he would like to see. While NATO allies like Germany, Italy, and France were at most half-hearted supporters of anti-Russian policy in Eastern Europe, Middle East allies and above all Israel were more concerned about Iran than the Americans were. Like Britain and the Soviet Union before the United States entered World War II, the message from the Middle East allies was, give us the tools and we will finish the job! Trump could be a cheap hawk and, one suspects, hoped that even in a worst-case scenario it would be Israeli planes and troops that would act to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities—with the help of American bunker-busting bombs and anything else the Israelis might need.
Trump could argue to isolationists that he was sloughing off responsibility for Iran to local allies as the United States headed for the exits in the Middle East. And he could argue to Jacksonians and other pro-Israel supporters that he was absolutely committed to ensuring that Israel had everything it needed to defend itself, and that it would receive unstinting American support.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a diminishing American presence in the region combined with changing calculations among most of the Gulf states to force the long-hidden relationship between Israel and much of the Arab world out into the open. Looking at Iran, looking at the likelihood that their energy wealth would diminish as American fracking and the global turn away from fossil fuels undercut the oil business, a number of Arab countries concluded that the old mix of public hostility and quiet cooperation with Israel was no longer enough.
Geopolitically speaking, the Arabs and the Israelis were turning into strategic allies. If the United States was going to withdraw from the Middle East, Russia, Turkey, and Iran would immediately contest the succession. Nobody trusted Russia and neither Israel nor the Gulf states would do well if Turkey or Iran emerged as a regional hegemon. In the view of Egypt and most Gulf states, the Palestinian issue was small potatoes compared to the urgent need to build an Arab-Israeli alliance to prevent the submergence of the Arab world under a renewed Ottoman or Persian empire. That alliance would need to be diplomatic and military, and it would need to operate in Washington and Europe.
It would also need to be economic. The oil wealth coursing through the Gulf states had, for a time, concealed the economic failure of the Arab world. The glittering skyscrapers of Dubai, the Arabian playboys coursing through the casinos and fleshpots of Europe, the financial flows surging through world markets—these were all linked to oil. As the populations of the Gulf countries inexorably rose, the underlying weakness of Arab economies began to drive policy. Economic development was clearly the priority of the century, and Israel was a natural and even necessary partner for the kind of Arab revival that the security and independence of the Gulf, of Egypt, and of Lebanon would require.
The shock of the 1967 war revealed the bankruptcy of the rejectionist Arab approach to the Jewish state, but the oil boom that soon followed allowed many in the Arab world to avoid drawing the necessary conclusions about the future of Israel in the region. Fifty years later, reality could no longer be avoided. Israel was part of the region, like it or not, and the independence of the Arab world depended on reaching a realistic and even a close relationship with the “Zionist entity.”
Here Trump reaped what he did not sow, although Trump administration officials worked diligently to finalize the agreements and to recruit additional members to the new Middle East peace club. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco all agreed to normalize relations with Israel during the closing weeks of his presidency. The cascade of agreements were historic in themselves, an unprecedented wave of neighboring states accepting normal relations with Israel. As significant, perhaps, was that Bahrain was widely believed to have Saudi backing for this step. Nothing remotely similar had happened in all the anxious years of American peace diplomacy in the region, and Donald Trump had broken every rule of conventional Middle East diplomacy without derailing the process. Trump’s policy did not create the conditions that drove the Arab-Israeli rapprochement, but the steady progress in Arab-Israeli relations on his watch meant, among other things, that Trump’s decisions like the shift of the embassy did not result in the catastrophes his opponents confidently and repeatedly predicted. On Israel and Middle East policy Trump looked to his base like a winner, and his perceived success there lent support to the belief of his supporters that his approach to American foreign policy works better than the old establishment approach even as it challenges establishment myths.
