Israel, Iran, and International Politics

 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, many began to dream of an international order based on peace and law.  The United States government took the lead in some respects.  The US government claimed a very large indemnity from Great Britain for shipping losses at the hands of the Confederate raider Alabama, and it submitted it to arbitration, with British consent,. and won a large award.  It signed numerous treaties with foreign powers promising to submit other disputes to neutral arbitration.  The same impulses led to the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War and the United Nations at the end of the Second World War.  Both institutions attempted to ban aggressive war, leading self-defense as the only legitimate reason for conflict.  

Atomic weapons posed new challenges.  In 1946 the US government proposed at the new United Nations that they be banned, with atomic facilities put under international control, but the USSR refused the offer and developed its own atomic weapons instead.  That led to high-level discussions of a possible preventive war in the United States.  The US government regarded the USSR as a totalitarian nation bent on world conquest, like its enemies in the Second World War.  That war had taught some that only total military defeat could remove such a threat.  Cooler heads prevailed, however, and the US government eventually concluded that nuclear deterrence could keep the peace among heavily armed adversaries.  By the mid-1950s, nuclear weapons had become the only real guarantee of a nation's sovereignty, and Britain and France were developing them as well.  China followed suit in the 1960s and has now been joined by India, Pakistan, and North Korea.  And Israel had apparently developed atomic weapons sometime during the 1960s, although the Israeli government never seems to have tested one and has never formally admitted possessing them.    During the 1960s the Soviet Union and the USSR also tried to restrict and even eliminate nuclear weapons by negotiating the Nonproliferation Treaty.  Non-nuclear signatories to the treaty (which some states refused to sign) promised not to develop nuclear weapons, while nuclear states promised to work to eliminate them.  Although the US and the USSR drastically reduced their arsenals after 1989, Ronald Reagan was the only president who seems to have shared that goal, and he never took concrete steps to make it happen.

Israelis created the State of Israel in 1948 despite the hostility of Palestinian Arabs and neighboring states.  Although they held their own in their War of Independence and decisively defeated enemy armies in 1956 and again in 1967, they too apparently concluded that they needed atomic weapons to safeguard their independence.  According to some accounts, the Israeli government was preparing to use them in the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when things were going very badly on the ground.  Instead, they regained the initiative on the battlefield.  In one key respect, however, the Israeli government attitude towards nuclear weapons has differed from that of the two original superpowers.  Rather than rely on their own nuclear weapons for deterrence, they have concluded that they cannot allow any hostile nation even to develop them either.  Many years ago I read that the Israelis had assassinated Egyptian nuclear scientists, and French authorities apparently suspected that one such assassination had taken place in France in 1980.  Menachem Begin's government unilaterally destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.  Israeli governments claim a right to take any military action necessary to stop a hostile nation from developing nuclear weapons.

The US government adopted the same view under the George W. Bush administration. A new National Security Strategy declared that the United States would take preemptive military action to stop any dangerous nation from developing weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush Administration justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on those grounds.  I heard from well-informed people that they had planned to do the same in Iran and North Korea, but such plans went on the back burner, apparently, when it turned out that Iraq wasn't developing nuclear weapons after all.  Successive US administrations declared that Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, and during the Bush II and Obama administrations, when Iran was developing the capacity to enrich uranium, the Israeli government pressured Washington to make a joint attack to destroy its nuclear facilities.  In 2008, as I discussed here, the Israeli historian Benny Morris called upon the US to join Israel in such an attack, and threatened that Israel might have to use nuclear weapons of its own to destroy the key Iranian facilities if Washington did not join in.  Washington apparently refused, and eventually the Obama administration joined Russia, China and the EU and negotiated a deal under which Iran limited its uranium enrichment to levels that would not allow it to build a bomb in return for the lifting of economic sanctions,  In a sign of things to come, Republicans unanimously opposed that agreement, and Mitch McConnell invited Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress opposing the agreement.  When Donald Trump came into power he withdrew from the agreement, and Iran ramped up its enrichment again.

Israel's conflict with Iran, its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon, and its Hamas ally entered a new phase after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.  To begin with, the Israeli government apparently decided to respond to that attack by making the Gaza strip uninhabitable and driving out most of the Palestinian population, as leading Israeli officials now admit.  It also escalated the rocket war against Hezbollah, apparently with considerable success.  And now, after two months of new US negotiations failed to reach agreement with Iran, it has launched pre-emptive strikes on that nation (its own words) to try to destroy its nuclear capability.  Iran has retaliated promptly with salvos of ballistic missiles.   I do not know whether Israel can achieve its military objective of destroying Iran's enrichment facilities, some of which are buried deep underground.  As of today, only 24 hours into the operation, it has not tried to hit the Iranian stockpile of already-enriched uranium.  In contrast to the attack on Iraq, however, it has hit targets in Iran not related to the nuclear program, such as energy installations and apartment buildings.  Why is not clear.

