The Lobby Diversion

I think Matt is essentially right here with respect to some critics of the Mearsheimer/Walt article:

Last, but certainly not least, is this: “We can — and should — debate the roll of ethnic groups in American politics, the nature of the US-Israel relationship, and just about anything under the sun.” Those sort of disclaimers were de rigeur for participants in the smear campaign against Walt and Mearsheimer at the time, but the most noteworthy thing about the controversy, from where I sit, is that folks on the other side seem, in fact, to be totally unwilling to actually debate the issues at hand.

Instead, there’s been a massive amount of harping on the failings — some real, some wholly imagined — of the Walt/Mearsheimer essay. And, to be sure, it had its problems. But still, there’s a policy issue here to be debated, and it actually should be debated.

Personally, I would be fascinated to read a serious defense of the proposition that making Israel by far the largest recipient of American foreign aid serves our national interests or else is dictated by considerations of abstract morality. Then we could debate!

I think this is right–critics of the article haven’t really been willing to seriously debate these questions, and I also agree with Matt’s implication that it would be extraordinarily difficult to justify Israel getting so much more aid than India, say.

However, it must also be said that M/W opened this particular exit. The central point of the article, after all, is not to defend the claim that American policy toward Israel is not in the national interest–M/W establish this premise in a few paragraphs and for the rest of the paper take it as a given before moving on to the real argument, that this disjuncture is caused by the power of the pro-Israel lobby. I think that this is, in fact, an object lesson in why assertions about the power of Israeli lobby are almost always useless at best and counterproductive at worst. As anyone who studies interest groups knows, making convincing casual claims about the influence of interest groups is notoriously difficult even when groups have more resources and conflicts with the ideology of decision-makers are more evident than is the case here–the fact that state actors have their own interests and normative goals (and multiple sources of funding and support) makes untangling cause-and-effect is nearly impossible, even with the most careful study. And, needless to say, M/W’s arguments on this score are far from careful; indeed, their grasp on the relevant literature is tenuous at best, and leads them into frankly embarrassing howlers. I agree with Jacob Levy that their claim that “The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about” is the ” worst paragraph of political science I’ve read in many years;” the idea that the state’s natural equilibrium is to pursue the “national interest” and only those opposed to the “national interest” need lobbies is just absurd, and would lead to rather unsavory conclusions such as that the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow were not in the “national interest.” (Could somebody please not only kill functionalism but cremate it and scatter the ashes so nobody can try to resurrect it again?) It’s understandable that people are picking up on the tendentiousness of their analysis, and unfortunate as it is that it obscures the important and defensible points they do make one can hardly blame their critics for noting that their central claim just isn’t very well-defended.

But moreover, I also don’t understand the decision to focus on the power of the pro-Israel lobby, because it’s ultimately beside the point. What matters is whether the policy can be defended in realist and/or moral terms, not the virtually impossible question of exactly what influence a particular lobby has had. Even if M/W hadn’t provided people who wish to evade this debate with such low-hanging fruit, I don’t think that trying to answer virtually impossible questions about the precise influence of the pro-Israel lobby does much to serve the debate. What’s really important is whether state decision-makers should want what they’re trying to sell, and that’s the debate worth having.