Kako veš, da je hegemon izgubil svoj dominantni položaj? Takrat, ko več ne more pregnati vsiljivca in zaščititi svojih zaveznikov in ko se ga tudi zavezniki ne bojijo več in ignorirajo njegova priporočila in nasvete. ZDA se je to zgodilo v manj kot dveh letih – v Ukrajini in Izraelu (če pozabimo sramotni beg iz Afganistana). Spodaj je dobra analiza ameriške nemoči in impotence, ki jo je napisal Robert Wright.

Naj k temu dodam samo analogijo iz živalskega sveta. Levinje ostarelemu alfa samcu samo enkrat oprostijo poraz proti mlajšemu vsiljivcu (ki so ga morale same pregnati), naslednjič preženejo nemočnega ostarelega samca in si izberejo novega zaščitnika krdela. No, to se začenja dogajati ZDA. Le da se tega ameriški establishment še ni zavedel.

The phrase “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”— President Biden’s way of saying that America won’t use its leverage as chief arms supplier to push Ukraine toward a peace deal—never made sense to me. Isn’t using leverage on less powerful allies a defining trait of great powers? And didn’t the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say more than a year ago—presciently, we now know—that Ukraine’s battlefield prospects were unlikely to improve, so we should pursue a peace deal rather than spend more money and lives putting Ukraine in a worse bargaining position?

“Nothing about Israel without Israel”—a statement that, though not yet uttered by Biden, seems to capture his policy on the Gaza war—is in a way even more puzzling. With Israel, unlike Ukraine, Biden has explicitly and repeatedly said he would like to change the less powerful ally’s behavior. He has said the rate of civilian deaths in Gaza should drop and Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” should be refined and the war should wind down soon. Yet trying to use America’s leverage with Israel to those ends is apparently out of the question. Biden alternates between saying he doesn’t approve of what the Israelis are doing and sending them the weapons they’re doing it with.

Becoming known as a president who’s afraid to play hardball with allies has its costs. The frequency and directness with which Israeli officials convey to the world that they don’t care about Biden’s opinion is getting embarrassing. This week, for example:

(1) Israel’s ambassador to the UK ruled out the possibility of a Palestinian state—even though Biden has insisted that a path to such a state must be part of the war’s aftermath.

(2) Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said that the war “will last more than several months”—even though, only a week earlier, Politico, citing multiple Israeli officials, reported that the administration had told Israel it had to “wrap up its war on Hamas” by the end of the year. That’s two weeks from now.

What’s more: In an impressive power move, Gallant said this while standing next to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who had traveled to Tel Aviv to confer with Israeli officials in hopes of convincing them to, among other things, quit saying things like this. After this awkward spectacle, in an apparent attempt to salvage some pride, the Biden administration leaked that Sullivan had been firmer with Gallant and other Israeli officials in private than in public; he had told them that the war needs to “transition to the next lower intensity phase in a matter of weeks, not months.”

How many weeks? How much lower the intensity? The goalposts, as they recede, are getting blurrier.

In the case of Ukraine, Biden could at least trot out superficially plausible reasons that sustaining the war was in America’s interest. I mean, these reasons don’t make sense to me, but if you have the Manichaean mindset so common in the US foreign policy establishment, the logic has a kind of brutal appeal. As Ivo Daalder, former US Ambassador to NATO and now head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, laid it out in October: “If anybody on February 24, 2022 had told you that an investment by the United States of 43 billion dollars and no American lives would have led to the destruction of half the Russian army, everybody would have said ‘Fantastic, I’ll do that, I’ll give you a hundred billion if you want to do that.’ It has been an unbelievable investment.”

You can call Daalder callous—as you might if you were one of the maimed or bereaved Ukrainians who perhaps belong somewhere in his spreadsheet. But you can’t say he’s not at least making an argument about American interests.

In the case of Gaza, though, even a remotely plausible argument of this kind is hard to find. The war—which more and more looks like it could culminate in massive ethnic cleansing—is (1) reducing America’s stature across the world and staining its reputation for decades to come; (2) raising the chances of terrorism on American soil; (3) raising the chances that the US will be engulfed in a regional war; and (4) raising the chances of civil conflict in America by (a) intensifying antisemitism and anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment, and (b) fomenting tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine activists.

And on the positive side there is… what? Does Biden even pretend that this war is somehow benefiting America?

For that matter, Biden seems to be moving away from his earlier claim that the war was benefiting Israel. Two weeks ago Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, reading from a no doubt White House-approved text, said that the mass killing of civilians in Gaza threatens to turn the war into “a strategic defeat” for Israel.

In short: America’s current relationship with Israel consists of tolerating—and materially supporting—a course of action that America’s president seems to consider bad for America and bad for Israel. After all, what are friends for?

This perverse dynamic has characterized the US-Israel relationship for much of the past few decades. The US, while professing to care about Israel, and possessing tremendous leverage over it, has failed to use that leverage to get Israel to do things that would have been in Israel’s long-term interest.

Like, for example: Stop building the West Bank settlements that, in addition to flagrantly violating international law, have made a two-state solution less and less conceivable, thus making periodic conflict with Palestinians more and more predictable. Though the barbarism of Hamas’s October 7 attack shocked just about everyone, the cyclical recurrence of some kind of violence by Palestinians against Israelis has become a feature of the Middle Eastern landscape, and the US is in no small part responsible for that.

Of course, it’s possible to shift some of that blame to Israel. In addition to building the settlements—and in various other ways impeding resolution of the Palestinian conflict—it has fiercely resisted American efforts to change those ways.

Sometimes Israel does this in concert with some of the various “pro-Israel” American institutions and groups and influencers (yes, those quotation marks are meant to convey irony) that together constitute the “Israel lobby”. If any American president makes a serious attempt to significantly modify Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, the domestic political blowback from various quarters is intense. 

Hence Biden’s impotence. In theory he has massive leverage with Israel—not just as a supplier of weapons and other material resources, but as its guardian at the UN Security Council and in various other roles. If Biden was really intent on reshaping Israel’s behavior, there are lots of levers he could pull. But he’s afraid to do that—afraid of the political consequences of actually trying to serve America’s and Israel’s long-term interests.

The same kinds of forces are at work with Ukraine. There is a Ukraine lobby, even if it’s less powerful and less far flung than the Israel lobby. And, like the Israel lobby, it has the ironic effect of subverting the very logic of friendship. It is when friends are involved in intense conflicts that their judgment can be catastrophically bad—and your job is therefore to get them to coolly weigh their long term interests. But America’s “pro-Ukraine” and “pro-Israel” lobbies, even if physically remote from the conflicts, wind up reflecting that bad judgment and fighting any American attempts to clarify it.

In addition to national lobbies, there is a kind of hawk lobby—a chorus of politicians, think tankers, and lobbyists who look for opportunities to accuse presidents (especially Democratic ones) of weakness. The hawk lobby would have pilloried Biden if, for example, he had used diplomacy to head off Putin’s invasion after Putin massed troops on Ukraine’s border. 

We need a different kind of hawk lobby: a lobby that accuses American presidents of weakness every time fear of domestic political blowback keeps them from helping nations they profess to care about, including their own. Contrary to the claims of the current hawk lobby, that’s the kind of cowardice that has done the most damage to US foreign policy and, in the long run, to the interests of the US, its friends, and the world.

Vir: Robert Wright, Nonzero