"America First" could Prove Dangerous for Israel's Security
President Trump's announced preferences for "America First" run directly counter to his country's core principles of justice and security. Because of Washington's strong and historic ties to Jerusalem, these preferences now also threaten Israel's national dignity and safety. Opinion
Louis René Beres
| 26/02/2017
President Trump and PM Netanyahu (Photo: AP)
It has been taught: R. Meir used to say: "The dust of the first man was gathered from all parts of the earth."
For the United States, Donald Trump's ideology of "America First" will quickly prove to be deeply injurious. At the same time, at least derivatively, this misconceived ideology could impact Israel in similarly negative ways. In essence, this linked effect exists because the fate of each individual nation is tied to the broader interests of humankind, and also because of the unambiguously special ties that bind Jerusalem to Washington.
In world politics, of course, everything is always more-or-less interrelated. The notion that a purely exploitative and nationally self-centered American philosophy can somehow propel the United States in more suitably prosperous and gainful directions, therefore, is fanciful and foolish. It is also grievously immoral, especially in light of utterly core American and Jewish understandings of human responsibility and human oneness.
For authoritative sources of the pertinent American understandings, we may turn to the still vital nineteenth-century writings of the Transcendentalists, especially Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. For comparable sources of expressly Jewish understandings, we may look in literally thousands of relevant directions, beginning in the beginning, with Genesis.
The abundantly shallow and correspondingly perilous Trump vision of "America First" can only lead the United States to an endlessly Darwinian global struggle, that is, toward a retrograde conflict in which the thoroughly corrosive principle of "every man for himself" will inevitably produce further suffering. Without any reasonable doubt, these chaotic consequences will "spill over" onto America's most conspicuously faithful allies, especially the State of Israel. It follows that if Mr. Trump should sincerely intend to help Israel with its ongoing struggles against war, terrorism and prospectively even genocide, he cannot possibly succeed by further hardening certain already existing global dualisms between "us" and "them."
Whether we like it or not, both American and Israeli security are inextricably linked with the much wider "human condition." There is, among other things, a tangibly compelling commitment to ethical interdependence. For both allies, moreover, a seemingly boundless confidence in vacant witticisms and mindless chants could only serve to undermine each country's national security. What is injurious or even ominous about such wrongfully orchestrated mutterings is not just the specious content being chanted – content which is usually incoherent, and often insidious – but also the corollary disappearance of personal empathy and individual responsibility. For Israel and Jews in general, the dreadful consequences of any such disappearance ought to be perfectly obvious, and, accordingly, exhibit a troubling historical resonance.
Whether it is as a nation, a social organization, a terrorist band, or a new political movement, the Trump "crowd" (a term absolutely central to the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard) tempts all-too-many with a patently false reassurance of group communion. This particular temptation lies at the heart of its ritually incomparable attraction. Ultimately, this all-too familiar temptation could meaningfully undermine the defense of both the United States and Israel.
Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost two hundred of which are called "nation-states," many human beings still find it distinctly easy or even pleasing to slay "others." As for any remediating consideration of empathy, that sentiment is typically reserved for those who happen to live within one’s own properly delineated tribe. Any expansion of empathy to include "outsiders" is a genuinely basic condition of authentic peace and global union; that is, without such an expansion, our entire species would remain inconveniently dedicated to its own incremental debasement, and possibly, its eventual disappearance.
Understanding this particular wisdom should already have become a necessary corrective to the literal nonsense of "America First." After all, this mistakenly resurrected political mantra is eerily reminiscent of America's sordid "Know Nothing" history, and of the incomparably hideous slogans of the Third Reich. In essence, let us be candid, however well-intentioned and unintended, "America First" revealingly represents Mr. Trump's specifically Americanized version of "Deutschland uber alles."
Could anything possibly be more disagreeable or frightful for Jews and the Jewish State?
We need remedies. But what fixes, if any, are plausibly available? What must Americans actually do to encourage a wider empathy, and thereby to foster certain deeply caring feelings between as well as within "tribes"? How can a new US president work to seriously improve the state of our dissembling world, so as to correspondingly ensure a viable and dignified future both for America and Israel?
These are not easy questions, but they are incontestably the precise ones that will now need to be faced openly by Donald Trump.
Ironically, as we must readily acknowledge, the essential expansion of empathy for the many could sometime become “dreadful,” possibly improving human community, but only at the intolerable cost of our private sanity. This unwanted consequence is rooted in the way we humans were originally "designed," that is, more-or-less "hard wired," with very recognizable and selectively impermeable boundaries of feeling. Were it otherwise, an extended range of compassion toward too many others could quickly bring about our own total emotional collapse.
This challenging paradox was examined long ago in the ancient Jewish legend of the Lamed-Vov, a tradition that certain Talmudic scholars trace back to Isaiah. Here, the whole world rests upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov, who are otherwise indistinguishable from all other ordinary mortals. Still, if just one of their number were absent, the resultant sufferings of humankind would poison even the souls of the newly born.
This Jewish-elucidated paradox has useful contemporary meaning, for the United States, and for Israel. It is that a widening circle of human compassion is both indispensable to civilizational survival, and also a potential source of unimaginable private anguish.