The American Question and the Judeo-American Entanglement
The Covid-19 pandemic, together with the strength of the continuing opposition to Donald Trump’s form of populist identity politics, denied him a second term in the White House. Populist leaders in other countries had been able to assert government control over the press, weaken the independence of the judiciary, or pass draconian security legislation that crippled their opponents’ ability to compete in electoral politics. Thanks to the strength of American institutions and to the continuing commitment of a large American majority to the foundations of their political order, these options were not available to President Trump. The unswerving loyalty of the military to constitutional governance, the fierce independence and principled approach of both liberal and conservative judges to their legal responsibilities as well as the narrow base of Trump’s electoral support meant that Trump, even if he tried, could not become an American Putin. That road remained closed.
Trump could, however, retain his commanding position in the Republican Party, and the grievances and anger that brought him into the White House did not disappear when he left. From his seaside Florida retreat of Mar-a-Lago, transformed into an American Elba after his defeat, Trump continued to challenge the legitimacy of his successor and to stoke his followers’ rage at what Trump, in the face of a growing accumulation of evidence to the contrary, much of it compiled by Republican election officials, insisted was the “stolen” election of 2020.
Joe Biden was swept into office as his promises to restore the prosperity and peace of the post-historical era appealed to voters weary of the Sturm und Drang of the Trump years. It is still much too soon to tell whether and to what extent he will succeed. The new president and his team are seasoned professionals who are deeply committed to their vision and mission; it would be a mistake to underestimate either their ingenuity or their tenacity. Yet the forces that frustrated the Obama presidency are, if anything, stronger and more entrenched in the 2020s than they were in the last decade. China and Russia are more settled and resolute in their hostility to the U.S.-based world order, the fissures among America’s alliances are deeper and harder to close, and public confidence in post-historical foreign policy has by no means been restored.
Between the pandemic, the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the hotly contested presidential election, 2020 was the most dramatic year in American politics since 1968, and momentous cultural, political, and economic changes were set in motion that would test the strength of American institutions and the resilience of American social order in the years to come. Yet even among these upheavals, the quantum entanglement between the Jewish people, the Jewish state, and the United States was as strong, and as relevant to American politics as ever before.
That entanglement dates back to the earliest moments of the American story. It deepened as both Protestant theologians and Enlightenment visionaries looked to the Restoration of the Jews as a consequence of the same forces shaping the American people and their republic.
The entanglement tightened during the late nineteenth century and continued into the Cold War. During those years, Americans discovered that the identity wars of the far-off imperial zone, the region dominated by the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, were impossible to ignore. The nationalism that shattered the imperial zone created a global geopolitical crisis that ultimately produced two world wars and the Cold War that dominated the twentieth century and transformed America’s place in the world. It also stimulated the Great Wave of migrants that challenged, enriched, and reshaped American society in ways that still engage us today.
The revolutionary transformation of the imperial zone was itself both product and sign of another revolution that was also upending American life. The Industrial Revolution disrupted the agrarian and mostly rural republic the Founders knew and replaced it with the kind of predominantly urban and deeply unequal society that many of the Founders believed was incompatible with the republican values they professed. The crowded, smoky cities of this industrial America teemed with Great Wave immigrants rooted in cultures and grounded in religions that “old stock” Americans considered outlandish at best, subversive at worst. Old political ideologies had to be discarded and new ones developed for the challenges at home, even as Americans recalibrated their ideas about foreign policy to accommodate the uneven process that would culminate in America’s post–World War II assumption of world leadership in a dangerous new era dominated by fears of a nuclear holocaust.
The Jewish people were caught up in the same maelstrom. The Great Wave brought more than two million Jews to the United States, turning the American Jewish community from a numerically insignificant presence to a community making major contributions to science, culture, and business across American life. The Zionist movement was both the Jewish face of the new nationalist movements that broke up the imperial zone and a desperate effort to secure the survival of the Jewish people from the forces the nationalist movements unleashed.
As Americans grappled with the interlocking crises at home and abroad, the Jewish people kept stepping onto center stage. Domestically, mass Jewish immigration was one of the most prominent aspects of the Great Wave, challenging America’s image of their nation as a “Christian culture.” The old denominational model of American identity, in which Americans with different religious, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds could participate in a common national citizenship and culture without renouncing their other loyalties, was severely challenged during the Great Wave and the xenophobic reaction that accompanied it. Was the United States less antisemitic than other Euro-Atlantic cultures only because it had contained a relative handful of Jewish residents before the Great Wave began, or was the liberal nationalism of the United States sufficiently flexible and resilient to flourish under twentieth-century conditions?
