The Theory of Victory or Death
“Why has American support for Israel gone up in a period in which the Zionist state has lost all value from a US strategic point of view? The US-Israel relationship and the Zionist enterprise itself are significant test cases for theories that regard states as rational actors. A brief historical overview is in order.”
Editors | November 2023
We are often told that the leaders of states that threaten Western interests are motivated by hatred, resentment and paranoia. While this is a recurring motif in official and media portrayals of foreign enemies, it is easy for the broader public to be made to see it this way too, as the notion that those who oppose us are not quite right in the head probably has roots in human nature. For their part, critics of US foreign policy often see its architects as prone to hubris and wishful thinking (though far worse things are said of them) and can point to a long track record of failed outcomes, from the Vietnam War to more recent debacles in the Ukraine and the Middle East. It is important to recall then that the founding principle of modern political science is flatly opposed to these commonly expressed opinions, in holding individuals—and by extension, states—to be rational actors. Co-authored with Sebastian Rosato, Mearsheimer’s latest work is a defense of this assumption against much apparent evidence to the contrary and in it he provides some criteria for evaluating the rationality of controversial strategic decisions past and present.1
Our authors point out that the nature of reason—the activity and goals of reasoning itself—is rarely addressed in the social sciences. The prevailing positivism offers a pseudo-solution to this problem by defining rationality as utility maximization—the efficient attainment of freely chosen and ranked preferences, sometimes called ends or goals. This is called “rational choice theory” and they argue that its conception of rationality fails on two counts. The first is that it misrepresents the actual thinking process by which these actors arrive at decisions by asking us to assume that agents come to decide after ranking their preferences, aggregating the available data, and calculating the odds of various outcomes. Proponents of this theory recognize that this does not actually happen, but they see this representation of choice under conditions of scarcity as a useful theoretical fiction. While Mearsheimer defends the use of sweeping abstractions to identify the strategic logic of sovereign decision making, this simulacrum of rationality, he argues, thoroughly obscures it. The second problem with this view is that it cannot address whether preferences are themselves rational. Going back to Hegel and before, the philosophical conception of the state began with the problem of its rational ends. In a break from this tradition, modern social sciences understand rationality to be solely a matter of the means of attaining ends which are themselves neither rational nor irrational. They are subjective values—Max Weber’s “warring gods.”2 Here utility is not an objective measure of pleasure or the like but a placeholder term for whatever goals the relevant actors happen to choose and how they rank them assuming a scarcity of means.
When applied to international relations, rational choice theorists argue that states act as if they were utility maximizers. Here is a simple Cold War example of the application of this method they provide.
Assume the following: first, American policymakers examined the data available to them, and estimated there was a 60% chance that the Soviet Union was expansionist, and a 40% chance that it was status quo. Second, they would rank the four possible outcomes from most preferred to least preferred: 1) cheap balance of power, 2) costly balance of power, 3) superpower war and 4) Soviet hegemony over Europe. Third, they then assign these outcomes cardinal utilities of 1, .75, .25 and 0 respectively, reflecting their belief that a cheap balance of power would best serve US security, a costly one would be next best, and that while war would be bad, Soviet hegemony would be an even worse outcome.
Given these probabilities and utilities, the rational decision was for the United States to keep its forces in Europe (Stay) and not fall back on an off-shore balance (Leave) because the expected utility of remaining was greater than the expected utility of withdrawing given assumptions about probable Soviet intentions. The method is expressed in the following equations:
1. Expected utility of keeping forces in Europe = (probability of USSR being expansionist) (the utility of a superpower war) + (probability of USSR being status quo) (the utility of a costly balance of power)
Stay: (.6)(.25) + (.4)(.7) = .45
2. Expected utility of withdrawing = (probability USSR expansionist) (utility of Soviet hegemony) + (probability USSR status quo) (utility cheap balance of power)
Leave: (.6)(0) + (.4)(1) = .4
Since .45 > .4, we supposedly see why they chose to stay.
The authors argue that this entire framework of hypothetical calculations completely misrepresents the realities of strategic decision-making by assuming that decision-makers can assign accurate quantitative probabilities to the intentions of their adversaries and meaningful quantitative magnitudes to their preferred outcomes.