How, then, shall Mr. Trump's "America First" now deal with a requirement for global civilization that is simultaneously essential and unbearable? Properly informed that empathy for the many is a precondition of a necessarily decent world union, what can create such needed caring without simultaneously producing intolerable emotional pain? In essence, Emersonian "high-thinkers" must duly inquire: How can an ideology of "America First" satisfactorily deal with ongoing and still-multiplying expressions of war, terrorism, and genocide?
Can it really be accomplished by building walls, or, instead, should we be solidifying certain wide-ranging and always-applicable human bonds? Should it be by insisting upon an openly predatory philosophy of world affairs, or rather by recognizing that "the dust from which the first man was made was gathered in all four corners of the earth"?
The correct answer should already be obvious, in Jerusalem as well as in Washington. This answer can never be found in ordinary presidential speeches and programs, especially in the always shallow rhetoric or cravenly empty witticisms of American politics. It is discoverable only in a far more consciously resolute detachment of citizens from unambiguously one-sided and presumptively self-serving calculations.
The whole world, Mr. Trump should promptly acknowledge, is a system. "The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature," says the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "no matter whom...Each element of the Cosmos is positively woven from all the others..." Above all, President Trump must fully understand that the state of America's national union, or of Israel's, can never be any better than the state of the wider and deeply intersecting world.
In duly acknowledging this significantly misunderstood mutuality, this utterly vital reciprocity, the overarching presidential objective must eventually be to protect the sacred dignity of each and every individual human being. It is exactly this high-minded and ancient Jewish goal that should now give specific policy direction to President Donald Trump. This counsel could represent a welcome corrective to his continuously misleading expressions of "America First."
It will, of course, be easy to dismiss any such seemingly lofty recommendations for human dignity as silly, ethereal, "academic," or utterly fanciful, but in reality, there could never be any greater American presidential naiveté than to champion the patently false extremity of "everyone for himself" in world politics.
"America First" is a sorely erroneous presidential mantra. Devoid of all empathy, intellect, and human understanding, it can only lead us toward distressingly new heights of global strife, disharmony, and collective despair. Individually, "America First," if left unrevised, would directly point us to a potentially irreversible vita minima, that is, toward a badly corrupted personal life emptied of itself; meaningless, shattered, unfeeling, and radically unstable.
The lesson is clear. Only by placing "Humanity First" can the new US president help to make America and Israel "First." The latter, we may deduce, inter alia, from the Talmud, is not even possible without the former.
***
Louis René Beres is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. He lectures and publishes widely on matters of Israeli security and nuclear strategy.
President Trump's announced preferences for "America First" run directly counter to his country's core principles of justice and security. Because of Washington's strong and historic ties to Jerusalem, these preferences now also threaten Israel's national dignity and safety. Opinion
President Trump and PM Netanyahu (Photo: AP)
It has been taught: R. Meir used to say: "The dust of the first man was gathered from all parts of the earth."
For the United States, Donald Trump's ideology of "America First" will quickly prove to be deeply injurious. At the same time, at least derivatively, this misconceived ideology could impact Israel in similarly negative ways. In essence, this linked effect exists because the fate of each individual nation is tied to the broader interests of humankind, and also because of the unambiguously special ties that bind Jerusalem to Washington.
In world politics, of course, everything is always more-or-less interrelated. The notion that a purely exploitative and nationally self-centered American philosophy can somehow propel the United States in more suitably prosperous and gainful directions, therefore, is fanciful and foolish. It is also grievously immoral, especially in light of utterly core American and Jewish understandings of human responsibility and human oneness.
For authoritative sources of the pertinent American understandings, we may turn to the still vital nineteenth-century writings of the Transcendentalists, especially Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. For comparable sources of expressly Jewish understandings, we may look in literally thousands of relevant directions, beginning in the beginning, with Genesis.
The abundantly shallow and correspondingly perilous Trump vision of "America First" can only lead the United States to an endlessly Darwinian global struggle, that is, toward a retrograde conflict in which the thoroughly corrosive principle of "every man for himself" will inevitably produce further suffering. Without any reasonable doubt, these chaotic consequences will "spill over" onto America's most conspicuously faithful allies, especially the State of Israel. It follows that if Mr. Trump should sincerely intend to help Israel with its ongoing struggles against war, terrorism and prospectively even genocide, he cannot possibly succeed by further hardening certain already existing global dualisms between "us" and "them."
Whether we like it or not, both American and Israeli security are inextricably linked with the much wider "human condition." There is, among other things, a tangibly compelling commitment to ethical interdependence. For both allies, moreover, a seemingly boundless confidence in vacant witticisms and mindless chants could only serve to undermine each country's national security. What is injurious or even ominous about such wrongfully orchestrated mutterings is not just the specious content being chanted – content which is usually incoherent, and often insidious – but also the corollary disappearance of personal empathy and individual responsibility. For Israel and Jews in general, the dreadful consequences of any such disappearance ought to be perfectly obvious, and, accordingly, exhibit a troubling historical resonance.
