As the Israeli journalist Amit Segal observes, “There is a significant disparity between Israel’s leadership and its citizens — but it’s the opposite of what people in Washington assume.” The policies of Israel’s war cabinet are restrained relative to public opinion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign-policy instincts are moderate by Israeli standards. If “the Israeli people” somehow controlled the war in Gaza directly, it might be even more devastating.
So Harris’s remark reflects a misapprehension of Israeli democracy. But more than that, it highlights how promoting democracy is a weak foundation for U.S. foreign policy in the first place.
Biden has made a global contest between “democracy and autocracy” central to his presidency. That pitch has failed to keep Congress united in support of aiding Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. The main deficiency is obvious: Many Americans wonder what the form of government in a faraway country has to do with their own lives.
Republicans are responsible for holding up aid to Ukraine. But Biden has accelerated partisan polarization over the war by casting it as an extension of U.S. domestic politics, with Ukraine’s fight against Russia parallel to the Democrats’ fight against former president Donald Trump’s GOP. Portraying Republicans as part of the authoritarian menace you want to defeat abroad is obviously not a formula for winning their support on a foreign policy priority.
An overemphasis on democracy can be self-undermining, as the political philosopher Emily B. Finley argued in her 2022 book, “The Ideology of Democratism.” When democracy yields a controversial outcome, there can be a tendency to assume that democracy itself was corrupted — that the problem is not a difference of opinion among citizens, but that nefarious forces prevented the true will of the people from emerging. One classic example is the liberal attribution of Trump’s 2016 election victory to disinformation or foreign interference.
Harris’s Israel statement betrayed a similar tendency. The Biden administration is displeased with the behavior of Israel’s leadership, so it signaled that Israel’s elected leadership is not actually a democratic reflection of its people. But if Segal is right about Israel’s warlike public opinion, that’s misdirection. The Israeli conduct that angers the Biden administration is democratically representative.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to change a democratic country’s behavior. One benefit of American alliances is that they enable Washington to influence democratic allies to comport with U.S. interests. The Biden administration can lean on Israel as it wishes. But if it has to construct the fiction that it is leaning only on Israel’s leaders, not trying to overrule its people — because the latter would violate the sanctity of democracy — it is bound to miscalculate about what it can achieve.
Blocking a country’s collective democratic will takes more political muscle than persuading a single unrepresentative leader to change course. Biden’s remark that an Israeli invasion of Rafah “is a red line,” for example, will go unheeded if — as it appears — the Israeli public overwhelmingly wants its military to finish the job against Hamas. Biden could end up diminishing U.S. authority and his own political standing by appearing to resist an Israeli action that happens anyway.
Other than Israel, of course, America’s Mideast allies are autocracies. It might have been more accurate for Harris to warn against conflating the governments of countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia with their people. Yet far from trying to open the gap between those governments and their populations, as Harris did with Israel, U.S. policy is to shore up moderate Arab regimes to check Iran and Islamist radicalism.
Indeed, a Saudi-Israel diplomatic agreement seems to be the linchpin of the Biden administration’s ideal Middle East settlement after the Israel-Gaza war. That rapprochement would be driven by the monarchy in Riyadh, not democratic forces in the Arab street.
It’s hardly a new discovery that popular opinion can, under certain circumstances, radicalize rather than moderate a state’s foreign policy. One politician in revolutionary France warned that democratizing foreign policy could lead France to “be at war with every nation that we consider unjust, or which will not accept our system.”
That brings us back to Hamas, the entity that started this war with its Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis. The Biden administration made headlines after Harris’s remarks by releasing an intelligence assessment saying that Netanyahu’s leadership “may be in jeopardy.” But the striking line in the assessment was not the assertion that Netanyahu’s popularity is eroding among Israelis but that Hamas enjoys “broad popular support” among Palestinians. Hamas won a Palestinian election in 2006 and, if the American spies are right, can still claim a kind of democratic legitimacy even after bringing ruin on its people.
Democracy is an attractive theme with a long tradition in U.S. foreign policy. But appeals to democracy won’t arrest the GOP’s turn toward noninvolvement when it comes to Ukraine, and they offer no framework for mitigating Middle East violence. Hardheaded statecraft has to come first to protect the United States’ global interests.
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