Abroad, the struggle of the Jewish people to survive the surging antisemitism of the era and to establish a refuge in Palestine engaged the sympathies of many Americans and also served to test, many felt, the ability of the international system Americans tried to build to protect the rights and security of small peoples as well as to test American ideas about the direction of history and the nature of progress.
For many, though by no means for all, Americans, including American Jews, the lesson of the twentieth century seemed to be that America worked. The framework of American society inherited from the past produced a society that was flexible enough to accommodate the strains and stresses of the Industrial Revolution, and dynamic and productive enough to win the two world wars and establish the model for advanced industrial democracy that captured the world’s imagination and won the Cold War. The Great Wave was accommodated, the civil rights movement pointed toward a resolution of America’s racial injustices, a new social order based on mass consumption and mass production generated mass affluence, American diplomacy helped produce, or was seen to help produce, a Jewish state in the Middle East, and Americans felt that even as the world changed on an unprecedented scale, somehow their core institutions and values had powered them through to a new synthesis.
Although we cannot know whether the twenty-first century will confirm the lasting value and power of America’s values and the contributions they can make to the world, the parallels between the contemporary situation and the crises of the past are striking. As the information revolution upends the economy, as the ideologies of the last century no longer seem to work, the stable post–World War II domestic order is breaking up. As a new Great Wave of immigration heralds a new period of cultural and demographic change, Americans are discovering that problems once thought to be the concern of less fortunate, less exceptional lands must be addressed at home even as comfortable assumptions about American identity demand to be reassessed.
Internationally, the geopolitical challenges to the post–Cold War American order threaten to test the limits of the post-historical foreign policy consensus as cruelly as the activities of Germany, Italy, and Japan demonstrated the shortcomings of the Lodge consensus back in the 1930s. Today as in the 1930s, the foreign policies Americans are prepared to support do not seem capable of producing the results they require, and it remains to be seen just how much more dangerous the international situation becomes before Americans and their allies summon the imagination and the will that the world crisis demands. While it takes greater prophetic powers than I possess to predict how American democracy and foreign policy will fare in the coming years, it is easier to see that the Jewish people will be caught up in the coming events in ways that keep the Judeo-American entanglement strong.
Domestically, one of the most potent and divisive questions in American life today is, as it was a century ago, whether the denominational model of American identity can accommodate the needs of an increasingly diverse society. The old model of American identity, in which Americans with different religious, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds could participate in a common national citizenship and culture without renouncing their other loyalties, was tested almost to destruction during the Great Wave and the xenophobic reaction that accompanied it. Could “hyphenated Americans” be real Americans? One hundred years ago, with Asians largely excluded by discriminatory laws, the question was, on the one hand, whether “old stock” Americans were or could become tolerant and open-minded enough to accept masses of Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants as equal members of American society and, on the other hand, whether the immigrants wanted to integrate into American society, as opposed to the practice in their homelands where different religious and ethnic groups lived largely separated lives.
Today the question is partly about race and partly about migration. The failure of sixty years of post–civil rights era policy to eliminate the consequences of slavery and segregation led many to question whether that old denominational model, and the liberal providential nationalism associated with it, had simply been part of a fundamentally racist social order whose purpose had been to suppress Blacks. Was a common “whiteness” the secret sauce that allowed American majority society to welcome wave after wave of white migrants, while relentlessly holding native Blacks back? With racial protests on a scale not seen since the 1960s sweeping the country in the early 2020s, many Americans had come to believe that a sense of national identity and of the nation’s global mission that could tolerate so much racial privilege and discrimination for so long would no longer suffice. The hard right, on the other hand, saw American identity connected to the maintenance of a white demographic majority in the United States. White nationalist groups, some willing to countenance violence, began to organize in opposition to what they feared was an establishment conspiracy to destroy the supposed values of “white America” and to “replace” the current majority with, allegedly, more biddable nonwhites.