But while they attack the rational choice theory understanding of rationality, their main polemical target is another, and indeed competing, school of IR scholars: the political psychologists. The political psychologists reject the usefulness of the rational choice fiction, but subscribe to the same standard of rationality. The criticism of the latter applies then to both. The political psychologists hold that in practice individuals can never actually be fully rational because they lack the cognitive ability to aggregate all the data required to make decisions that would maximize their utility. Being ordinary human beings, statesmen are bound to be irrational to varying degrees and so resort to the same shortcuts we all do when opining and choosing whom to vote for: ideologically or emotionally loaded heuristics and analogies. Though it has taken the form of a theory, this is close to common sense, what used to be called “the man on the street” point of view. Mearsheimer and Rosato forcefully reject it.
All the political psychologists they criticize seem to incline to the standard good guy-bad guy school of history. The political psychologists aim to prove that the bad rulers were more susceptible to the influence of this kind of irrational pattern thinking than the good ones, though both kinds lay on a spectrum. Some of the examples these scholars adduce are the alleged failures of rationality underlying the decisions of the leaders of Germany and Japan to initiate hostilities at the outset of WWI and WWII. He takes up such cases on the premise that if it can be proven that these apparently irrational decisions were rational then it would be plausible to conclude that states are more generally rational. But as was said at the outset, this involves establishing a different conception of reason.
How do states think? While individuals employ cognitive shortcuts in their everyday lives, this is not true, the authors say, of the primary actors of international politics who must base their decisions on implicit or explicit causal theorizing. Mearsheimer and his co-author criticize rational choice theorists and political psychologists for failing to recognize the necessarily causal form of cognition under the pressure of existential challenges. What’s at stake is the distinction between causality and mere statistical frequency. In order to understand the exigencies of this strategic rationality we have to understand the difference between the causal nature of uncertainty and the statistical one of risk. In a risk world, decision-makers do not know the consequences of pursuing any given strategy, but they can acquire the information needed to calculate the odds of various outcomes. Rational choice and political psychology assume we live in a world of risk where decision makers act as if they possess this information (the former) or, alternatively, never have access to sufficient information and so must rely on shortcut pattern thinking (the latter). But the inter-state world is one not of risk but rather of uncertainty. In other words, it is not a lack of data but an irreducible inter-subjective openness of conflicting intentions that characterizes this uncertainty. Over the last century, economists have attempted to efface the ontological distinction between risk and uncertainty and to apply probabilities to every instance of our imperfect knowledge of the future. Many IR scholars have been swept up in this positivist vogue. In so doing, they end up conflating two fundamentally different worlds, the small world of risk and the large world of uncertainty.
The specific form of large-world uncertainty that obtains under these conditions is the unknowability of the intentions of other states which threaten one’s own existence as a state. In this anarchic state of nature, no neutral arbiter stands above the fray. Though uncertain, inter-state anarchy nonetheless comprises a causal system organized around a balance of power that each state must look to in banding together with friends against enemies for their own protection. This is why decision-makers in a winner-loser, self-help international system need causal theories about how other states are thinking in order to guide their actions. Since the survival of their state is at stake, superficial heuristics and rules of thumb will not do. The strategists cannot crunch numbers or hand over the decision-making to computers.
Two consequences follow from this inter-subjective uncertainty of the international state of nature, where no higher power adjudicates disputes and settlement by force lurks in the background. The first is that given inter-state anarchy, the rationality of strategic decisions cannot be determined by outcomes. Rational strategic decisions under these conditions sometimes lead to catastrophic outcomes. What makes decisions rational is not outcomes but solely the process by which they were reached. It would seem to follow that even a decision to launch a nuclear first strike, though the whole uncertain world itself perished, might nonetheless be rational by this standard. As is said, you can hate the game, but not the player. Second, since theoretical claims are probabilistic statements, they are not falsified when contradicted in particular cases. The very uncertainty that makes theory so necessary makes empirical verification difficult. And this is why there are multiple theories of international politics that policy-makers can choose from in arriving at strategic decisions.
