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How the U.S. Keeps Enabling Reckless Clients

Shashank Joshi criticizes the slow U.S. response to the conflict in Gaza: Eleven days ago, discussing the paucity of possible mediators, I warned that “unless someone steps up, Israel and Hamas could find themselves hurtling into a wider war that neither truly wants”. This is precisely what has happened. Those with leverage over the combatants […]

Shashank Joshi criticizes the slow U.S. response to the conflict in Gaza:

Eleven days ago, discussing the paucity of possible mediators, I warned that “unless someone steps up, Israel and Hamas could find themselves hurtling into a wider war that neither truly wants”. This is precisely what has happened. Those with leverage over the combatants [bold mine-DL] have shown themselves to be every bit as useless as I feared.

Although US President Barack Obama has called for an “immediate ceasefire”, and US Secretary of State John Kerry was caught on tape sarcastically criticising Israel (“It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation. We’ve got to get over there. I think we ought to go tonight. I think it’s crazy to be sitting around”), Washington has been unpardonably slow to act. There is no sign that the White House did anything to caution Israel against escalation, and only today – Monday – has Kerry travelled to Cairo.

Joshi makes many fair points here, but there is unfortunately nothing surprising or unusual in Washington’s tardiness in half-heartedly trying to restrain its client. U.S. politicians make ritual declarations of support for Israel’s “right to defend itself,” which is expanded as needed to apply to whatever Israel happens to be doing, and then some of them later call for restraint after the client escalates the conflict with their blessing. The calls are usually too late to do any good, and they are always ignored anyway because the client government knows that it won’t suffer any consequences for paying no attention to them. Despite being complicit in what Israel does during its military operations, the U.S. tries to create the impression that it is not fully endorsing Israeli actions. Washington does this for the benefit of the international audience, but I don’t think very many people outside the U.S. are buying it. This leads to an odd arrangement of giving the client a blank check on the one hand and feigning shock at the client’s excess on the other.

He refers to the leverage that the U.S. has over Israel, but he and everyone else knows perfectly well that the U.S. won’t use whatever leverage it has to get Israel to halt its current operation (or to do anything else). U.S. clients know they can behave however they wish, and U.S. aid will continue to flow because enough people in the U.S. have convinced themselves that we cannot afford to “lose” these clients. We saw something similar in the wake of the coup in Egypt: the U.S. was never willing to cut off aid to Egypt or seriously penalize its military for what it had done for fear of “losing” Egypt, so any leverage the U.S. might have thought it had was useless. Washington didn’t want to risk losing its limited influence, and in the end had none at all. Likewise, everyone involved knows that the U.S. will never cut off its aid to Israel or firmly oppose its actions even when Washington may consider them to be foolish, because the administration and members of Congress are much more anxious to demonstrate their support for Israel than they are interested in putting conditions on that support. The U.S. doesn’t really have any leverage over its clients because there is absolutely no desire in Washington to use the aid it provides to make the clients change their behavior. The U.S. enables the reckless behavior of clients with its unconditional support, and its clients will keep behaving recklessly for as long as they can do so with impunity.

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