Israel & USA – does the tail wag the dog?

Today a Caitlin Johnstone post – The More Murderous Israel Gets, The More We Hear about “AntiSemitism” – reminded me of a promise several posts back in the context of the criminal war on Iran. In closing Why are America’s rulers allowing this, I wrote:

I’ve long held the view that Israel does not dictate US policy, and that the argument most often advanced by those – many of whom I hold in high esteem, including John Mearsheimer and Jewish anti-Zionists like Jeffrey Sachs, Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté ¹ – who say it does; viz, that the USA “fights Israel’s wars”, fails to disentangle the interests of America’s labour sellers from those of its rentier  elites.

While I stand broadly by that view, articulated most forcefully (minus overt references to class ² ) by Brian Berletic, the war on Iran now casts light on that debate in ways which show it to be too rigidly and binarily entrenched. In my next post, if events don’t dictate otherwise, I will examine a third position on this vexatious matter.

Well events, personal as much as geopolitical, did dictate otherwise but better late than never.

 

Three years ago, in Telling a Martian what hospitals do, I wrote in general terms of corporate media lies of omission being more powerful than those of commission in manufacturing what is fondly known as ‘public opinion’. ³ On February 6 I did so again in the more specific context of a media blackout on Epstein-Israel ties.

In the latter I wrote:

I keep insisting that contrary to the views of many otherwise invaluable commentators (and many unabashed antisemites) Israel does not dictate US foreign policy. Rather, its expansionist goals align with those of a US oligarchy masquerading as a democracy and determined to keep control – by bloodshed and chaos, regime change, balkanisation or whatever else works ⁴ – an oil rich and geostrategically pivotal West Asia.

As Brian Berletic put it:

When people tell me Israel controls the US, I ask how. They tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture … if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three.

In making one point Brian draws on another which cannot be aired too often. US ‘democracy’ is on sale to the highest bidders. Vested interests shape policies sold to the public by corporate media – and to governments captured long ago by vast private wealth, most transparently via a revolving door between government office and subsequent lucrative posts in sectors hitherto ‘regulated’ by those same public ‘servants’. But while I’ve used the quote (from October 2024) many times, here I followed with a caution as much epistemological as political:

Against that viewpoint, which I largely endorse, two things have to be conceded. One, Brian glides over a hidden category confusion in tacitly assuming The Lobby, Banks, Big Pharma, Fossil Fuel, Big Agri and Military Industrial Complex to be orthogonal entities. He makes no room for the very high likelihood of a Lobby deep embedded in those other players.

Two, The Lobby has shown itself capable of punching above its weight. Whether or not it has pockets as deep, its capacity for organising pressure, and ruthlessness in applying the same, is a fact too well and diversely documented for serious contention.

Sixteen months earlier – Does Israel dictate US foreign policy? – I’d written:

That Israel has advanced Western elites’ interests in the region is beyond serious dispute. ⁵  [It] is an outpost for imperialism in an oil rich region all the more significant for standing between the West and a Eurasia perceived as a threat by five centuries of European colonial strategists, and some half century of US imperialists. ⁶ Israel has a very special role in dividing the Middle East, yet some aspects are common to all colonial and neo-colonial rule of the global south.

But colonial outposts – apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia spring to mind, as do Algeria and the Six Counties of north east Ireland – have a way, like Dr Frankenstein’s monster, of showing levels of independent ferocity constantly embarrassing, frequently alarming and, in the case of Algeria, even threatening the mother country with regime change.

A case can be made that Israel’s lobbyists, deeply embedded within the upper echelons of the US oligarchy, have gone further than the above examples, none of which enjoyed the grip on their creators that AIPAC and its cut-outs have on the Beltway. This is the explicit view of men like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

So let me condense my opening self-quote with its promise delayed:

I’ve long held the view that Israel does not dictate US policy but, while I stand broadly by it, the war on Iran now shows it to be too rigidly and binarily entrenched. In my next post I will examine a third position on this vexatious matter.