This theory-dependent conception of the rational decision-making process presupposes a specific relationship between statecraft and the world of ideas. The ruling part of the executive that makes military and diplomatic decisions consists of the head of government plus a few ministers and their advisors who act collectively to formulate state policy. The guiding institution of any rational state is thus a fairly small deliberative body, “where competing options are discussed and weighed, resulting in victory for a particular theory or theories.” Here the claim that use of military force must be subject to a strict political calculus depends upon a particular institutional relation between political and military decision-making. The underlying division of labor bears a resemblance to Clausewitz’s portrayal of a rational state, and one can imagine Mearsheimer at home among the great Prussian theorists of war and diplomacy.
For policy deliberation to be rational there not only needs to be an open weighing of pros and cons, there also needs to be an ultimate decider who “must adjudicate in response to events rather than merely ratify a consensus or agreement.” This necessity for a final decision is why the collective brain of a properly sovereign state is organized hierarchically. Mearsheimer shows that one key variable in determining whether the conduct of foreign policy is rational or not is whether the ultimate decider is a facilitator or a dominator. When what he calls a “facilitator” is in charge, different theories are debated in a vigorous and unconstrained fashion. But when a “dominator” is in charge, rigged or otherwise unfree deliberation will tend to lead to faulty strategic decisions. Mearsheimer argues that policy is rational if it is the product of a deliberative process and if it is based on a credible theory. By these criteria, Imperial Japan’s decision to bomb Pearl Harbor and begin a war against a vastly more powerful America was rational whereas the decision to invade and impose regime change on a crippled Iraq was irrational, though both ended in failure.
Rational policymakers are homines theoretici. The relevant bodies of IR theory originate in academia or other centers of intellectual production and find their way into the minds of strategists. Policymakers in today’s world appraise situations and formulate strategies by drawing on two broad theoretical traditions: realism and liberalism, each of which includes a number of different theories. There are now three types of realism: defensive realism, offensive realism and hegemonic realism, a variant conceived by Robert Gilpin that Mearsheimer has never previously considered and whose introduction, we shall see, destabilizes the opposition he has posited to liberalism. Hegemonic realists say that states seek unrivaled power not only to ensure their security, but also to pursue more ambitious goals to shape the world in ways that maximize their political, economic, ideological and other interests. Let us take note that this kind of realism makes room for goals other than security.
Liberal theories reject the realist contention that the inter-state system has a structural logic to which states are compelled to conform. On the contrary, liberalism rests on a bottom-up view of the political world in which the demands of individuals and power relations between whole societal groups are treated as analytically prior to the state, and individual states as analytically prior to the inter-state system to which they belong. While realists tend to the view that the principles governing international politics have remained essentially the same since the seventeenth century, if not the advent of states themselves, liberal theorists going back to Kant have argued that the pursuit of prosperity in modern times has engendered a powerful evolutionary trend leading to states’ progressive acquiescence to legal rules imposed by an increasingly self-governing society, and from there to ever greater cooperation among states, which in turn will attenuate and finally supersede the cut-throat calculus of realism.
If states can be seen as rational so long as their decision-makers are acting on a credible theory, and there are many such theories, does that not set the bar too low for what passes as rational? While this pluralism seems like it might lead to intellectual chaos and indecision, fortunately the strategic “community” and the academics that aspire to influence it consider only the most logically coherent theories, bolstered by evidence from the annals of successful and failed strategic decisions.
Though they see most states as rational most of the time, Mearsheimer and Rosato point to a number of cases in which governments made irrational decisions because they opted for a non-credible theory, typically after a highly flawed decision-making process. Among these he classes the foolhardy German decision to build up a battleship fleet to challenge the British in the North Sea in the years before WWI, “Risikotheorie” par excellence; the British decision to abandon efforts to contain Germany in the lead-up to Munich; and the American effort to topple Castro in Operation Zapata. In each of these cases, a breakdown of the normal mechanism of deliberation resulted in the adoption of a faulty theory that supported an enormous miscalculation. But a closer look at his treatment of them reveals that the term “theory” has taken on a different meaning.