With migration, the question was one our predecessors would easily recognize. The new immigrants are coming at such a rate, and from so many countries whose cultural and religious traditions are so different from those of the United States, that many wonder whether these immigrants will follow the patterns of the past. Some fear and some hope that the new immigrants will embrace a more social, less individualistic economic and political position that will shift American politics permanently toward the left. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America, largely because their numbers have been so great, and from the Muslim world, because of the perceived gap between Islamic and traditional American values, have been the objects of particular hostility.
Overall, American Jews have been, if anything, more welcoming toward immigrants, and more concerned about the consequences of racism than the public at large. This in part reflects specific Jewish values and experiences, including memories of the hostility experienced by earlier groups of Jewish immigrants and shame at the American refusal to admit many victims of the Nazis. It also reflects the reality that American Jews largely skew left in voting behavior and on a range of social issues. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising to see criticism of the patriotic bona fides of American Jews coming from the far right. However, American Jews have also come under attack from the left. American Jews, say some, are “white Jews” invested in the perpetuation of an oppressive system that benefits them.
Many on the hard left and hard right also see Zionism as illegitimate. For opponents from the hard right, American Jews who support Israel are doing so out of “dual loyalty,” and cannot be trusted to prefer America’s interest to Israel’s. Proud Boy leader Kyle Chapman vowed that “we will confront the Zionist criminals who wish to destroy our civilization.”[26] Alex Jones, whose hard-right InfoWars site averaged almost 1.4 million visits a day before being “deplatformed” (and which continued to receive more than 700,000 daily visits after YouTube and Facebook banned it), said that “the Jews” “run Uber, they run the health care, they’re going to scam you, they’re going to hurt you,” and promised to expose “the Jewish mafia” allegedly ruling the world in alliance with other nefarious groups.[27]
For many on the hard left, Israel is an example of an apartheid state and “settler state colonialism.” American Jews who support Israel, or who oppose movements like BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) Israel are siding with the forces of evil and oppression and cannot be accepted or respected by the left. As the prominent activist Linda Sarsour put it in a 2017 interview, “It just doesn’t make any sense for someone to say, ‘Is there room for people who support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?’ There can’t be in feminism. You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it.”[28] The 2016 platform of the Black Lives Matter movement asserts that Israel is worse than an apartheid state, and Americans who support a close relationship with Israel are guilty, too: “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”[29]
The result is sobering. While not all of the hard right or the hard left is antisemitic, political movements that embrace a racialized vision of American identity are frequently hotbeds of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. As the center erodes, and more radical political voices move from the internet to the world of electoral politics, the crudest antisemitic slanders are slithering into public discourse. In 2018 a Democratic councilmember in Washington, D.C., charged that the Rothschild banking family controlled the weather;[30] in the same year a Republican representative from Georgia alleged that Rothschild-funded space lasers were responsible for California wildfires.[31]
It remains the case that the health of American society can be measured by the degree to which the ignorant hatreds behind statements like these are ashamed to show their face in the public square. Conversely, the radicalization and polarization of post–post-historical American politics is the gravest threat to the integration of American Jews since the 1940s, and at the time these words were written, antisemitic violence in the United States has reached the highest levels ever reported.
Adding to the spotlight on Jewish Americans will be the continuing prominence of the Jewish state in world affairs. From the first meetings of the World Zionist Organization, the Zionist movement and the state the Zionists ultimately built have attracted more than their share of attention and comment, both favorable and unfavorable. There are no signs that Israel will lose its place in the limelight. Despite the Abraham Accords and peace at last with most of its Arab neighbors, Israel remains a flashpoint in world politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will for the foreseeable future engage the passions and loyalties of people all over the world.
