Paul Pillar

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker offers an explanation for why so much of the United States has become divided fairly clearly and consistently into red and blue states—into regions that lean decidedly toward Republicans or toward Democrats. Borrowing ideas from other scholars, including historian David Fischer and psychologist Richard Nisbett, he suggests it is largely a legacy of the patterns of settlement in colonial America. The North was settled mostly by English farmers; the inland South mostly by Scots and Irish herders. Anthropologists tell us that herders, whose wealth is mobile and can easily be stolen, develop a “culture of honor” with an emphasis on using self-reliance and one's own guns, rather than depending on government, to avoid being victimized by rustlers. And from that one can implicitly draw various positions that are associated with the present-day political Right. Farmers do not have the same set of vulnerabilities and thus developed a different culture. As time passed and each culture moved with the frontier westward, the political traditions persisted.

It is an intriguing hypothesis and probably has some validity. There are many other aspects of current American attitudes that are strongly rooted in American history, even going back to colonial times. But before getting to the regional question, Pinker addresses why the views on disparate political issues tend to correlate at all into a Republican clump and a Democratic clump. Why, for example, does knowing someone's view on gay marriage help us to predict the same person's view on military spending? Pinker adduces an explanation—which he appears to accept as valid, even if it does not explain as much as the anthropological hypothesis about settlement patterns—that is based on contending views about human nature. The Right, according to this explanation, has a “Tragic Vision” of people being “permanently limited in morality, knowledge and reason.” This leads to views ranging from the need for guns and a large military for protection against unreasonable people, to respect for customs of religion, sexuality and the like to avoid a slide into barbarism. The Left is said instead to have a “Utopian Vision” that considers human nature to be malleable and “articulates rational plans for a better society and seeks to implement them through public institutions.”

This explanation is not persuasive, partly because it is blatantly inconsistent with some actual political positions associated with the Right or Left. Consider foreign policy, where one of the biggest and clearest examples of a utopian vision is found in the neoconservative belief in being able to remake foreign societies in America's image. The neoconservatives' biggest project, the Iraq War, was about implementing an ostensibly rational plan for making a better society in the Middle East, administered from above by the Coalition Provisional Authority and based on a belief that malleable Middle Easterners could be made into reasonable practitioners of liberal democracy.

Explanations for political beliefs that are based on something like a supposedly coherent view of human nature give far too much credit to present-day American ideologies for being logically consistent. There isn't really any good, logical reason particular views on gay marriage ought to accompany particular views on military spending; it takes intellectual gymnastics to try to tie the two together.

Such explanations nonetheless continue to be offered, largely for two reasons. One is that the explanations themselves may be part of a political agenda or political slant. Pinker acknowledges “conservative thinkers” to be the source of the concept about Tragic Visions and Utopian Visions. That is not surprising. Utopianism is something one is much more likely to attribute to an opponent than to claim for oneself.

The other reason is the tendency of intellectuals to over-intellectualize—to come up with a nifty logical construct and then to assume this reflects the thinking of others. Another example of this is the lead article in the current International Security, which offers an explanation for the different policies of presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy toward the defense of Western Europe, with the former preferring to rely on self-defense by the Europeans and the latter favoring more of a forward commitment by the United States. The article, by Brendan Green, is based on solid scholarship and explores in admirable detail the perspectives of the two presidents to the challenge of deterring aggression by the Soviet Union. But the author then invokes Isaiah Berlin and his two concepts of liberty and tries to explain strategies for European defense in terms of “negative liberals” and “positive liberals.” That's a stretch.

When looking not at presidential policies but instead at voters' preferences, explanations of this type are not just a stretch; they are simply incorrect. Voters going to the polls next week will not have made their choice after brushing up on their Isaiah Berlin and contemplating the different varieties of liberty. Nor will they have contemplated human nature and deduced, based on that contemplation and on ideas about tragedy and utopia, the best ways of dealing with the human condition.