Whether it is as a nation, a social organization, a terrorist band, or a new political movement, the Trump "crowd" (a term absolutely central to the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard) tempts all-too-many with a patently false reassurance of group communion. This particular temptation lies at the heart of its ritually incomparable attraction. Ultimately, this all-too familiar temptation could meaningfully undermine the defense of both the United States and Israel.
Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost two hundred of which are called "nation-states," many human beings still find it distinctly easy or even pleasing to slay "others." As for any remediating consideration of empathy, that sentiment is typically reserved for those who happen to live within one’s own properly delineated tribe. Any expansion of empathy to include "outsiders" is a genuinely basic condition of authentic peace and global union; that is, without such an expansion, our entire species would remain inconveniently dedicated to its own incremental debasement, and possibly, its eventual disappearance.
Understanding this particular wisdom should already have become a necessary corrective to the literal nonsense of "America First." After all, this mistakenly resurrected political mantra is eerily reminiscent of America's sordid "Know Nothing" history, and of the incomparably hideous slogans of the Third Reich. In essence, let us be candid, however well-intentioned and unintended, "America First" revealingly represents Mr. Trump's specifically Americanized version of "Deutschland uber alles."
Could anything possibly be more disagreeable or frightful for Jews and the Jewish State?
We need remedies. But what fixes, if any, are plausibly available? What must Americans actually do to encourage a wider empathy, and thereby to foster certain deeply caring feelings between as well as within "tribes"? How can a new US president work to seriously improve the state of our dissembling world, so as to correspondingly ensure a viable and dignified future both for America and Israel?
These are not easy questions, but they are incontestably the precise ones that will now need to be faced openly by Donald Trump.
Ironically, as we must readily acknowledge, the essential expansion of empathy for the many could sometime become “dreadful,” possibly improving human community, but only at the intolerable cost of our private sanity. This unwanted consequence is rooted in the way we humans were originally "designed," that is, more-or-less "hard wired," with very recognizable and selectively impermeable boundaries of feeling. Were it otherwise, an extended range of compassion toward too many others could quickly bring about our own total emotional collapse.
This challenging paradox was examined long ago in the ancient Jewish legend of the Lamed-Vov, a tradition that certain Talmudic scholars trace back to Isaiah. Here, the whole world rests upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov, who are otherwise indistinguishable from all other ordinary mortals. Still, if just one of their number were absent, the resultant sufferings of humankind would poison even the souls of the newly born.
This Jewish-elucidated paradox has useful contemporary meaning, for the United States, and for Israel. It is that a widening circle of human compassion is both indispensable to civilizational survival, and also a potential source of unimaginable private anguish.
How, then, shall Mr. Trump's "America First" now deal with a requirement for global civilization that is simultaneously essential and unbearable? Properly informed that empathy for the many is a precondition of a necessarily decent world union, what can create such needed caring without simultaneously producing intolerable emotional pain? In essence, Emersonian "high-thinkers" must duly inquire: How can an ideology of "America First" satisfactorily deal with ongoing and still-multiplying expressions of war, terrorism, and genocide?
Can it really be accomplished by building walls, or, instead, should we be solidifying certain wide-ranging and always-applicable human bonds? Should it be by insisting upon an openly predatory philosophy of world affairs, or rather by recognizing that "the dust from which the first man was made was gathered in all four corners of the earth"?
The correct answer should already be obvious, in Jerusalem as well as in Washington. This answer can never be found in ordinary presidential speeches and programs, especially in the always shallow rhetoric or cravenly empty witticisms of American politics. It is discoverable only in a far more consciously resolute detachment of citizens from unambiguously one-sided and presumptively self-serving calculations.
The whole world, Mr. Trump should promptly acknowledge, is a system. "The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature," says the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "no matter whom...Each element of the Cosmos is positively woven from all the others..." Above all, President Trump must fully understand that the state of America's national union, or of Israel's, can never be any better than the state of the wider and deeply intersecting world.
In duly acknowledging this significantly misunderstood mutuality, this utterly vital reciprocity, the overarching presidential objective must eventually be to protect the sacred dignity of each and every individual human being. It is exactly this high-minded and ancient Jewish goal that should now give specific policy direction to President Donald Trump. This counsel could represent a welcome corrective to his continuously misleading expressions of "America First."
It will, of course, be easy to dismiss any such seemingly lofty recommendations for human dignity as silly, ethereal, "academic," or utterly fanciful, but in reality, there could never be any greater American presidential naiveté than to champion the patently false extremity of "everyone for himself" in world politics.
"America First" is a sorely erroneous presidential mantra. Devoid of all empathy, intellect, and human understanding, it can only lead us toward distressingly new heights of global strife, disharmony, and collective despair. Individually, "America First," if left unrevised, would directly point us to a potentially irreversible vita minima, that is, toward a badly corrupted personal life emptied of itself; meaningless, shattered, unfeeling, and radically unstable.
The lesson is clear. Only by placing "Humanity First" can the new US president help to make America and Israel "First." The latter, we may deduce, inter alia, from the Talmud, is not even possible without the former.
***
Louis René Beres is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. He lectures and publishes widely on matters of Israeli security and nuclear strategy.
