U.S.-Israeli Relations

How bad are U.S.-Israeli relations? And how important are they in the grand scheme of things?by Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest magazine and Middle East expert

Adam was a neighbor of mine during the 1990s in suburban Philadelphia. I knew him as both a person of great personal integrity and a brilliant scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a man with a cold eye and sharp tongue. His insights matter.

The key points of this article are:

  • Fracking of domestic oil shale deposits are making the U.S. energy self-sufficient. We don't really need Middle Eastern oil or their religious wars.
  • An increasingly racially and ethnically diverse America will have less interest and affinity for Israel in particular and the region in general.
  • American and Israeli relations were historically a seesaw driven by changing national priorities and domestic politics.
  • President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu detest each other; but this personal antipathy between U.S. and Israeli elites has many precedents.
  • Practical military, technical and commercial cooperation between the two nations remain satisfactory, as it as for decades.

Quote from article:

“The Arab world and its Muslim periphery have selected commodity riches, but not real earned wealth. This is reflected in the fact that whether one measures technological innovation, patents, books published, medical advances, education levels, female literacy trends, or a host of other standard development indices, the Muslim MENA region is near the bottom of the global heap. The area is important not for its positive contributions to a globalized world, but because of its negative potential to pull the tent down on everyone."