William Moloney
The parallels are eerie: Israel is at war, following a successful surprise attack enabled partly by a failure of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services. The Jewish state is confronting enemies on all three borders. It is the object of virulent hatred across much of the Muslim world, faces widespread indifference in some European countries, and in the U.S. some are reasserting the familiar argument of “moral equivalence” between Israeli and Palestinian causes.
In Washington, the American president has his own troubles, with plummeting approval numbers, a sputtering economy, a sour national mood following a long and unsuccessful war, and an opposition party sponsoring investigations alleging lawless behavior, discussing impeachment, and determined to end his presidency.
The above descriptions, with marginal variations, somewhat portray the conditions in Israel and the United States both today and in 1973.
Back then, President Richard Nixon responded to Israel’s plea for assistance by ordering, within eight days of an initial attack, a massive airlift — “Operation Nickel Grass” — that delivered in roughly a month’s time 22,325 tons of tanks, artillery and ammunition. This extraordinary effort allowed Israel to decisively turn the tide of the war against the invading Egyptians, and effectively deterred other bad actors — including Russia — from involvement in the conflict.
The world has changed dramatically in the half-century since the Yom Kippur War. The relative strength of the United States in the international balance of power is greatly diminished from what it was in 1973. The detente with China that Nixon achieved in 1972 is a thing of the past. Today China is a committed opponent, determined to overturn what it sees as American hegemony. Iran — once a U.S. ally under the shah — is now one of America’s most implacable foes and a sponsor of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations attacking Israel.
In the Middle East, Israel is a small nation of roughly 9 million people surrounded by authoritarian Muslim regimes, with an aggregate population of more than 200 million, who view the Jewish State as the illegitimate oppressor of the Palestinian people. The most dangerous of these is a near-nuclear Iran, deadly earnest about “wiping Israel off the map.” And both the Israeli and the U.S. governments have emphasized there’s no moral equivalence with regard to the terrorist tactics of Hamas.
America’s worldwide commitments today are nearly as great as in 1973, but the economic resources needed to meet them are far less — a condition that British historian Paul Kennedy in 1987 described as “imperial overstretch.” At present, the United States is in the untenable position of being committed to defend the territorial borders of three nations thousands of miles from the American homeland — Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan — while our own southern border is being massively overrun by migrants.
Clearly, our country has reached a time for choosing where our truest national interest lies.
President Joe Biden confers with national security adviser Jake Sullivan during a roundtable with Jewish community leaders in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Oct. 11, 2023 in Washington.
In a different world, we might attempt to simultaneously protect the borders of all four countries, but today that task is self-evidently impossible. By way of illustration, consider the stark contrast between the immensity of the logistical support provided to Israel by Operation Nickel Grass in 1973 and our current posture. Though we have moved warships and aircraft to the region, only a few months ago President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly justified sending cluster bombs to Ukraine by conceding that we’re “running out of ammunition” for our own troops.
Our country has been described as a “world policeman,” but we must remember that a good policeman knows both the limits of his jurisdiction and the identity of the people he is sworn to protect. So, in prioritizing our obligation, the obvious first commitment must be to our own homeland, where some Americans are evidencing a growing dismay and even anger over the our government’s failure to deal with the metastasizing crisis on our southern border that’s spreading to some major cities once designated as “sanctuary cities.”
If the American people were asked about the three foreign countries where we have made commitments of varying kinds over time, many undoubtedly would say that Israel should be our highest priority. Israel came into existence fundamentally as a moral response to monstrous and historically unique crimes: the Holocaust. Through four wars that represented attempts to destroy the Jewish state, America has stood by its ally. Now we are called to do so again. The U.S. and its allies — France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom — have pledged to “ensure Israel is able to defend itself.”
With regard to Taiwan and Ukraine — bordering and respectively threatened by our greatest adversaries, China and Russia — America’s challenges are more difficult and complex. The choices we make will not be easy and, ultimately, they must be made in the Oval Office. As Harry Truman told us long ago, “The buck stops here.”
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