Not of moral responsibilities, but more of "territorial rights"…from The New York Times that came with today's papers…
Foreign policies can make a mockery of moral certitude. You're trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like general neighborliness, where even a superpower's ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.
This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past. It's why the "good war" of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression. It's why the "bad war" of Vietnam was only escaped at the cost of betraying the South Vietnamese and making a deal with yet another monster in Beijing.
But in active controversies the tragic vision can seem like a cold way of looking at the world. Lean into it too hard, and you get accused of ignoring injustice or recapitulating the indifference that gave cover to past atrocities.
Sometimes those accusations have some bite. A "realist" foreign policy can slide from describing power to excusing depredations. It can underestimate the power of a righteous cause—as I underestimated, for instance, Ukraine's capacity to defend itself in 2022.
But seeing statecraft as a tragic balancing of evils is still essential, especially amid the kind of moral fervor that attends a conflict like Israel-s war in the Gaza Strip. The alternative is a form of argument in which essential aspects of the world, being inconvenient to moral absolutism, simply, disappear.
Then a similar point applies to supporters of the Israeli war for whom moral considerations—the evil of Hamas, the historical suffering of the Jewish people, the special American relationship with Israel—are invoked as argument-ender in an inflexible way.
Biden's specific attempts to micromanage the conflict may be misguided or ham-fisted. But it's not misguided for America, an imperium dealing with multiplying threats, to decline to write a blank check for a war being waged without a clear plan for victory or for peace.
Being cold-eyed and tragic-minded does not mean abandoning morality. But it means recognizing that often nobody is simply right, no single approach is morally obvious, and no strategy is clean.
And so, the Israeli-Hama war has nothing do to with what's morally responsible, how the Palestinians are trying to establish their own independently ruled territory, because they don't want to be ruled under the Israelis anymore. This is how the western civilizations see it: someone else's war, so long as it doesn't get into my backyard, then, I couldn't give a, @#$%. And it's still all about money, not about the moral responsibilities these wars that are going on right now, same for the Ukrainian-Russo "conflict", because Russia perceives Ukraine's possibly being "admitted" into N.A.T.O. as N.A.T.O., expanding east, and, naturally, when someone threatens to take OVER your backyard, you would, DEFEND it, wouldn't you? Exactly. While the Israeli is preventing Palestine from setting up its own country, because of the fight over the holy land of Jerusalem.
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