When Mearsheimer considers the credibility of the theories that guided these blunders, “theory” here simply refers to the specific causal assumptions underlying the scenario planning of foreign-policy decision-makers—but these all presupposed a balance-of-power world and therefore the truth of IR realism. These were not therefore opposing theories in the sense of conceptual systems identifying different general logics of the inter-state relations. Attempting to forecast the behavior of other states on the basis of theories conceived of as concrete strategic plans is an ordinary feature of inter-state relations, but choosing between the larger genus of theory that informs the underlying assumptions of such planning has only happened once. Not until the end of the Cold War did a choice between theories in this latter sense become possible, and only the United States confronted it.
The US was the first state in history to have the option of choosing between realism and some wholly distinct alternative, because with the collapse of the USSR, it found itself in a unipolar world, where it could take on the altogether more grandiose project of a New World Order conceived of and superintended on a global scale. If the Soviets had won no doubt they would have done likewise. But unlike the Soviets or any earlier contenders for regional hegemony in Europe or Asia, the US had already attained hegemony in its own region, the Western hemisphere. Separated from the other theaters by vast oceans, the US could contemplate a range of possibilities from isolationism to remaking the world in its image. Being a liberal state with a penchant for moral crusades, its leading minds unsurprisingly ended up discarding realism in favor of liberal hegemony. This strategic decision put distinct conceptual systems and corresponding worldviews into contention. Such a clash of ideas raised more general theoretical issues regarding the nature of the inter-state order than any of the previous cases of decision-making surveyed here—involving “theories” of a far more limited scope—all of which, after all, presupposed realism. It would seem then as if the early post-Cold War world provided an ideal historical laboratory for assessing the relative merits of realism versus liberalism in the eyes of those who deliberate and decide.
But with the introduction of the term “hegemonic realism,” the very opposition of realism to liberalism seems to lose its force. Hegemonic realism holds that capable states seek not only to ensure their security, but also to pursue more ambitious goals to shape the world in ways that maximize their political, economic, ideological and other interests. Liberal hegemony, in so far as it agrees that states prioritize security but also have more ambitious world-changing goals, would appear to be merely a specific instance of the general theory of hegemonic realism. This ambiguation of the theoretical distinction between realism and liberalism mirrors an ambiguity in Mearsheimer’s characterization of the post-Cold War international system itself: did it remain a realist world, as he argued in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, or did it for a time actually become another kind of international order, in which realist compulsions were subordinated to a different structural logic? All realist worlds have been multipolar or bipolar: did the age-old balance of power cease to operate under unipolarity, or did it merely seem to be inoperative within the historically unprecedented context of unipolarity?
Whether America’s post-Cold War grand strategy of liberal hegemony was rational depends on the answer to this question. Realist critics of US foreign policy see the whole sorry affair as a lesson in the perils of hubris and point to its track record of failures. Many will therefore be surprised to learn that Mearsheimer and his co-author argue here that while liberal hegemony was a failure, it was a rational grand strategy in that it was a project based on a credible theory and it resulted from a deliberative process. This suggests a shift from his earlier view, in which liberal hegemony was seen as bound to fail because the post-Cold War world remained realist despite all that liberal guff about democracy, international law and globalization. His new view is that the Cold War grand strategy of containment was irrelevant after the fall of the Soviet Union, since there was no other great power to contain, hence the laws of realism were suspended for a time. The idea that liberal hegemony was based on a credible theory presupposes that under unipolarity it was rational to think that the US could best pursue its interests by promoting democracy, pushing globalization, and embedding other states and, to a lesser extent, itself into international institutions. None of this would have been possible if the traditional realist imperatives of the international system were still operative, so one may surmise that he is now more open to the idea that the US was in a position to phase out the realist world of strategic uncertainty with compelling inducements backed by a massive superiority of force.
Though the theoretical genus was credible, some of the ideas supporting liberal hegemony were less so and informed some specific strategic deductions that were entirely baseless. Democratic Peace Theory hold that democracies will not go to war with each other, a generalization that rests on dubious criteria of what counts as a democracy. In any event, neocons took it to support their view that the US could stamp out terrorism, stem the proliferation of WMDs and lay the groundwork for Arab-Israeli peace by regime-changing hostile dictatorships. Few now think that champions of US democracy promotion in this period can point to any successes, though spectacular failures in the Middle East no doubt overshadow some achievements in other regions.