To the extent that the views of most voters on different issues do tend to be grouped into recognizable clumps, this is not because they are all going through the same coherent thought process—or any coherent thought process. It is because they are taking cues from groups with which they identify. The groups might be organized interest groups or identifiable segments of society or the economy. They might be friends and neighbors—and if so, this would accentuate the regional patterns that Pinker addressed. Most of all, the cues come from political parties. Most voters identify with Republicans or with Democrats, and because of this they tend to adopt most of the views that go with their preferred party. A person's views on some issues might underlie the party identification in the first place, but once identified, the rest of the views in the clump associated with the selected party are usually taken on as well.

Anthropologists could help in understanding this phenomenon. It is essentially a form of tribalism. People identify with either the Republican tribe or the Democratic tribe and shape their views on matters of public policy accordingly.

One indication of how much political views and alignments are at least as much a matter of group affinity as an intellectually cogent approach to formulating an ideology is the role of a very anti-intellectual factor: racial affinity and racial preference. Voters' preferences this year are at least as much divided along racial lines as in any other recent election. This no doubt reflects not only the less malign forms of racial affinity but also differential patterns of racial prejudice between followers of the two political parties.

All of this is yet another regrettable consequence of the evolution of American party politics in the direction of a sharper, harsher party division with little room for intraparty free thinking. The demise of moderate Republicans is the principal manifestation of this evolution. The message implied by much of the party politics of today is that all the right answers exist on one side of the divide or the other. This has made the American electorate more mentally lazy than ever. Its part in the political game is simply to pick a tribe and fall in line.

Image: boris.rasin

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy has an interesting op ed which is a response to accusations that Barack Obama has thrown Israel under that proverbial bus under which one's political opponents are continually throwing people and things. The main respect in which the accusations are nonsense, of course, is that during President Obama's tenure the United States has continued to lavish voluminous unconditional aid and protective UN vetoes on Israel and has backed off from even the most tentative effort to exert leverage on it. Halevy's point is that to the extent there has been any American arm-twisting of Israeli leaders, it has mostly occurred during Republican presidencies.

Halevy mentions the clearest specific attempt to use aid as leverage: when the George H.W. Bush administration withheld some loan guarantees to Israel on the eve of the 1991 Madrid conference. He notes how Dwight Eisenhower leaned on Israel and its British and French collaborators to withdraw from Suez in 1956. He recalls how neocons in the George W. Bush administration pressed Israel to allow a free and open Palestinian election in 2006—although the administration lost interest in this bit of democratization of the Middle East when Hamas won the election.

The episode Halevy recounts that is least well known occurred just before the same administration began its war in Iraq in 2003. As Halevy tells it, in order to retain Tony Blair's support for the war in the face of resistance from members of his own Labour Party who demanded in return some Israeli concessions toward the Palestinians, Bush had to declare that the multilateral diplomatic plan known as the “roadmap,” which included an implied end to Israel's sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, represented U.S. policy. The Israeli government of Ariel Sharon strongly opposed the roadmap, but the Bush administration, anxious not to lose the participation of Britain in the war, made clear to the Israelis that it wanted no opposition or complaint from them. Sharon reluctantly went along and got his cabinet to do so too—although one member of it, Benjamin Netanyahu, abstained when the issue came to a vote.

The principal lesson to draw from Halevy's extracts from Middle Eastern history is not just his own point about whether Republicans or Democrats have been more willing to exert leverage on Israel. It is the more basic point that such leverage indeed can be exerted and has been exerted in the past—and has worked.

And yet most of what is said and written in the United States today on anything having to do with Israel pretends there is no such option. Examples abound, having to do with occupation of Palestinian territory, animosity toward Iran, and other topics. In another op ed on Wednesday, on Iran, in which a couple of neocons lay out a schedule over the next few months for diplomacy to be made to fail and for the U.S. war against Iran that they evidently are hankering for to be launched, the authors refer in passing to “those who take the Israeli threat of a pre-emptive strike seriously and believe it would be a mistake.” But even though it would indeed be a big mistake, and even though whatever crisis we supposedly have about Iran's nuclear program is being driven by the threat of Israel starting a new Middle Eastern war, the authors say absolutely nothing, despite all the unused means of U.S. leverage, about addressing that problem.

