Opinion: The danger of an uncritical alliance

Jackson Lears wrote in Harper’s Magazine that George Washington cautioned the new republic to avoid both passionate attachment and habitual hatred in engagement with other countries. Our country has strayed from this admonition in its present foreign relationships. The examples that Lears offers are a full-throated, uncritical United States alliance with Israel and an ardent conviction of a persistent threat from Russia. Considering the former, the U.S. relationship with Israel has led to the tendency “to excuse Israel’s wars of conquest as retaliation against their supposedly hostile Arab neighbors.” The U.S. was the first country to recognize the state of Israel in 1948. Since then, the U.S. has accepted that nothing Israel might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal. Continued U.S.

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