“‘Israel does ‘the wet work.’”

Zionism and the neoconservatives.

The served and the servant. Biden and Netanyahu, 18 October 2023. (The White House.)

This is the first of two essays examining Israel’s place in the design of American policy and the future implications of the terrorist regime’s genocide in Gaza. The second of these pieces, “Israel and the totalization of power,” will appear shortly.

—The Editors.

Patrick Lawrence

11 NOVEMBER—The notion of a distant ally serving as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” seems to be nearly as old as aircraft carriers. It means a usefully located landmass, typically but not always an island, that cannot be scuttled and can serve as a forward base for the projection of force. Over the decades, various hegemonic powers have been especially fond of the term. British and American war planners used Midway and Malta as aircraft carriers of this kind during World War II. After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, Cold Warriors in Washington thought Taiwan might serve in the same way.

Closer to our time, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan’s nationalist premier during the Reagan years, famously pledged to make his country America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific.” This was in 1983, just as President Reagan was intently re-escalating tensions with the Soviet Union after a period of détente. Reagan and his national-security people—neoconservatives very prominent among them—were especially fond of aircraft carriers made of land. While serving as Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig called Israel “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk.”

There is a useful lesson in this history. Haig, a four-star general who had also served as chief of staff in the Nixon White House, understood: The Zionist state exercises extraordinary influence in Washington by way of what we call the Israel lobby: There can be no underestimating this. But Israel is at bottom an instrument of American power, just as Japan has been since its 1945 defeat: It is peripheral, not metropolitan—the machine, not the operator.

There has been a running debate on this topic in the year that has passed since the events of 7 October 2023. The Biden regime’s limitless supply of lethal weapons to terrorist Israel’s military as it prosecutes its genocidal campaign against Palestinians has revived an argument that Israel, rather than serving as a client state in West Asia, in fact dictates U.S. policy in the region. Given Donald Trump’s professed loyalty to the Zionist cause, his election victory on 5 November is likely to prolong this discussion. But as I have commented elsewhere, appearances once again deceive. The thought that “the Jewish state” tells America what to do is no more true or even plausible in Israel’s case than it is in Japan’s.

There are a lot of dazed liberals among us since Trump trounced Kamala Harris at the polls. In strictly political terms, the sky has fallen for the Democrats now that their insulting joy-and-vibes story has failed to carry the most incompetent presidential candidate in my memory to the White House. But I am with Larry Fink, oddly enough, on one point. “I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime,” the chief executive at BlackRock told a conference of money-center executives shortly before the vote. “The reality is over time it doesn’t matter.”

Fink had in mind financial regulation, capital gains exemptions, corporate taxation rates, and other such matters, surely. Here I transplant his remark to another sphere. Neoconservatives—the hawks, unilateralists, and interventionists who rose to prominence in Washington onward from the late 1960s—ran the Biden regime’s national-security policies, and they would have run a Harris White House had any such thing come to be. Given the prominence of Zionists in the neocon cliques, nowhere has their influence been more evident than Washington’s policies toward Israel and West Asia altogether. And they are not going anywhere now.