Like the poor strategic decisions of Kaiser Wilhelm, Prime Minister Chamberlain and President Kennedy, taken in a realist world, the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq was a heedless choice made in a unipolar world. And though this attempt to remake regimes rested on delusional premises and was rammed through with scurrilous maneuvers, its failure does not invalidate the underlying theory of liberal hegemony.
For the more telling consideration in evaluating the rationality of the grand strategy of liberal hegemony is whether promoting China’s integration into a world market regulated by rules set by the US, its allies and supporting institutions was ever a good idea from a US strategic perspective. This grand strategic decision was supported by Economic Interdependence Theory, another variant in the case for liberal hegemony. Mearsheimer has previously argued that it was remarkably foolish on a realist calculus of the balance of power for the US to allow and even encourage China’s extraordinarily rapid economic ascent. But whereas the neo-con democracy crusade was soon widely recognized as delusional, the neo-liberal enterprise of integrating China into the world market was until recently regarded by experts in America and the world over as a stunning success.
The case for liberal hegemony ultimately rests on whether it was reasonable to assume that the dynamic of world market capitalism would fundamentally modify the logic of inter-state competition. Arguably, it was and will continue to be reasonable to assume that, even as Clinton-era visions of global pacification have come to seem very remote now. The rational core of liberal hegemony is a credible theory about the long-term term neutralization of inter-state conflict under the impact of civilizational progress. Even if this is not going to be achieved under the auspices of US hegemony, it remains the case that the viability of whatever international order succeeds it will be determined by the degree to which it keeps open this world-historical course while minimizing catastrophic crises. This is a rational goal that enlightened states may seek to promote, but it is likely to continue to depend on processes unfolding behind the backs of these ever-wary sovereign persons. More radical alternatives are currently without prospect. Geopolitical turbulence might once again unleash them but such speculations take us outside the confines of realism, or of any other general theory for that matter.
Mearsheimer’s new conception of political rationality informs judgments on developments of more immediate concern. The expansion of NATO following the collapse of the Soviet Union is often portrayed by realists as a folly. No one is more associated with this line of criticism than Mearsheimer. The reader may again be surprised to learn that, on the contrary, he sees the initial decision to expand NATO as rational. Both proponents and opponents of the policy relied on credible theories, and there was a vigorous policy debate at the top before President Clinton finally opted for expansion.
In sum: it was perhaps unduly risky but nonetheless reasonable for the US to go for liberal hegemony as long as the world remained unipolar; and as long as Russia remained incapable of acting as a great power, the advantages of maintaining US influence in post-Cold War Europe—preventing any European state or federation of states from emerging as a regional challenger—outweighed the dangers of provoking Russia. But trying to get Ukraine into the alliance was clearly a bridge too far. The dawning realization of having entered yet another debacle casts doubt on the wisdom of the decisions that led to it, but failed outcomes don’t settle the question of whether or not a more limited expansion of the Atlantic Alliance was rational.
Mearsheimer and Rosato make a plausible case for the rationality of these two fateful US decisions, though his conclusions are somewhat at odds with his earlier criticisms of US foreign policy. But the question of how prudent American statecraft in this period has been is not so easily settled. A reason to doubt its rationality is that one fundamental alternative was ruled out in policy discussion from the start: isolationism. Given America’s geographic situation, one might think this would have been eminently credible. As a matter of fact, Mearsheimer recognizes it as a very powerful idea but even he never discusses it as a viable grand strategy, and, of course, it has no takers in the foreign policy establishment. But how could the conduct of American foreign policy ever be rational if such a plausible and indeed fundamental alternative is never even considered? From a purely intellectual point of view, its exclusion casts serious doubt on the quality of deliberations of experts on foreign policy as well as the relative strengths and weaknesses of the theories and related strategic scenarios they regard as credible.