In addition to the sheer drama of what by any standard is one of the most remarkable national stories in the history of the world, the controversies that swirl around the Jewish state touch on some of the most sensitive and inflammable issues in the contemporary world. Israel’s stubborn defense of its national sovereignty, from its insistence on building a nuclear arsenal to its ongoing confrontations with international organizations ranging from UNESCO to the European Union, attracts the ire of “cosmopolitan globalists” and the warmth of nationalists all over the world. The perception that Israel is a white European settler state encamped on land stolen from brown Palestinians may be crude and superficial, but it is widespread enough to make the Israeli-Palestinian struggle intensely relevant to billions of people in postcolonial societies around the world. Similarly, the sense that Zionism represents an attack on the integrity and dignity of the Islamic and/or the Arab world ensures that Israel retains an object of irresistible interest wherever Arabic is spoken, or the Koran is invoked. Behind all this, the reality that both the Holy Land and the fate of the Jews are bound up with theological ideas about the end of the world for billions of believing Muslims and Christians will, in an era when apocalypse often feels more likely than not, ensure that news about Israel continues to find massive audiences around the world. The continuing global importance, symbolic and otherwise, of Israel in turn will increase the attention paid to it in the United States, and the importance that Israel has in American politics will, as in the last seventy years, further stoke the global fascination with the Jewish state.
For both Israelis and Palestinians, two peoples whose fates have become intertwined in ways that neither side wanted or foresaw, this means that their private quarrel must be fought out in the glare of global publicity. Politicians all over the world will comment; legislatures will pass resolutions; students will demonstrate; historians will drone on; and, worst of all, demagogues will sensationalize and further inflame a conflict that is already dangerously hot. Whether it is an Iran looking to legitimize its aspirations for a wider role in the Sunni Middle East, Russia looking to further reinsert itself in an important world theater, or China looking to build its international profile, outside powers will find ways to turn the conflict to their own advantage.
For Jews, this is the modern form of an ancient problem. The Jewish people have sometimes benefited from, and more often suffered under, the fascinated gentile gaze since the Pyramids were young. For the Palestinians, global fame has been a more recent experience, purchased at the cost of an unwanted Jewish presence on land that their great-grandfathers never doubted was legitimately theirs.
Now the Jews and the Palestinians are stuck with each other, and stuck with their position on the global center stage. That entanglement has in turn drawn the Americans in; the future of the Palestinians has become as much a domestic political question in the United States as the future of the Jews used to be.
It remains my hope that Palestinians and Jews find ways to make this entanglement work better for both sides, as it remains my conviction that the creation of a Palestinian state will move both sides closer to a mutually acceptable accommodation. In the meantime, Israel will continue to occupy its continent in the American mind, with both supporters and opponents of a U.S.-Israel alliance putting considerably more energy into their lobbying than a purely objective assessment of the national interest would support. Many observers in the United States and beyond will attribute this intense focus on Israel to the hidden hand, the Benjamins, or to the space lasers, of American Jews. But the driving forces behind Americans’ fascination with Israel originate outside the American Jewish community and are among the most powerful forces in American life. Anyone seeking to analyze American foreign policy or to reform it needs to come to grips with them.
Policy advice has a short shelf life, and my goal here has not been to change readers’ minds about what America’s Middle East policies should be. Instead, at a time when the assumptions behind a generation of American global and regional policy have been found badly wanting, I have tried to shine a useful light on the relationship between the ways Americans think about the world and the approaches they develop to act in it. I believe this is an essential step in developing new concepts for American national strategy in a new era. I can only hope that my readers agree.
Medieval England was one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe. Edward I expelled the Jews from England in 1290, more than two hundred years before the Jews were expelled from Spain.
Roger Williams founded Providence Plantation, which became Rhode Island. He wrote, “It is the will and command of God that since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or anti-Christian consciences or worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries.”
Eminent Boston clergyman Increase Mather taught that the Bible predicted the return of the Jews to Palestine. His book The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applyed was published in London in 1669.
The Greek and Italian national movements electrified Americans fascinated by the historical glory of the great peoples of antiquity—Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. Italian revolutionaries like Giuseppe Garibaldi were idolized by Americans who also hoped to see a national movement among Jews.
Pliny Fisk was among the first of the thousands of American missionaries to the Middle East. Although they had little success at winning converts, the universities and hospitals they built remain important across the region today.
John D. Rockefeller, oil baron and devout Baptist, was one of the many prominent Americans who signed the 1891 Blackstone Memorial advocating for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His wildcat rivals in the oil industry funded the conservative theological and political institutions that defined evangelical Christianity and Sun Belt Republicanism.