We do not know how far Israel is willing to go--a critical question since Israeli governments have apparently talked about using nuclear weapons against Iran in the past.  The Israeli government may be hoping to induce the US government to give it its most powerful bunker-busting conventional bombs to use against Iranian facilities by threatening the use of its own nukes.  It may also hope that these initial strikes, and perhaps more strikes on Teheran itself, might convince the Iranian government to give up its nuclear program altogether, as the Trump Administration has been asking it to do.   President Trump has just announced that he would like to see the war stop now, but he does not seem at all likely to force Israel to stop it.  The US government evidently knew that the Israeli attack was coming and did not try to stop it. The Trump administration has also  hinted that we might join in the defense of Israel.

This much is clear: the dream of a world ruled by law and diplomacy has faded into the background.  Human nature being what it is, it never had much chance of success, but such dreams remain essential, I think, to keep humanity headed in the right direction.  The end of the Cold War, it turns out, has moved us in the wrong direction, feeding US and Israeli dreams of world or regional hegemony imposed by force, and Russian and Chinese dreams of regaining lost territories.  Israel has revived the project of using force to prevent hostile states from acquiring nuclear weapons, rather than relying on deterrence.  The Israeli people seem to support that policy.  We don't know where it will lead. 

Great Minds Think Alike

 This morning, Ken Jennings, the all-time Jeopardy champ and current host, has an op-ed in the online New York Times that says essentially what yesterday's post said from a different perspective.  Enjoy.

The challenge of being the United States

 A few months ago I started a new historical project:  a study of controversies over slavery from the constitutional convention of 1787 until the outbreak of the Civil War.  I have already read through about half a dozen secondary works on various particular controversies--works that once again testify to the one-time strength of the American historical profession, now fallen on relatively barren times.  I am struck as I have been over the last few decades at how much technology has made research easier nowadays.  Nine times out of ten, when a secondary work that I am reading cites an article or even a primary source, I can have the original source on my screen within a few minutes.  Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are taking advantage of these opportunities because they haven't been trained to do serious historical research, and I am not sure that any publishers are willing to publish them, anyway.  In any case, such research has always been more pleasure than business for me and this is turning out to be no exception.  Boiling the material down to a reasonable length will be hard, but I have solved problems like that before.  Meanwhile, I am learning an enormous amount not simply about different views of slavery but also about the fundamental dilemma that we Americans have struggled with since 1787.

Our constitution reflected the values of the Enlightenment in many ways, some of which contemporary observers prefer to ignore.  Despite the actual difference in legal status between free people and slaves and men and women, the founders used "persons" throughout to refer to all the nation's inhabitants.  They began with a promise of a "more perfect union," and their ratification process allowed the people of the nation, acting in statewide conventions, to transfer ultimate sovereignty from the states to the new national government.  And, using their recently devised state constitutions as a model, they codified procedures designed to carry out all the major functions of a government.  The constitution immediately became the ultimate source of authority when conflicts over governmental power arose.  Almost immediately, however, the inescapable flaw of such a system emerged.  Words require people to interpret them--and our history shows that political partisanship continually leads men and women to argue that even the simple words of the constitution do not mean what they say.

The first crisis along these lines occurred during the administration of John Adams, when Congress passed and Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798.  The Bill of Rights had been ratified only a few years earlier, but that act made criticism of the President and his administration a crime, and several opposition leaders were tried under it.  Fortunately Congress allowed it to expire in 1800.  I was even more struck, however, by what I have just read about John C. Calhoun and his theory of nullification, which South Carolina tried to deploy to invalidate federal tariffs in 1832.  I have discovered that my high school textbooks gave an inadequate account of that crisis.  While South Carolina bitterly opposed the tariff, the real issue involved was the possibility of federal action against slavery, which militant South Carolinians wanted to rule out. Calhoun laid out his argument at For Hill, South Carolina, on July 26, 1832, in an address you can easily find in full, as I did, on the web.

Now in point of fact, the founding fathers' overriding goal in Philadelphia in 1787 was to create a much stronger federal government as an alternative to the chaos they were living through thanks to the Articles of Confederation.  That document had given each state one vote in the confederation congress, and any important measure required the unanimity of all.  The founders instead created a bicameral legislature specifically designated to pass legislation relating to all the major functions of government.  It created an executive branch led by a president to enforce those laws.  A new federal judiciary was given original jurisdiction "all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority,"  And crucially, Article VI declared, in presumably unmistakable words,  "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."  Tariffs--the explicit source of the nullification controversy--were customarily part of the taxing power given to Congress, whose explicit authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations confirmed their legality.

