A Gaza test for Obama national security strategy

Any audiologist administering a hearing test would see Israel’s heavy-handed attack on Turkish relief vessels bound for Gaza as an alarming sign of an entire political class slipping into profound deafness, no longer hearing even its most important ally.  Israeli commandos launched the raid just five days after the Obama administration released a new national security strategy that rejected its predecessor’s blustery endorsement of preemptive strikes and instead affirmed collective “enforcement of international law.”

True, Washington protected the Israelis from explicit condemnation by the United Nations Security Council, pending an “impartial” investigation of what actually happened.  But it joined in a unanimous Council denunciation of “the loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force during the Israeli military operation in international waters against the convoy sailing to Gaza.” 

If an impartial U.N. investigation--which the General Assembly will assuredly vote to authorize—unequivocally finds the commando attack responsible for the killings and a serious breach of international law, the Obama administration can hardly block follow-up measures at the U.N.

Obama’s national security strategy, after all, insists that governments either “abide by international norms,” or if they refuse, “bear the consequences of that decision, including greater isolation.”  Israeli authorities may not have noticed these nuances, as the country’s right-of-center governments had come over the past decade to take for granted an American government that as ready to use force as they are.

After all, George Bush’s national security strategy had reassuringly vowed “direct and continuous action using all the elements of national and international power” to deal with foes.  Devised in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks--and as a prologue to the invasion of Iraq—the Bush-era world view focused on “identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders.” 

This doctrine of preemptive attack might well cover the kind of action the Israeli defense ministry took Monday, even if the “threat” was of a civilian relief convoy voiding Israel’s tight blockade of Gaza.  But armed preemption, cited seven times in Bush’s strategic blueprint, has vanished from the U.S. security strategy in the age of Obama. 

Instead, the new document pointedly notes, in recent years “some methods employed in pursuit of our security have compromised our fidelity to the values that we promote” and undercut American leadership and power.  “Rules of the road must be followed, and there must be consequences for those nations that break the rules.”  There is no room for American exceptionalism, in the sense of self-exemption from duly ratified international law—and perhaps not, in the Gaza context, for Israeli exceptionalism either.

In other ways, too, the Obama security strategy marks a signal change of direction from its predecessor.  While the Bush doctrine had emphasized the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation, as Obama’s does, the Bush strategy never mentioned the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, much less the treaty banning nuclear testing.  The treaty is a cornerstone of the Obama strategy for suppressing nuclear dangers, around which it is forging global coalitions “to hold others [i.e., Iran] accountable for their obligations.” 

Still, the Obama team cannot bring itself to acknowledge that international law restricts a nation’s use of force to self-defense against armed attack—a limitation that candidate Obama had seemed to acknowledge in his campaign.  Ignoring the explicit limits on force that American leaders had written into the heart of the U.N. Charter, the new strategy affirms, in Washington fashion, that the United States “must reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests”—no mention of self-defense against armed attack—“yet we will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force.”  To “seek to adhere to standards” is a much more modest aspiration than to act in accordance with Charter obligations--or even to follow the rules of the road.

Still, there is a remarkable degree of convergence in the Bush and Obama security strategies.  Bush, no less than Obama, saw the spread of global prosperity through a high-performance American economic engine as crucial to international security (though Obama’s strategy drops Bush’s insistence that “respect for private property” is a core “nonnegotiable demand”).  Both affirm advancement of human rights as essential to security (Bush nine times, Obama 31 times). 

And both underscore that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is critical, in the Bush strategy’s words, “because of that region’s importance to other global priorities of the United States.”  Bush was the first president specifically to embrace an independent Palestinian state; Obama observes that the settlement must deal with borders, refugees, and Jerusalem.

Israeli officials who ordered the late-night commando raid on the Turkish ship seem not to have heard the messages coming from Washington.  Perhaps the din on the right end of their own democratic politics impaired their hearing.  But barely recovering from the damage caused by its own home-grown cowboy bellicosity over the past decade, America cannot afford now for its other major alliances to be jeopardized by Israeli impetuousness. 

Perhaps the two long-time allies can find common ground on an observation Obama makes in his preface to the administration’s security strategy.  There the president writes, “Our long-term security will come not from our ability to instill fear in other peoples, but through our capacity to speak to their hopes.” 

Comments

[Nabil Shoeb]

Excellent article.I wish you send it to all the Israeli cabinet.The problem is that Israel feels that,with the Israeli lobby in the US supporting them,then they are above the law,and they can do any thing they want.Hopefully the US and the international reaction this time will wake Israel up.

[Sally McMillan]

Again, the U.S. refuses to condemn Israel. When will we acknowledge that Israel wants to control the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and any peace talks that does not allow this to continue will fail? I suppose that President Obama's hands are tied because of the pro-Israel Congress and advisors that he has to deal with, but the American people are slowly waking up and hopefully will be heard from. Israeli security could be assured by ending the occupation and brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

[Jeffrey Laurenti]

Actually, to Sally McMillan's point, I think the United States was correct in deflecting a knee-jerk Security Council condemnation of Israel based on the first day's reports. (Isn't that how the Congress got stampeded into approving the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing a U.S. war in Vietnam?) But it did join in a unanimous coupling of a call for an "impartial" investigation with a condemnation of "the loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force during the Israeli military operation in international waters against the convoy sailing to Gaza."
As for Nabil Shoeb's point, I think the nationalist Right in Israel (the faction that Sally says seeks to swallow up "the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean") shares the same view as the nationalist Right in the United States that framed the Bush administration debate and its national security strategy. Peter Beinart notes the Israeli hardliners' alienation of younger Jewish Americans from Israel (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/?pagination=false), and today the New York Times quotes the Peres Center for Peace's Ron Pundak--who will be speaking at The Century Foundation on June 14--as observing larger throngs of Israeli protestors against the reckless raid. Perhaps the blowback from ready reliance on use of force will shake the wax out of the political establishment's ears.