Neocons in 2003 considered British support for their Iraq War project so important that they were willing to twist Israeli arms to get an Israeli concession, and they succeeded. Isn't avoiding another badly mistaken war worth twisting arms again? Netanyahu didn't yield on that previous occasion, but on the issue of war with Iran he probably is even more of an outlier among Israelis than he was regarding the roadmap. It also certainly is worth exerting some of that unused leverage to salvage whatever chance remains for a stable and long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

President Obama can indeed be criticized for his approach so far toward Israel, but it is by no means the criticism to which Halevy is responding. The failure is not in pressing Israel but instead in not pressing it sufficiently for its own good. If we must use that clichéd bus metaphor, the problem is not in throwing Israel under a bus but instead in not rescuing Israel from a path it is taking on its own and that will cause it to get hit by the bus.

As this year's presidential campaign turns to debates about certain foreign conflicts and controversies with the potential for sucking the United States into war, here is an anniversary-based fact that does not seem to have received notice—certainly nothing like the Cuban missile crisis did this month upon its semicentennial.

The presidents of the United States who were elected 200 and 100 years ago both led the nation into war. Both did so despite earlier indications of personal hesitation and reservation in doing so.

The United States entered war with Britain during the final year of James Madison's first term. The impetus for war came principally from Congressional war hawks from the West and South such as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. When Madison sent to Congress in June 1812 what became known as his war message, it did not explicitly ask for a declaration of war. Instead it only listed the maritime and other grievances that the nation had against the British. Congress did declare a war—"Mr. Madison's war”—in which Madison would become the only U.S. president to be chased out of the White House by foreign troops.

A century later, as the European powers sank into the carnage of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson said to his aide Colonel House, “Madison and I are the only Princeton men that have become presidents. The circumstances of 1812 and now run parallel. I sincerely hope they will not go further.” Wilson was elected to a second term in 1916 aided by the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” But only a few months later he asked for and received a Congressional declaration of war. The United States was on the winning side of that war, but mismanagement of the aftermath set the stage for another ghastly European war two decades later.

Notwithstanding the many differences, there are some parallels between the circumstances of a century and two centuries ago and those of today. Let us sincerely hope the parallels will not go further.

Leon Hadar in these spaces has commended as a “sensible stance” toward the Israeli-Palestinian a policy, enunciated by a prominent American politician, that “we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.” Hadar criticizes “some self-proclaimed foreign-policy realists,” implying that their belief that “Washington can and ought to help make peace between Israelis and Palestinians” somehow contradicts realist criticisms of neocon ambitions to remake the Middle East in the American image. Insofar as Hadar is making a general point that there are difficult and often violent problems out there that the United States simply cannot be expected to solve, he's right about that. (For a nice statement on this theme that goes far beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, see Daniel Byman's recent treatment.) And Hadar is certainly correct that there are other regional and global players that need to play a role in resolving this conflict.

But Hadar seems oblivious to the enormous resonance that this conflict has like no other—with its continued festering harming U.S. interests—and to the leverage that could be, but has not been, applied to resolving it.

He also seems oblivious to what actual U.S. policies and efforts have, and have not, been in recent years. When he refers to “America's preoccupation with the conflict”—taking him to mean preoccupation with resolving the conflict—one wonders what he is looking at. The last preoccupation at the presidential level was that of Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000. Clinton's successor George W. Bush promptly made it known after entering office that he didn't want to be bothered by the Arab-Israeli issue. It was only near the end of his administration that he decided he ought to go through the motions of hosting a single conference on the subject. Barack Obama made a brief stab at addressing the main impediment to a negotiated settlement—the continued Israeli colonization of occupied territory—but promptly retreated when the Israeli government and its American supporters pushed back hard. Since then he hasn't run with the issue, much less be preoccupied with it, any more than Bush.

