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Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Walter Russell Mead writes in ‘Wall Street Journal’: Israel ‘threatened but strong’
2023-05-25
A comforting thought.
[Cleveland, kept in touch with the world by Obamaphone,
...was ruled by a Democrat machine from 1942 through 1971. After the river caught fire during the administration of Carl Stokes they tried a Republican, then went back to being Democrats when the party hacked up Dennis Kucinich ...
JewishNews] The future U.S.-Israel relationship is one of the most pressing issues facing Israelis. That’s according to a new op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead, a distinguished fellow in strategy and statesmanship at the Hudson Institute who has written the "global view" column at the Journal since 2018.
The WSJ piece is pay walled, so this is the next best thing.
"There is nothing written in the stars that guarantees its permanence," he wrote of the relationship between Israel and the United States.

To Mead, neither anti-Israel BDS activists calling for Washington to boycott Jerusalem nor the pro-Israel lobby will drive change. "Those forces provide the mood music for the relationship, and at the margin and on certain very specific issues have an effect. But the real forces lie elsewhere," he wrote.

"American policy toward Israel depends less on poll numbers than on how a given U.S. president sees American interests world-wide and where Israel and the Middle East fit into the administration’s global foreign policy," he wrote.

Where U.S. leaders previously prioritized Middle East oil, many on the left now focus on climate change and many on the right are isolationist, according to Mead.

"How much does the Middle East matter if the world is moving away from fossil fuel?" he wrote. "Similarly, if isolationist perspectives among Democratic progressives or Republican populists dominate the agenda, U.S.-Israel relations likely will cool."

Should Washington back away from Israel, it wouldn’t be wholesale and wouldn’t be disastrous for the Jewish state, stated Mead.

"Narendra Modi’s India would eagerly embrace a closer technological and military relationship with the Jewish state. China, Russia and even The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire...
would see serious benefits in a strategic relationship with Jerusalem," he wrote. "History offers no guarantees and problems remain, but the citizens of this extraordinary state have every reason to look forward with hope."
Posted by:trailing wife

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