"Israel and the totalization of power."

'Destroying the world as we know it.'

And so it began. Gaza City, the afternoon of 7 October 2023. (Wafa via APAimages, cc by SA 3.0./ Wikimedia Commons.)

This is the second of two essays examining Israel’s place in the design of American policy and the future implications of the terrorist regime’s aggressions in Gaza and elsewhere in West Asia. The first of these pieces, “Israel does ‘the wet work,’’’ can be found here.

—The Editors.

Patrick Lawrence

In a State Department memorandum titled “Review of Current Trends” and marked “Top Secret,” George F. Kennan reflected on America’s circumstances as they were on 24 February 1948, the date atop his report. The 1945 victories were but three years in the past. The United States suddenly found itself a global power. And as Luigi Barzini, the noted Italian journalist, remarked a few years later in Americans Are Alone in the World (Random House, 1953), Americans were as nervous and uncertain as they were ascendant.

Kennan went on to become America’s most celebrated diplomat during the Cold War decades, the architect of Washington’s “containment” policy. Here is a brief passage from his postwar tour d’horizon:

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population…. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming…. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

Further in his paper Kennan speculated:

The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

How strange it is to read these words three-quarters of a century later, as the Biden regime prosecutes via its Israeli client a genocide so raw, so uninhibited in its ferocity, we must search the decades that separate Kennan’s time from ours for comparisons. And when we find them—the firebombing of North Korea, the napalming of the Vietnamese—we are face-to-face with the horror hidden in the “straight power concepts” Kennan anticipated as America began its pursuit of global hegemony.

In net terms Kennan proposed that the U.S. discard the Wilsonian universalism—the incessant “light of the world” rhetoric with which America had long explained itself. But as anyone who listens cannot but note, the policy cliques and apologists in Washington have never, in all the decades of America’s postwar primacy, run short of “idealistic slogans.” The Biden regime has recited them routinely as it finances and supplies terrorist Israel’s murderous assaults on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank and lately on the Lebanese. We will never be without these official avowals of benign intent—“world-benefaction,” in Kennan’s sloppy phrase. But those making such professions have sacrificed—sacrificed to power—all remaining shreds of credibility since the events of 7 October one year back.

This is widely understood, even universally understood. Those professing to act in the name of justice and the human cause know perfectly well the emptiness of these claims. So do those to whom they are addressed. Even Americans, so often habituated to simulacra, know this. Mere pretense is sufficient in our post–7 October world. It is the preference among many Americans, just as Arendt observed, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that people subjected to relentless propaganda come to prefer deception. Deception offers refuge in a constructed reality, a meta-reality, a reality parallel to the reality we have created but cannot bear. I rank this—let us call it the temptation of betrayal—among the most evident consequences of the Gaza genocide and the Western powers’ sponsorship of it.

If the events in West Asia this past year have anything to tell us, it is that the Zionist state—as the grotesque creature of the American imperium, let us never forget—has led the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies into a new time—a new and unendurable time. The era whose threshold we stand upon marks a world-historical transformation the significance of which it would be difficult to overstate.