This is a very comprehensive essay by Robert Kagan about the Netanyahu government's embrace of right wing nationalism around the world. Kagan notes that Israel has made close to ties to Putin's Russia, Orban's Hungary, even Bolsanaro's Brazil. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Netanyahu government's embrace of the the Republican Party and evangelical US Christians.
As Kagan implies, this has put Israel on a collision course with the "international liberal order" that is under assault from all sides. Kagan also notes that the US-Israeli alliance has largely been based on shared values rather than US strategic interest. Foreign policy realism would argue for jettisoning any unconditional support for Israel to woo the much more numerous and important Muslim states. He uses the penetrating example of Iran, a country that likely poses no threat to the US, but does to Israel. Our constant animosity towards Iran is largely in service to Israeli security interests and does not make for a stable Persian Gulf.
Eventually, there will be a Democratic president who is more willing to take on Netanyahu. Do we really need to subsidize the Israeli military at the cost of $3B a year in order to subjugate the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza? Do we need to continue to protect Israel in the UN?
More broadly, the next Democratic president is going to have two huge tasks, even if s/he is inaugurated in 2021. First, they will have to restaff and repair the basic functions of government. A lot of the federal bureaucracy is being hollowed out by Republicans. Creating a government that can actually work again will be as important as whatever laws will be passed through a (potential) narrow Senate majority.
Secondly, the next President will have to repair America's standing in the world. Famously, Obama's Trans Pacific Partnership was torpedoed from the Left in the 2016 election from a basic revulsion of free trade. Yet, free trade is one of the pillars of the post-war international liberal order. While free trade is complicated in both domestic and international economics, it does largely work. However, it has very few defenders at the moment. The TPP was designed to protect workers in ways that earlier trade deals didn't, but because it was lumped in with other free trade agreements, it was pilloried. But the TPP was more than a trade deal, it was an attempt to buttress the countries of Pacific basin against a powerful but illiberal China.
This trend towards nationalism and illiberalism has an end point: global war. Nationalism feeds off military conflict. (That Trump has largely resisted this impulse is one of the more curious aspects of his presidency. His firing of John Bolton is an objectively good thing. Trump is a man of simple ideas and impulses and somewhere deep in his tapioca brain he's internalized the idea that war is bad for business.)
As countries retreat into what Kagan and others call "blood and soil nationalism" the potential for wars increase. As we saw in 1914, regional wars can trigger broader conflicts that can engulf the whole world. If militant rightist nationalism isn't thwarted politically, it's logical next step will be the sort of global war we saw last time a pair of powerful countries embraced this toxic idea. While Japan and Germany are not likely to be next source of geopolitical instability, India/Pakistan; Iran/Saudi Arabia or perhaps even Ukraine/Russia could be the spark that ignites World War III. If humanity survives, perhaps then we will relearn the lesson of 1945.
If humanity survives.
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