Building Humane Foreign Policy On Moral Outrage
Only building popular concern for the shared humanity of others will lay the groundwork for regional peace.
Andrew Leber is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the Middle East & North African Studies Program at Tulane University, and was a cofounder of Fellow Travelers Blog.
Since late 2010, U.S. policy towards the Middle East treated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as something that could be safely left on the back burner while dealing with more pressing concerns – chiefly the desire to contain Iran’s nuclear program. Now events have come full circle, with Israel’s expansive response to Hamas’ October 7 attacks finally pulling the United States into a direct military engagement with Iran.
In condemning President Trump’s decision to send B-2 bombers halfway around the globe (without congressional approval), critics have understandably raised the specter of a protracted military engagement in the Middle East, akin to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Yet Trump’s actions also highlight the limits of a politics of restraint rooted in conserving American “blood and treasure” from foreign military adventures. While successive U.S. presidents have been constrained by the ultimate unpopularity of the Iraq War, the flip side of a historical memory overwhelmingly focused on U.S. (rather than Iraqi) casualties is a sense that almost any military action is permissible so long as it avoids committing ground forces.
“No ground forces were used in the strike,” Trump noted in his subsequent letter to Congress justifying the strikes. This rhetoric channels executive legal arguments across administrations and President Obama’s own emphasis on “no boots on the ground” in overseas military operations. Even during his first term, Trump embraced drone strikes and airpower as a way to project U.S. power abroad, in many ways a continuation — albeit with even less regard for civilian casualties — of Obama’s own “light-footprint” approach to military intervention.
Still, merely limiting the direct risks to U.S. forces is no recipe for peace or human well-being, as the Obama administration found in facilitating a Saudi-led military intervention. Even in the absence of broader military commitments, present U.S. support for Israel’s “might makes right” foreign policy poses enormous reputational and material risks to the United States.
Only concerted efforts to build popular concern for the shared humanity of others, as happened in limiting U.S. support for military intervention in Yemen, will lay the groundwork for regional peace that is more than a pause between fighting. The alternative is a continuation of the Global War on Terror: carrying out (or otherwise facilitating) attacks on actors, organizations, or even states deemed threatening to the United States and its partners, with little in the way of popular or congressional oversight.
The Yemen-War Model
The progressive foreign policy movement already has experience addressing the moral hazard of U.S. security commitments in the Middle East, namely Saudi Arabia’s protracted military intervention in Yemen. There, as with Israel, sources of leverage were clear: arms sales that sustained the Saudi war effort and diplomatic cover that justified the intervention in terms of Saudi national security concerns.
As with Israel’s war in Gaza (albeit on a much smaller scale), the United States was perceived as facilitating mass suffering by providing Saudi Arabia with material and moral support for sustained attacks on Houthi forces in Yemen. U.S. leverage was also understood as critical to restraining Saudi Arabia given the absolute monarchy’s suppression of any domestic dissent. While Israel is far more open to domestic dissent than the Kingdom neither criticism by prominent former officials nor protests by the families of Israeli hostages in Gaza has meaningfully restrained Prime Minister Netanyahu in Gaza. An overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis back the latest attack on Iran, even if some quibble with the timing. Additionally, free speech within Israel itself is under threat, with state raids on bookstores in East Jerusalem, sanctioning Israeli media critical of government actions in Gaza, and stifling of dissent within the Israeli armed forces itself.
Moral outrage over the war’s humanitarian toll and Saudi Arabia’s humanitarian abuses, not rational cost-benefit analysis, ultimately pushed members of Congress – including some Republicans – to pass successive War-Powers resolutions and take other legislative action aimed at curtailing U.S. security support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen and blocking U.S. arms sales to the kingdom. This moral outrage did not appear overnight, but was actively built by a broad coalition of activists, and turbo-charged by Saudi Arabia’s assassination of media figure Jamal Khashoggi.
While the Trump administration ultimately overrode Congress in direct terms, and maintained most arms sales to Saudi Arabia, senior officials nevertheless began to push Saudi and other Gulf leaders toward peace talks. Joe Biden in turn made ending support for the Saudi intervention part of his presidential campaign, and empowered a special envoy to seek a diplomatic solution to the conflict in 2021. (The Biden administration continued security coordination with Saudi Arabia, however, leaving its Yemen policy open to charges of being both too hawkish and too dove-ish.) Restraint ultimately worked in Saudi Arabia’s favor as well, with a de facto truce by 2022 insulating the kingdom from the Houthi force’s efforts to pressure Israel amid the ongoing Gaza war.
Of course, any restraint of Saudi Arabia was (in retrospect) playing on “easy mode.” Saudi Arabia has little domestic constituency in the United States, at least outside of the Beltway, and to the extent that Americans have strong feelings about the kingdom they tend to be negative. Even then, any “restraint” of Saudi military activities by the United States has been partial at best and highly contingent on other U.S. policy priorities.
Israel, by contrast, is overwhelmingly supported by one half of the United States’ two-party political scene, and by a fiercely devoted constituency within the Democratic Party’s supporters as well. While negative U.S. views of Israel are on the rise, it is hard to imagine a presidential candidate for either party labelling the country a “pariah” on the campaign trail anytime soon.
What is to be done?
In the near term, War-Powers legislation – as recently attempted by Tim Kaine in the Senate, and proposed by various members in the House – is the clearest tool for weighing in on the Executive’s opaque decision-making. It is good for Congress to flex its oversight muscles, for individuals and advocacy organizations to support these efforts, and to remind the President and security partners overseas of the domestic fallout of military action abroad.
Yet even within the Democratic Party, leaders struggle to meaningfully criticize Israeli actions – while drawing distinctions regarding committing U.S. forces – while other members openly long for regime change in Iran. It will require a far more concerted effort to demilitarize U.S. policy towards the Middle East at the strategic level, and to ensure that future administrations do not simply shunt the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the back burner once more.
At the local and state level, this means building and maintaining spaces to talk about Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. role in this long-running conflict – something that can no longer be taken for granted, even on private university campuses. It in turn means supporting political candidates who oppose a “Palestine exception” to free speech, while recognizing practical limits on the type and tenor of critiques they make of Israel.
In terms of shaping mass attitudes, it means integrating demands for Palestinian liberation into broader advocacy of a rights-based internationalism – as many pro-Palestinian advocacy organizations across the United States have already done.
Progressives recognize the need to build popular buy-in to global norms long taken for granted in foreign policymaking, from respect for international humanitarian law to the belief that the United States is safer when it cares for the well-being of others. The best counter to charges that U.S. policy singles out Israel for criticism – beyond noting the fact that few countries receive the same level of U.S. diplomatic and military support – is to demand that the same standards apply to Emirati involvement in Sudan’s civil war, or to our own country’s treatment of resident non-citizens.
When it comes to Israel per se, this means continuing to convey the risks of underwriting a “might makes right” approach to regional security. In engaging persuadable U.S. supporters of Israel, it means taking seriously concerns about rising antisemitism while continuing the slow, steady work of insisting that the state of Israel be judged by its actions as a state.
And at the level of national policy, it means forcing elected and appointed officials to recognize that U.S. ties to any security partner cannot take the form of writing blank checks for states bent on exacerbating human suffering – whatever their justifications. For those willing to listen, this can take the form of advocacy; for those unwilling, this should take the form of primarying them or, for appointees, their patrons.
It also means accepting, as both the Biden and now the Trump administrations have found, that Israeli war crimes in Gaza, and the fundamental injustice towards Palestinians of Israel’s one-state reality, cannot be walled off from more “strategic” considerations of the U.S. national interest rooted in avoiding costly interstate conflict.
