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Comments of the President

By Robert J. Loewenberg

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LAND FOR DOLLARS

Here's what a commentator wrote in Ma'ariv about Barak's visit to the U.S. Good Heavens! It's land for U.S. aid dollars, not land for peace. He was shocked! This is an important development. It was only about 15 years in coming. Of course it's only the smallest part of the aid story. The main part is what the aid is used for - propping up the socialist state. And this means preventing reform, which is to say, preventing the enlargement of the private spheres of life by way of markets and property, at the same time that the public sphere and especially the dominance of the state is reduced.

Resistance to Market Reform

Certainly we have drummed upon the economic aspects of this theme long enough not to have to repeat it for readers of the Quarterly. But there is a non-economic dimension to Israel's dogged and U.S. supported resistance to market reform. On one side, this resistance, enlarging the state, reduces its physical size. This is the Ma'ariv editor's point. On another side, perhaps an even graver one, the preoccupation with getting other people's money and with the slimy process of giving it out as the cement of politics and the salve of non-market failure, corrupts political life. The most obvious if not the worst aspect of this, again referring to the Ma'ariv commentator's discovery in the wake of Barak's U.S. visit, is the way it puts the Israeli policy community, to say nothing of the Israeli people, out of touch with reality.

This isn't a good thing for a country losing weight in the form of territory and the best and brightest among its population. In fact the most palpable oversight that's come about in Israel, and that will cost dearly, is that Israel's obsession with the peace process, tied as it is to the business of getting money for that dreadful system - just now exciting the workers of Mekorot, the water monopoly, to burn tires and publicly threaten to murder their director - has caused an oversight in the matter of Israel's survival chances.

There is No Peace Process

The oversight is this: there is no peace process. I mean, except for getting the PLO a state of its own and Syria the Golan Heights, the strategic implications of the process in context of the region's realities are bleak. Look at it this way. Just months ago, U.S. administration supporter Martin Peretz, Jewish owner of The New Republic, pointed out a "new circumstance" in the Middle East. The "economic prosperity" idea that was supposed to ground the peace process and be fueled by it is in shreds. Now, I find that most Jews don't know this or that the Arab oil regimes, here using Peretz's word, are "impoverished." But it is a rather effectual fact. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and the other oil regimes are for all practical purposes washed up. Now what does this mean for the peace process, for the U.S. and the region?

It's a Campaign Matter

Well, the short version is this: For the world it means the oil era has passed (at least in the long run, notwithstanding short-term price increase). It's going the way earlier resource staples went, for example, coal. What does this mean for the peace process?

Strategically it means that Israel, with the help of the U.S. and U.S. Jews, is about to give a big boost to Syria, Turkey's enemy and also Jordan's, these states being the linchpins of any possible strategic stability in the region for Israel and the West. Israel is doing this for money in the way the Ma'ariv editor just figured out. The U.S. is doing it for more complicated reasons, but the answer that will do here is hubris. It's a campaign matter.

Unconcerned about the Russians, who are orchestrating a new Russian led OPEC from the Caspian region (based on sales of missiles and weapons of mass destruction to the swooning Arab oil regimes ) and, driven by Cold War revenge against the West, the U.S. administration is at this moment preoccupied with oil in the Gulf. But this time it's not the Persian Gulf. It's the Gulf of Guinea. For as long as the U.S. remains the only real military power in the world - and it's not going to last forever - foreign policy is going to have no purpose beyond domestic U.S. politics. Moreover, the essence of domestic U.S. politics is pretty well summed up in multiculturalism. This means foreign policy is part of the perpetual campaign and "diversity" is the key to money, votes and power. Most of all perhaps, the Democrats, at least for now, are the ones who know best how this works, and, of course, Clinton is the absolute Master of this politics. But the life and death consequences, whether for Somalia, Bosnia, Russia or Israel, for Taiwan or China, all are going to have to adjust to U.S. uses of them.

In the case of Israel, the realities of U.S. foreign policy affecting the balances of power in the Middle East, in effect the consequence of U.S. domestic policies played out overseas, are first, that the peace process is no more than Mr. Clinton's exit strategy from the region.

Touting the peace process to the American Jews and most of all to the press, the other reality of America's regional policy is: Goodbye Arabs, Hello Blacks. In other words, the Democrats are going to steal the free market card (again) from the Republicans by recognizing that the U.S. can build an oil-presence in the Gulf of Guinea, sponsoring and promoting an African (black vs. Arab Persian Gulf) economic renewal, all of which will be tied to the Democratic domestic coalition with the Black Caucus.

Indeed, at this very moment DOD Secretary Bill Richardson, along with Clinton's Trade Representative Barshefsky, is following the Charlie Rangel's angels approach to foreign policy (namely the Republican model of boosting markets, not socialism) as a way to get the most political advantage out of the U.S.'s leaving the Persian Gulf. The political and foreign policy meaning of this for Israel is that it will soon be facing Arab nations in chaos getting good deals on missiles and weapons of mass destruction from the Russians in the Caspian who in turn hope to revenge the Cold War.

In short, the Peace Process will buy the U.S. an escape from the Middle East morass and a new access to black Africa. For Israel, it will mean billions of U.S. and European taxpayer dollars to give up strategic land resulting in a welfare-line free-for-all fighting over all of the free money. For the Arabs, it will mean economic decline, social and strategic unrest if not revolution, resulting in new military and Islamic regimes bathing in Russian weapons of mass destruction. Is this what they mean by "peace?"