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Vol. 9 / September 2006 / Rosh Hashana 5767        A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE ARTS

 

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 For only the obtuse regard Democracy in America as a mere historical document, a portrait of a simpler time and place.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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