Lord Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, an evangelical, lobbied the British Crown for decades to establish a Jewish colony in Palestine.
Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg and Hertefeld, was an amateur diplomat, Richard Wagner devotee, and notorious antisemite. He supported Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state in Palestine to curry favor with the Kaiser and to gain fantastic riches from the (imaginary) wealthy Jews behind Herzl.
Convinced by Herzl’s advocacy, in 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II asked Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II to create a Jewish state in Palestine under German protection. The Kaiser hoped to rid Germany of Jewish socialists while freeing the Ottoman Empire of its debts to British and French creditors.
Americans hoped that nationalism and democracy would bring peace to the Old World, but massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide resulted instead as the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires fragmented. Here, Russian soldiers look at the remains of the Armenian population of Sheykhalan in 1915.
Unlike his father, Czar Alexander III was a brutal autocrat. During his reign, millions of Jews and Muslims fled the Russian Empire. Over two million Russian Jews came to America from 1881 to 1924.
Karl Lueger, widely admired as a founding father of European Christian Democracy, was an antisemitic populist Hitler praised in Mein Kampf. His election as mayor of Theodor Herzl’s home city of Vienna helped convince Herzl that Europe’s Jews would soon face an unsurvivable wave of antisemitic persecution.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge defined U.S. foreign policy after World War I. He opposed Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations but favored American economic engagement in Europe, supported immigration restrictions, and authored the 1922 Lodge-Fish Resolution endorsing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
More than 23 million people immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1924. As the percentage of foreign-born Americans climbed precipitously, the federal government set up immigration facilities like this one at Ellis Island to process the new arrivals.
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, championed restrictions on immigration to the United Kingdom while he was prime minister. As Britain’s foreign minister during World War I, he supported the Balfour Declaration in favor of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Benjamin Disraeli, a baptized Anglican of Jewish birth, used proto-Zionism to gain acceptance from British Tories as he rose to the summit of British and European politics.
Henry Morgenthau Sr., a former U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, was one of the 299 prominent Jews who petitioned Woodrow Wilson in 1919 to reject the Balfour Declaration. The American Jewish establishment of the day rejected Zionism on both religious and political grounds.
Pastor John Hagee, the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States by membership.
Alfred Dreyfus, seen here in prison on Devil’s Island, was a French army officer and assimilated Jew who was falsely accused of spying for Germany. The French left rallied to Dreyfus’s support and he was eventually returned to active duty.
Many European liberals hailed Dreyfus’s release as proof that liberal democratic values could protect Europe’s Jews. Theodor Herzl concluded the opposite: that Europeans’ attachment to liberal and democratic values was too weak to hold the forces of antisemitism in check.
Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times from 1896 to 1935, married Effie M. Wise, the daughter of prominent Reform Judaism in America leader Rabbi Isaac M. Wise. Wise described Judaism as “eminently humane, universal, liberal, and progressive.” Under its previous, non-Jewish owner, the Times had supported the Blackstone Memorial. Under Ochs, the Times vigorously opposed the Balfour Declaration.
American Jewish leaders tried and failed to win public support for a boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.
Henry Morgenthau Jr., left, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, right, leaving a White House meeting regarding German and Austrian refugees in April 1938. Like his father, Henry Morgenthau Jr. was an opponent of Jewish statehood in Palestine. As Nazi persecution of German Jews intensified, Zionist and anti-Zionist American Jews united to find places of refuge for European Jews, but they could not overcome the Lodge consensus on immigration restrictions.
Embittered by British support for the Palestinian Jewish community, Arab Palestinians turned to Italy and Nazi Germany for support. During World War II, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini visited Hitler in Berlin and supported Nazi campaigns against European Jews.
The “Big Three” at the 1945 Potsdam conference, left to right: Prime Minister Clement Attlee, President Harry Truman, and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin would dominate the postwar struggle over the future of Palestine.