Two recent pieces have shaped the evolution of my own take: from ‘Brian is right but …’, to ‘we need  a third understanding which incorporates the most compelling arguments on both sides’.

The first was a Nel Bonilla substack entry of March 15, The Imperial Feedback Loop. It begins:

The current US and Israel-induced war on Iran has brought an old debate back to the forefront: Mearsheimer’s “Israel Lobby” thesis versus the “US empire uses Israel as a proxy” thesis championed by analysts like Berletic. Engaging with this is neither an abstract nor a fruitless exercise; it is foundational for understanding the structural forces driving an escalation that could have global ramifications. Yet, from my perspective, pitting these two theses against each other is less a binary contradiction than a false dilemma.

I want to offer a third, synthesizing position: Israel is a functionally radicalized proxy that has also served as an ideological and military-operational laboratory and role model for a specific faction of the US ruling strata (neoconservatism and securitocrats), producing a feedback loop in which US imperial strategy and Israeli state logic have become mutually constitutive.

The Mearsheimerites correctly identify a real, disproportionate lobbying power, while Berletic correctly observes that this power operates within a pre-existing, historically imperial US framework. The critical missing layer is the ideological transfer mechanism, where neoconservatism acts as the transmission belt between the two. Furthermore, the distinct social-anthropological history of the Jewish diaspora, specifically its historical capacity for dense, resilient networking, provided structural tools instrumentalized by a specific, right-wing Zionist faction. It is this political co-optation by a radicalized subset that amplifies that influence within the US political system.

Read the full piece (3100 words + footnotes) …

Nel, a relative newcomer who has fast established herself as a voice to heed, adheres to ground rules of social scientific academic discourse – note the trademark dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis – but does so with refreshing clarity. I urge readers to follow her substack offerings, which include many podcasts.

Talk of clarity leads me to the second piece to advance my thinking. Jonathan Cook, a Guardian journalist who quit over his employer’s pro-Israel bias and is unfailingly calm and lucid, offers a broadly similar but less academically framed argument in a March 27 piece.

Does the tail wag the dog? How both sides are missing the bigger picture

Binary thinking in the argument over whether the US or Israel is driving the illegal war on Iran obscures far more than it illuminates. The truth is the dog and the tail are wagging each other. ⁷

The joint US-Israeli war on Iran has thrust back into the spotlight a divisive debate about whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Jonathan Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing:

I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say …

Read Jonathan’s piece in full (2700 words) …

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1. The list of anti-Zionist Jews who say Israel drives US policy goes far wider. I mention this because, while I do not agree with that view, it is not of itself antisemitic. This should go without saying save for the armies of hasbarists  who, on encountering an argument they don’t like, sift far right sites to see if antisemites have also used it – and are jubilant when they strike gold. It’s a puerile tactic, like saying Hitler was a vegetarian so all vegetarians are Nazis, but that doesn’t, alas, make it ineffective.
2. Brian’s podcasts expose empire scheming, usually by its own words. Indispensable to the decoding of US geostrategy, they seldom mention class as Marxists understand it, but a relentless focus on empire implies it at every turn.
3. Media shaping of ‘public opinion’, sometimes referred to as agenda setting, was summed up thusly by one pundit whose name escapes me: “media may not tell us what to think but they sure tell us what to think about“. Omissions play a decisive role in this, as when the Ukraine clock is reset to start in February 2022, the Gaza one to October 2023.
4. To bloodshed, chaos, regime change and balkanisation I might have added Washington  capture by ‘soft power’ of foreign governments. War has a way of bringing daylight disinfectant here. The Ukraine proxy war did so in Europe, and this one is doing likewise in the Gulf.
5. See my 2019 review of the Stephen Gowans book, Israel: a beachhead.
6. A fuller account of how US policies in West Asia and beyond align with the Greater Israel project of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvr, Smotrich, Mike Huckabee and many other Zionists within and without the colonial settler state is given in my four posts on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right.
7. Also worth heeding is the brief introduction to Jonathan’s piece when it was replicated on the Jewish Voice for Labour Liberation site.