Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Even alliances between countries that share similar cultures and rich, intersecting histories can be acrimonious. France and Israel, for example, provoke vivid and contradictory sentiments for many Americans. Franco-American ties are routinely strained. No one in Washington ever believed that Charles de Gaulle’s nuclear independence, guided by the principles of tous azimuts, shoot in any direction, and dissuasion du faible au fort, deterrence of the strong by the weak, meant that France might try to intimidate the United States. But there were moments when it wasn’t crystal clear whether Paris, free from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, might harmfully diverge from Washington in a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Still, even when things have been ugly, quiet and profound military and intelligence cooperation continued with the French, almost on a par with the exchanges between Washington, London, and Canberra. It didn’t hurt that a big swath of affluent Americans have loved Paris and the sunnier parts of France for generations, and that French and American universalism essentially speak the same language. These things matter.  The United States has sometimes been furious at Israel — no other ally has, so far as we know, run an American agent deep inside the U.S. government hoovering up truckloads of highly classified information. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, much disliked and denounced by various American governments, is probably permanent: setting aside the Israeli right’s revanchism, the proliferation of ever-better ballistic weaponry and drones negates any conceivable good faith that might exist in the future between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, who never seem to be able to check their own worst impulses. Geography is destiny: Israel simply lacks the physical (and maybe moral) depth to not intrude obnoxiously into the lives of Palestinians. The Gaza war has likely obliterated any lingering Israeli indulgence towards the Palestinian people — what used to be called, before the Intifadas eviscerated the Israeli left, “risks for peace.” An ever larger slice of the Democratic Party is increasingly uncomfortable with this fate: the rule of (U.S.-subsidized) Westerners over a non-Western, mostly Muslim, people. But the centripetal forces — shared democratic and egalitarian values, intimate personal ties between the American and Israeli political and commercial elites, a broader, decades-old American emotional investment in the Jewish state, a common suspicion of the Muslim Middle East, and a certain Parousian philo-Semitism among American evangelicals — have so far kept in check the sometimes intense official hostility towards Israel and the distaste among so much of the American intelligentsia.  None of this amalgam of culture, religion, and history, however, works to reinforce relations between the United States and Islamic lands. Senior American officials, the press, and think tanks often talk about deep relationships with Muslim Middle Eastern countries, the so-called “moderate Arab states,” of which Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are the most favored. Presidents, congressmen, diplomats, and spooks have certainly had soft spots for Arab potentates. The Hashemites in Jordan easily win the contest for having the most friends across the Israel divide in Washington: sympathizing with the Palestinian cause, if embraced too ardently, could destroy the Hashemites, who rule over sometimes deeply disgruntled Palestinians. American concern for the Palestinian cause rarely crosses the Jordan River. (Neither does even more intense European concern for the Palestinians intrude into their relations with the Hashemite monarchy.)  The Hashemites are witty enough, urbane enough, and sufficiently useful to consistently generate sympathy and affection. Even when King Hussein went to war against Israel in 1967 or routinely sided with Saddam Hussein, his style and his manner (and I’m-really-your-friend conversations with CIA station chiefs and American ambassadors) always encouraged Washington to forgive him his sins. The Hashemites, like the Egyptian military junta, have routinely, if not always reliably, done our dirty work when Washington needed some terrorist or other miscreant held and roughly interrogated. Such things matter institutionally, building bonds and debts among officials.  But little cultural common ground binds Americans to even the most Westernized Arabs. Arabists, once feared by Israel and many Jewish Americans, always had an impossible task: they had to use realist arguments — shouldn’t American interests prefer an alliance with twenty-two Arab countries rather than with a single Jewish one? — without underlying cultural support. They had to argue dictatorship over democracy or belittle Israel’s democracy enough (“an apartheid state”) to make it seem equally objectionable. Outside of American universities, the far-left side of Congress, the pages of The Nation, Mother Jones, and the New York Review of Books, and oil-company boardrooms, it hasn’t worked — yet. Too many Americans have known Israelis and visited the Holy Land. And too many are viscerally discomfited by turbans and hijabs. Culture — the bond that rivals self-interest — just isn’t that fungible. Even the Turks, the most Westernized of Muslims, didn’t have a large fan club in America when the secular Kemalists reigned in Ankara — outside of the Pentagon and the Jewish-American community, which deeply appreciated Turkey’s engagement with Israel. The Turks’ democratic culture never really blossomed under the Kemalists, who couldn’t fully shake their fascist (and Islamic) roots. The American military still retains a soft spot for the Turks — they fought well in Korea, and their military, the southern flank of NATO, has a martial ethic and a level of competence far above any Arab army; and they have continuously allowed the Pentagon to do things along the Turkish littoral, openly and secretly, against the Soviets and the Russians.  Yet their American fan club has drastically shrunk as the Turkish government, under the guidance of the philo-Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has re-embraced its Ottoman past, enthusiastically used state power against the opposition and the press, and given sympathy and some support to Arab Islamic militants, among them Hamas. The Turks have pummeled repeatedly Washington’s Kurdish allies in Syria (who are affiliated with Ankara’s deadly foe, the terrorism-fond Kurdistan Workers Party). More damning, Erdoğan purchased Russian S-400 ground-to-air missiles, compromising its part in developing and purchasing America’s most advanced stealth fighter-bomber, the