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, far right, and Clement Attlee saw the maintenance of British rule over the oil-rich Middle East as the key to Britain’s economic survival. Fearing Arab hostility, they opposed resettling Jewish refugees in Palestine.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a liberal icon and firm believer in human rights and in the United Nations. She supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and pressured President Truman to enforce the 1947 U.N. resolution to create Jewish and Arab states in British Palestine.
Led by David Ben-Gurion, the Palestinian Jews were ready to fight for their independence, even if that meant war with Britain.
During his first term as president, Harry Truman struggled to unify the Democrats to oppose the Soviet Union. Henry Wallace, on the right, was seen by liberals as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s true heir and opposed the Cold War. He left the Democratic Party to run as a third-party candidate in the 1948 election.
Devastating winter storms in January and February 1947 set off an economic crisis that forced the British cabinet to reduce its military commitments in India and Greece and to return its mandate over Palestine to the United Nations.
Chaim Weizmann testified before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) as Palestinian Jews sought to win the contest for world opinion. Palestinian Arabs boycotted the process.
John Stanley Grauel, a Methodist minister and American Christian Zionist, was on the Exodus 1947 refugee ship when it was boarded by British forces and turned back from Palestine. Future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir said Grauel’s subsequent testimony to the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine persuaded the committee to recommend partition and Jewish statehood.
Joseph Stalin was an unlikely supporter of the Palestinian Jews in 1947 and 1948 as he worked to frustrate American and British policy in the Middle East and Europe.
Following the U.N. vote on partition, violence broke out in Palestine, and as the Jewish community in Jerusalem came under siege, Jewish forces suffered a succession of military reverses. Here, Jewish residents are seen fleeing the Old City through the Zion Gate in May 1948.
George F. Kennan, career diplomat and the first director of Policy Planning at the Department of State, believed that American support for Israeli independence would weaken Britain, strengthen the Soviet Union, and undermine America’s position across the Middle East.
Like most western experts, Secretary of State George C. Marshall was convinced that the Palestinian Jews could not win against professional Arab militaries. In May 1948 he warned Jewish Agency representative Moshe Shertok “you are undertaking a grave responsibility.”
David Ben-Gurion, standing, reads The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, to take effect the next day when the British mandate expired. A portrait of Theodor Herzl hangs on the wall behind him.
Overruling many of his advisers, Harry Truman immediately issued a de facto recognition of the new State of Israel. The State Department’s U.N. delegation heard the news from other delegations while they were gathering votes to delay partition.
Unknown to the Truman administration, Ehud Avriel, a close associate of Ben-Gurion and future Israeli diplomat, had already negotiated arms purchases from the communist government of Czechoslovakia. Czech-made arms, originally intended for Hitler’s Wehrmacht and sold to Israel with Stalin’s blessing, enabled Israel to win its War of Independence.
In its early years, Israel was more popular on the American left than on the right. Paul Robeson, standing, was an All-American football player, singer, actor, communist, and Zionist. He helped raise money for the Irgun, a Jewish right-wing militia in Palestine.
Noted civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (shown here with President Lyndon Johnson) was a strong supporter of Israel throughout his career.
Like Senator Bernie Sanders, the American left has increasingly soured on Israel. While supporting Israel’s right to exist, Senator Sanders has described the Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu as “an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism,” and wrote that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) provides a platform “for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.”
President Dwight Eisenhower, left, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was much more interested in cultivating Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser than he was in a relationship with Israel. Nasser, who was the leading figure in Arab nationalism, seemed to many Americans to embody the future of the Middle East.
Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office with Clark Clifford (left) and Dean Rusk. Worried about declining liberal support for the Vietnam War, LBJ told American Jewish veterans that he would support Israel if American Jews did more to support the war in Vietnam. Furious Jewish leaders demanded an apology.
Israeli prime minster Golda Meir with President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Determined to reduce Soviet influence in the Middle East, Nixon and Kissinger laid the foundations of the modern alliance between the U.S. and Israel.
Billy Graham was one of the most consequential religious leaders in American history. The evangelical religious movement he promoted would become central to late-twentieth-century American conservatism and helped make support for Israel a mark of conservative Protestantism.
