Why Realists Oppose the War in Gaza

At first glance, you might think that foreign-policy realists wouldn’t care one way or the other about what Israel is doing in Gaza. Yes, it’s a humanitarian disaster and possibly a genocide, but is brutal behavior all that rare in the conduct of international politics? Aren’t realists the first to point out that in a world with no central authority, governments are going to take the gloves off if they think they will benefit and that no one will stop them? Consider how the United States reacted after Pearl Harbor or after Sept. 11, how Russia is acting in Ukraine, or how the contending forces are behaving in Sudan, and you’ll see what I mean.

Yet prominent foreign-policy realists—including Chas Freeman, John Mearsheimer, and yours truly—have been highly critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the Biden administration’s support for it. Isn’t it odd that adherents of a hard-nosed and unsentimental approach to world politics are suddenly talking about morality?

Nope.

Some of the confusion arises from a common misconception about realism; namely, that its proponents think ethical considerations should play little or no role in the conduct of foreign policy. This is a silly charge, as even a casual reading of the realist canon would reveal. Hans J. Morgenthau wrote a whole book exploring the tensions between political efficacy and moral principles, and he emphasized that “the moral issues [of politics] raise their voice and demand an answer.” E. H. Carr was not a genuine realist, but he did write one classic realist work and made it clear that one could not exclude considerations of morality from political life. Virtually all of Kenneth Waltz’s writings on international politics focus on the problem of peace and the conditions or policies that reinforce or undermine it, and he repeatedly criticized the tendency of powerful states to commit evil acts in the pursuit of idealistic objectives. And prominent realists like George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, Morgenthau, Waltz, and their intellectual descendants opposed many of America’s recent wars of choice, on both strategic and moral grounds.

Like all human beings, those of us who think realism provides a useful way to think about world politics also have moral convictions and would like to live in a world where those principles were observed more consistently. Indeed, realists care about the moral dimensions of international politics precisely because they recognize how easy it is for states and other political groups to commit immoral acts. Realists are not surprised by what is happening in Gaza—as noted above, plenty of other states have done horrendous things when they felt their vital interests were at stake—but that hardly means that realists approve of what Israel and the United States are doing.

Realists’ criticisms of the war in Gaza arise in part from their appreciation of the limits of military power and the importance of nationalism. They are acutely aware of the difficulties foreign invaders typically face when attempting to dominate or destroy another people with armed force, which is why they concluded that Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas by bombing and invading Gaza was doomed to fail. It is increasingly clear that Hamas is going to survive Israel’s onslaught, and even if it doesn’t, new resistance organizations are bound to emerge as long as Palestinians are occupied, denied basic political rights, and gradually dispossessed of their lands.

Equally important, realists oppose Israel’s actions (and U.S. complicity in them) because the combination is undermining America’s global position. The war in Gaza has made it clear that America’s commitment to a “rules-based order” is meaningless; it is frankly hard to believe that U.S. officials can still utter that phrase with a straight face. The recent U.N. General Assembly vote granting new “rights and privileges” to Palestine—which passed 143-9 with 25 abstentions—was a revealing indicator of America’s growing isolation, as was the repeated U.S. veto of U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire. The top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity (along with Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri). Washington will no doubt reject this step, further underscoring how out of step it is with much of the world.

Public opinion polls also suggest U.S. popularity has declined sharply in the Middle East and slightly in Europe, while support for China, Russia, and Iran has risen. Less than one month into the war, a report from the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy warned: “America is losing compared to its opponents because of the war in Gaza. The percentage of Arabs who believe America has a positive role in the war amounts only to 7 percent, with figures as low as 2 percent in countries like Jordan. By contrast, the percentage of Arabs who say that China has a positive role in the conflict included 46 percent in Egypt, 34 percent in Iraq, and 27 percent in Jordan. … Moreover, it seems that Iran has been a major beneficiary of this war. On average, percentage of those who say that it had a positive impact in the war is 40 percent, compared to 21 percent [of] those who say that it has a negative impact. In countries such as Egypt and Syria, the percentage who say that Iran has a positive influence in Gaza is even higher, reaching 50 percent and 52 percent respectively.”

And the war isn’t cheap. The U.S. Congress has authorized billions of dollars of additional aid to help Israel decimate Gaza, along with $320 million for that floating pier the United States had to construct because the “ally” we are backing wouldn’t let relief agencies send trucks in to deliver humanitarian aid. U.S. military forces have been using up expensive missiles and bombs against the Houthis in Yemen, who began to terrorize ships in and around the Red Sea in protest to what Israel is doing. I know: These amounts aren’t that much for a country with a $25 trillion economy, but it would be nice to spend this money helping Americans instead of helping kill Palestinians in Gaza. The next time congressional budget hawks say they must cut some domestic programs, remind them how eager they were to pay for Israel’s war.

The war is also burning up vast amounts of top officials’ time, energy, and attention. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Director William Burns have made repeated trips to the region and spent countless hours wrestling with these issues. So have other top officials, including President Joe Biden himself. The time U.S. leaders have devoted to a conflict between roughly 15 million people in Israel and Palestine is time that they could not spend visiting key allies elsewhere, devising a better policy in Ukraine, developing an effective economic strategy for Asia, marshaling global support to address climate change, or any number of far more important issues.

The big winners? Russia and China, of course. For many people around the world—and especially much of the global south—the carnage in Gaza validates Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recurring charge that global U.S. “leadership” sows conflict and suffering and that the world would be better off in a multipolar order where power was shared more evenly. You may not agree with that argument, but millions of people already do, and our current policy makes it look a lot more credible. In the meantime, Chinese leaders aren’t wasting their time flying to Israel for the privilege of being humiliated by Netanyahu; they are busy mending fences, cultivating economic connections, and solidifying the “no limits” partnership with Russia. They must be giving thanks every single day for the costly distraction that the war in Gaza has become for the United States.

Lastly, realists object to what Israel is doing because it brings the United States precisely zero strategic benefits. Although its value was sometimes exaggerated, during the Cold War one could plausibly argue that Israel was a useful check against Soviet influence in the Middle East. But the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, and unconditional support for Israel is not making Americans more secure today. Some of Israel’s defenders now claim it is a powerful bulwark against Iran and a valuable partner against terror; what they fail to mention is that our relationship with Israel is one of the reasons the United States has a bad relationship with Iran and one of the reasons that terrorists like al Qaeda decided to attack the United States.

The plain fact is that bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age is not going to make Americans safer or more prosperous, and it is totally at odds with the values that Americans like to proclaim. If anything, it might make the United States slightly less secure, if it inspires a new generation of anti-American terrorists like the late Osama bin Laden. Nor is this policy going to make Israel safer; only a political solution to the conflict can do that.

And that’s why realists like me shake our heads about what the United States and Israel are doing today. On some rare and wonderful occasions, states can pursue a policy that advances their strategic interests and their moral preferences simultaneously. At other times, they face trade-offs between the two and must make hard choices between them (typically in favor of the former). But in this case, the United States is actively undermining its strategic interests and supporting the mass killing of innocent people, largely because U.S. leaders are trapped in an outdated view of the conflict and are overly deferential to a powerful interest group. For any good realist, doing evil for no good purpose is the worst sin of all.