But it also calls into question the predictive power of Mearsheimer’s offensive variant of IR realism. Critics would argue that his latest work amounts to a rearguard defense of a theoretical framework which has failed to account for the post-Cold War persistence of American grand strategic commitments to both Europe and the Middle East, at the expense of a more exclusive focus on containing China. What explains this decades-long divergence between what the theory predicts and what has happened? Recent developments dramatically underscore the overdetermination of statecraft by ambitions that defy the calculus of security, and the need for theoretical and historical perspectives on a world that gives evidence of being far more uncertain and open than realism assumes.
Why has American support for Israel gone up in a period in which the Zionist state has lost all value from a US strategic point of view? The US-Israel relationship and the Zionist enterprise itself are significant test cases for theories that regard states as rational actors. A brief historical overview is in order.
Although Washington had doubts about Israel’s debut as a regional power in the 1950s, the stock of Zionism skyrocketed after the IDF routed Arab armies in 1967. In the aftermath, Israel came to be seen as major strategic asset, a regional enforcer of American interests, with Pahlavi Iran in a supporting role. The main problem was the protection of the dynastic client regimes of the petroleum-rich Gulf from the threat posed by Soviet-aligned Arab nationalist regimes. Even before the end of the Cold War, the Camp David Accords changed this regional equation by bringing Egypt into the ranks of US clients. From the late 1970s, Tel Aviv would face no serious military foe on its borders while the challenge from the new regime in Iran was still far over the horizon. With this loss of the last major Soviet foothold in the region, the Zionist state’s strategic value from a US perspective dropped steadily, and under Reagan and Bush Sr., Washington occasionally expressed disapproval of Israeli excesses in Lebanon and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel’s significance would decline still further in the eyes of US strategists. It is worth noting that over the whole post-Cold War era, Washington never once considered having the Israelis play even a supporting role in its many large-scale military operations in the region. Yet paradoxically American backing for an increasingly assertive Jewish state has become nearly unconditional over the same period. What explains this development, so apparently at odds with realist calculation?
In 2007 Mearsheimer became known to a wider public for his argument that the Israel Lobby had made it impossible to deliberate freely on the pros and cons of this unconditional American support for Israel. He has likewise sought to show that theories which adopt the Israeli view of Iran as a mortal threat to US interests are far from credible. But this emphasis on the role of the Lobby arguably fails to explain the wider ideological context in which lobbying efforts meet with such success.
Over and above its role as a hegemon promoting markets and democracy, the US political establishment has manifestly come to see itself as the modern defender of the Jewish people. Long after WWII, its war against the Third Reich was recast as a moral crusade against antisemitism. In the 1970s, the defense of the Jews came to play a significant role in anti-Soviet propaganda and buttressed America’s moral case against pro-Palestinian Third World-ism in the court of Western public opinion. Since then, the containment and destruction of America’s invariably Hitler-like enemies never fails to reactivate this legend. For all their reservations, America’s ever more unwavering support for Israel in defiance of any realist calculus paradoxically boosts the moral authority of the hegemon in the eyes of its European allies. Though they don’t entirely understand it, Europeans fear and respect this special relationship. Views on Israel have long divided legitimate from illegitimate voices in the great American political conversation, and this norm is now in full force in much of the greater West. Whatever decline there has been in the popularity of the Jewish state among Jews in the United States, this has been more than counteracted by the rise of support for Israel in the ranks of the Christian right. The apocalyptic Christian-Zionist dream of rebuilding the Temple after the destruction of the Dome on the Rock does not have any forthright advocates in the ranks of the US foreign policy establishment nor many in its Israeli counterpart. But in both countries, certainly in the latter, this objective enjoys followings large enough to enter into the final equations. The machinations of the Lobby now take place within this mythico-ideological field. Here the role of value commitments cannot be understood instrumentally, as “soft power” or the like.
Mearsheimer has long argued that though states will often have many goals—the main ones being security, economic growth and ideology-promotion—they must prioritize the first in order to have a chance of attaining the others. It is interesting to note how closely “security” has come to be associated with the existential. One suspects that the current ubiquity of the term “existential threat” is a mainly Israeli contribution to the political discourse of the times, evoking an ever-present specter of extermination. In a less dramatic vein, the expression may evoke a survival imperative imposed by the structural logic of the international system, as understood by realism, but it speaks to a far wider public concern for safety, ultimately physical survival. But what is survival, collectively speaking? Mearsheimer states: “states aim to preserve the integrity of their physical base. The state’s physical base includes its territory, its population and the resources within its borders.”