George W. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, disapproved of his close relations with Israel and his disdain for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who W. thought was too authoritarian to offer Palestinians a better future. In his second term, Bush pressured Israel heavily in an unsuccessful attempt to broker a peace agreement that he hoped would stabilize the Middle East.
A close relationship with Donald Trump helped Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu achieve longtime Israeli goals like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and peace agreements with neighboring Arab countries. But linking Israel this closely with the polarizing Trump led many American liberals, and many American Jews, to become significantly more critical of the Jewish state.
Acknowledgments
During the more than a decade of thought, research, and writing that I have worked on this book I have benefited from the wisdom and insights of countless people. I can only hope that anyone whom I inadvertently omit will accept my apology along with my profound thanks.
I must first acknowledge my debt to those who have supported my work over the years. Bard College under the inspired leadership of Leon Botstein has been my academic home for almost two decades and my colleagues and students there have taught me more than they know. Research on this book began while I was at the Council on Foreign Relations, where I benefited from the wise counsel and thoughtful suggestions of Les Gelb, Richard Haass, and Jim Lindsay. At the invitation of Charles Davidson and Francis Fukuyama I was able to pursue my interest in American Middle East policy while writing for The American Interest, where I was fortunate enough to learn from Adam Garfinkle. I do not know which is more remarkable: Adam’s depth of knowledge about the Middle East or the generosity with which he shares that knowledge with colleagues.
Five years ago, I accepted Ken Weinstein’s invitation to move to Washington and work at Hudson Institute. First Ken and now his successor John Walters have fostered an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and rigorous debate that makes Hudson an extraordinary base for scholarship and policy work. I am grateful to Walter Stern and Sarah Stern for their leadership of Hudson, and to Ravenel Curry for supporting my work there. Many of my Hudson colleagues, including Doug Feith, Hillel Fradkin, Tod Lindberg, Ron Radosh, Peter Rough, and Nina Shea have provided thoughtful and detailed feedback on the manuscript that has made the book much stronger and better.
In addition to my colleagues at Hudson, other friends and colleagues have provided excellent edits and suggestions that have sharpened my thoughts and improved the manuscript and I thank Elliott Abrams, Allen Adler, Mustafa Akyol, Richard Aldous, Daniel Beilman, Roger Berkowitz, Hal Brands, Steven A. Cook, Sadanand Dhume, Nicholas Eberstadt, Mark Fisch, Samuel Goldman, Yossi Klein Halevi, Shadi Hamid, Husain Haqqani, Hussein Ibish, Martin Indyk, Henry Kissinger, Damir Marusic, Gerald McDermott, Michelle Murray, Henry Nau, Michael Oren, Danielle Pletka, Ken Pollack, Dalibor Rohac, Dennis Ross, Karl Rove, Kori Schake, Allison Stanger, Matthew Avery Sutton, Shibley Telhami, and Paul Wolfowitz.
This book would have been much harder to produce without a world-class team. Geri Thoma has been an invaluable agent for many years. My long-suffering and endlessly patient editor Jonathan Segal provided his usual insightful comments and thoughtful edits. Sarah Perrin and the team at Knopf have been tremendously helpful. I have worked with many researchers on this project, but three in particular stand out: the brilliant Gabe Perlman, whose keen insights and extraordinary research skills helped get the project off to a serious start; the peerless George Bogden, who helped me reconceptualize the book midway through; and finally the indispensable Mike Watson, without whose mastery of the many themes and subjects in the manuscript the book might never have been finished. In addition, Jake Barnett, Andrew Bernard, Nick Clairmont, Harry Zieve Cohen, Nick Gallagher, Eitan Goldstein, Lauren Gottlieb Lockshin, Grady Nixon, Dion Pierre, and Jeremy Stern have all helped, as has a small army of research interns over the years.
Without the love and support of a close and growing family, my life would be poorer and, I suspect, my books would be worse. Christopher Mead, my oldest friend and most faithful reader, gave the manuscript a close and careful edit. I am, as always, grateful for his friendship and help.
The responsibility for any remaining errors of fact or analysis is, of course, mine.