Hadar lectures us on how two parties will settle a conflict only if doing so is in their “core national interests” and cannot otherwise be forced to settle by some third party. Of course they can't, unless the third party exercises imperial domination—which is the sort of thing neocons would warm to in other contexts but is certainly not what any “self-proclaimed foreign-policy realists” would advocate. But this observation is not the same as saying other types of third-party participation are useless. If it were, we should find a way to revoke posthumously Teddy Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Nations locked in conflict with other nations often find themselves unable, for a variety of reasons, to embark on a course more conducive to their interests. With some of those reasons, the active participation of a third party can be instrumental.

There is a tautological quality to Hadar's treatment of this subject. When a mediation effort succeeds, such as with Carter at Camp David in 1978, then he says this must have been what the parties saw as in their core national interests, but when it fails, as with Clinton in 2000, this means they did not see it in their interests. This treatment leads to the glaringly incorrect comment that the parties reached agreement in 1978 “not as a response to American diplomatic pressure.” If nearly a fortnight of personal arm-twisting by the president of the United States and his senior foreign-policy aides and billions in assistance in buying off the parties' remaining hesitations does not qualify as relevant American diplomatic pressure, it is hard to imagine what would.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians strikes chords of anger and resentment and shapes attitudes toward the United States, more broadly and strongly than probably any other conflict around the globe. The chords are heard throughout the Arab world and to a large degree across parts of the larger Muslim world. That is why it is a mistake simply to lump this conflict, as Hadar does, together with other long-running disputes such as the one between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. That is also why it is a mistake to disregard the extent to which this particular conflict shapes the willingness of so many people either to cooperate with the United States or to strike out against it.

The extraordinary resonance of this issue underlies this accurate observation by Hadar:

Meanwhile, America's repeated failures as an “honest broker”—a designation that quite frequently runs contrary to its commitment to be a “reliable ally” of Israel—ends up producing an anti-American backlash in the Arab and Muslim worlds, which creates even more pressure on Washington to “do something.”

Correct, but clearly the problem is not with trying to be a broker but instead with failing to be an honest one. And that leads to the elephant in the room that Hadar does not mention at all: the extraordinary relationship between the United States and Israel, with the former bestowing on behalf of the latter many billions of unconditional aid and lonely vetoes at the United Nations and with advocates of the Israeli government having remarkable influence over U.S. policy in the Middle East. Given the shape of this relationship, the United States is in neck-deep in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whether or not we like to think it is. The extraordinary relationship with Israel ensures there will be high expectations about what the United States should do about the conflict, no matter what American leaders may or may not say about their intentions for doing something about it.

There is indeed an American preoccupation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it's just not a preoccupation with resolving the conflict. The dominant pattern affecting U.S. policy on this subject is not pressure from those self-proclaimed realists or anyone else to help resolve the conflict but instead pressure from supporters of the current Israeli government not to do things that would move toward a resolution—or even to keep open the possibility of a resolution, especially by freezing the Israeli colonization project. And this gets to all that potential but still unused U.S. leverage, embodied in all that aid and all those UN vetoes.

A benign-neglect policy toward this issue would not, as Hadar contends, “help send a clear message to the Israelis that the window of opportunity for American engagement in a Middle East peace process is gradually closing.” Instead it would send a message to the current Israeli leadership that it has a green light to continue consolidating its apartheid rule over all the territory it controls. It would send a message to the Israeli public that the United States is content to work with an Israeli leadership that follows that sort of policy and that they don't need to think about replacing that leadership. And it would send a message to the vast numbers of people who empathize with or feel kinship with the Palestinians that the United States doesn't really care if the Palestinians ever achieve justice and political rights.