If Israeli leaders were determining what security entailed on the basis of the safety of the existing Jewish population (already a significant qualification, in that nearly 20 percent of the citizens of Israel are Arab) within its internationally recognized borders, they would withdraw their settlements from the West Bank and set up a militarily neutralized, nominally sovereign entity with East Jerusalem as its capital. This was once of the view of what was called the Israeli Left. Mearsheimer believes that US failure to force the Jewish state to accept the so-called two-state solution has strengthened the hand of the Zionist Right, bent on pursuing policies that will eventually undermine their national security as well as ours.
But from an Israeli perspective, the logic underlying the two-state option in practice blends into the rejectionist view of the Right—they are on a continuum. The strategy of the latter is for Israel to become the economic hub of the region after sealing a deal with Saudi Arabia along the lines of the one it struck with Egypt. The assumption is that the Palestinians will throw in the towel after the destruction of Hezbollah and Hamas in a sequence that culminates in the overthrow of the regime in Tehran as the last state supporter of their national cause. Eventually, the world will forget about the two-state solution; in the meantime, maintaining ambiguity regarding the latter will remain useful. Eventually, by this crooked path, Israel will become more like a normal Western capitalist state and society while retaining its Zionist identity. The Likudist Right regards the current internationally recognized borders as an incomplete realization of the Zionist project of reclaiming all of Judea and Samaria as the homeland of the Jewish people. This incompleteness militates against any premature security-maximizing agreements. But this second strategic option risks detonating a wider regional war and spilling over into a third scenario, the ambition of an even more extreme Zionist Right. Here, Israel forgoes the benefits of capitalist normalization and becomes an ethno-religious garrison state. As the Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued, Zionism has an apocalyptic horizon which draws it toward self-destruction.
Israel was born in a regional war that allowed it to seize territories and expel populations, and this feat was repeated in 1967. Many in Israel see the way forward through a repetition of these foundational land grabs and clearances. Such a war could lead to the final realization of Israel in the Land of Israel, but it could also lead to devastating political setbacks for the nuclear-armed state, faced with adversaries more militarily capable than those of the past. Unfortunately, it has long been true that Israel will only remove its hundreds of thousands of armed settlers and give up the Palestinian territories to a viable Palestinian state if it is defeated militarily in a regional war—the reversal of the episodes by which it built itself. Such a conflict could entail the toppling of key regimes in the US-led regional order: Egypt or Saudi Arabia. If either of these regimes fall and a regime supportive of the Palestinians takes their place, the entire strategic horizon changes for Israel.3
Within this context, Hamas’s incursion in early October was a rational, though high-risk, gamble. It was meant to provoke an extreme reaction from Israel on the plausible expectation that Hezbollah and Iran would eventually be drawn into the struggle. This is why the US is currently trying to placate and persuade Israel not to take the plunge. Even if this provocation does not succeed, the idea that Hamas acted on a wild miscalculation is not credible. It has already at the very least postponed an Israeli deal with the Saudis that would have sealed the national doom of Palestine. The fallout from a regional war would force the US to drag Israel back onto the two-state path of negotiations, but it is probably too late for that now. Partition under external military and diplomatic pressure will be a violent process, pitting Israelis against Palestinians and both populations against themselves. But neither is there any likely one-state solution. Greater Israel is now often called an apartheid state, but the latter term has a misleadingly hopeful connotation for supporters of Palestine because it suggests that like in South Africa, Jews and Palestinians can live together in reasonable harmony in a single democratic state. But it is simply unrealistic to expect that these two peoples can live in one state after nearly a century of war. A violent partition with two-way mass expulsions is the more likely outcome.
Whatever happens next to the Palestinians themselves, it is clear that the great mythic force of Palestine as a tragic figure of national liberation remains alive and is playing a role in the current re-ordering of international relations, and closer to home, reactivating a polarization of Left and Right with significant consequences for the coming political season.