Tocqueville and American Foreign Policy:
Its Relevance to Israel
Paul Eidelberg & Will
Morrisey
One customarily refers all important
questions concerning American politics and society to Alexis de Tocqueville. For
only the obtuse regard Democracy in America as a mere historical document, a
portrait of a simpler time and place. Americans recognize themselves in
Tocqueville’s Americans, despite the industrial revolution, high-tech, and the
global village.
It may well be, moreover, that Democracy in
America can teach us much about Israel and about many Israelis. Even though
Israel (as the first author has shown) is not a democracy from a political
perspective, this does not diminish Tocqueville’s potential relevance to this
country because by democracy he does not mean a form of government so much as a
way of life. In other words, Tocqueville is primarily concerned about the
sociological characteristics of American democracy, which characteristics may
also be found among many assimilated Israelis.
Still, one does not usually refer questions
of foreign policy to Tocqueville. Nevertheless, that extraordinary philosopher
saw that “a democracy can only with difficulty regulate the details of an
important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution
in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or
await their consequences with patience.”
Tocqueville would not have been surprised
by the mistakes the U.S. made before 9/11. He saw that, given the democratic
love of physical gratification, “There are two things that a democratic people
will always find very difficult, to begin a war and to end it.”
How indeed can the President of the United
States arouse his fellow-citizens to engage and persevere in a war against
Islam, when Americans are bombarded daily by media steeped in moral relativism,
which saps the will to win? And how does this President maintain moral
consistency when his country’s economy depends on Saudi oil, and when his
people, habituated to ease and comfort, will not long endure the material
sacrifices demanded by a protracted (and amorphous) war?
As for Israel, how can it win a war against
its enemies when Israel’s political elites are forever intoning the mantra of
peace, and when its military, emasculated by the doctrine of “self-restraint,”
lack cardia, “heart,” and dynamis, “the will to fight.”
Americans and Israelis can learn much from
Tocqueville.
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