Yet faced with the explicit issue of a high tariff and the threatened issue of national slavery controversies, Calhoun invented new constitutional meanings out of whole cloth.  First, without mentioning Article VI's supremacy clause, he denied that the people of the states had surrendered state sovereignty to the federal government.  They had, it is true, ratified the constitution--but he insisted that they reserved the right as states to call the federal government to account any time that they believed it had exceeded its powers.  He also denied the clear authority of the federal judiciary to decide cases under the constitution.  To maintain liberty, he claimed, the people must have means of defense against a hostile majority that might take control of the whole federal government. "By nature," he said, "every individual has the right to govern himself; and governments, whether founded on majorities or minorities, must derive their right from the assent, expressed or implied, of the governed, and be subject to such limitations as they may impose. Where the interests are the same, that is, where the laws that may benefit one will benefit all, or the reverse, it is just and proper to place them under the control of the majority; but where they are dissimilar, so that the law that may benefit one portion may be ruinous to another, it would be, on the contrary, unjust and absurd to subject them to its will; and such I conceive to be the theory on which our Constitution rests."  The only way to maintain the equality which Calhoun posited between the states on the one hand and the federal government on the other was to allow both to be the judge of their powers and exercise a veto on acts of excessive power by the other.  That specifically meant that a new state convention could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional and refuse to obey it--as a South Carolinian convention did in 1832, only to back down the next year after Calhoun, then Vice President of the United States, had helped arrange a tariff compromise.  This he called the power of "interposition" of a state between an unjust federal government and its citizens.

Calhoun, it seems to me, was trying to keep the spirit of the Articles of Confederation alive, even though the constitution had created a completely different system, and even though, in my opinion, there is nothing in the constitution that remotely justifies his view.  Yet under the constitution all Americans remained free to debate its meaning, and ideas like Calhoun's were sufficiently common in the South as to bring about secession and the Civil War after his death.  Even in our own time southerners like the historian Shelby Foote have claimed that the founding fathers assumed a right of secession which, as Lincoln properly pointed out, cannot be justified by the words that they wrote.  And 122 years after the nullification crisis some leading southern politicians revived the doctrine of "interposition" to argue that states did not have to comply with Brown vs. Board of Education because the Supreme Court had overstepped its authority.  They did not prevail.

So far I have mentioned three instances, in 1798, 1832, and 1954, when Congress or state governments have refused to recognize the plain language of the constitution and its traditionally accepted meaning.  Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has at times done so as well.  Perhaps the most notorious case of this was the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which Chief Justice Taney claimed that black people could never be citizens, even though there was nothing to suggest that in the constitution and they had in fact been citizens all over the country since its founding.  In 2008 I argued in a post here that Justice Scalia's 2010 opinion in Heller vs. District of Columbia, which first defined an individual right to bear arms not stated in the Second Amendment, was almost as dubious--and yet its argument has now been extended in a subsequent decision that could take away the rights to regulate gun ownership that states have exercised for most of our history.  Income taxes had been regarded as part of the taxing power since the founding of the Republic and the government had imposed one during the Civil War, but the Supreme Court suddenly defined them as unconstitutional in 1894, leading twenty years later to a constitutional amendment.  The present Supreme Court has eroded the first amendment's prohibition of an establishment of religion beyond recognition.  

The Trump administration is making many absurd claims about the meaning of the constitution, starting with the explicit denial of birthright citizenship, which is stated in the fourteenth amendment as clearly as anything could be.  Its idea of the "unitary executive," bound in all things to obey the president, is equally dubious in light of history.  The administration has now put these issues squarely before our court system now on many fronts.  I think it is likely to prevail on most immigration issues--although not on birthright citizenship--because the rights of aliens have been severely limited throughout our history.  Perhaps its most consequential steps so far relate to the elimination of various parts of the federal government that have been established and funded by acts of Congress, as well as President Trump's assertion of absolute authority over all federal civil servants.  The question is whether, to paraphrase Orwell, the court in at least sum of these cases will conclude that 2 + 2 can equal 5, if the chief executive so insists. In the past, the Supreme Court has corrected some of its worst decisions, but the demography of the current court suggests that its more recent mistakes will lst for quite a while.

When one reads the writings and speeches of 19th-century Americans, as I have been doing, one recognizes men and women to whom language meant a very great deal.  Since sounds and images could not yet be transmitted, the words the only way in which they could convey thoughts and experience, and reading was by far the most common form of entertainment.  I think that a successful democracy needs a society and a leadership that respect the actual meaning of words.  Such respect has diminished in recent decades, partly because my own profession has increasingly denied that words have any fixed meaning at all.  In so doing they, like demagogic politicians, have opened the door to authoritarianism.  Our functioning democracy depends, I think, on allegiance to something beyond ourselves.  Truth is such a thing.  We need it.