Luckily for JD Vance, Kamala Harris showed her lack of respect for her position as president of the Senate while aiming for a cheap point against Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to maintain her radical left creds, when he addressed a joint session of Congress this week. Her low and discourteous gesture aligns her with the representative from Michigan who was there brandishing signs accusing Netanyahu of war crimes while anti-American thugs outside soiled Union Station and nearby statues while burning Old Glory and raising Hamas’s Jolly Roger.
Such ugly gestures overshadow Vance’s absence from what should have been a must-attend event; but he would be well advised to hurry up and find a way to make up what could be held against him later as the slighting of an ally.
Israel’s fighting prime minister evoked an address in the same place by Winston Churchill with the same inspiring effect. He hammered at the same theme the great Englishman brought to Washington during another crisis, 80 years ago: indispensable allies must stand together in a fight between civilization and barbarism, and since we — England in 1940, Israel today — are at the front line, you must not flag in your support: “Give us the tools,” Netanyahu quoted Churchill, “we’ll do the job.”
Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech was rousing, but it was also quietly reassuring. Such a seeming contradiction is possible: read the Psalms and you find again and again the deep confidence to stay the course against all difficulties, combined with a fierce determination to trust the Lord to bring you to success. The young Israeli soldiers who were present reminded Americans that Israel is a free country, with rights for all faiths and backgrounds, and they also were there to express the quiet strength and courage that Israel’s fight requires, as did England’s. One of the prime minister’s compatriots is a young sergeant who lost an arm and an eye protecting his men in Gaza: when fully rehabbed, Netanyahu said, he will return to the front as a tank commander.
The others, including one from a Muslim-majority village and another from an Ethiopian family, had done feats of valor no less admirable; Israel represents the fight for life against the cult of death.
Harris has, by all evidence, chosen her side; rioting and killing are fine if in service of a righteous cause, such as the destruction of a civilized society based on liberal democratic principles. This, after all, is what she labored for in cheering on and raising money for rampaging anti-American mobs during the summer of 2020, or promoting the decriminalization reforms in the judicial system that, along with the subversion of police departments’ ability to do their jobs, has contributed mightily to putting us on a path to perdition.
But Vance nowise partakes of this way of thinking; his absence from the joint session represents a serious lapse of manners or a flawed political judgment. Does he mean to reinforce his image as a Jacksonian isolationist, unmoved by the heroism of our strongest allies in their time of need? But the Jacksonian tradition in America is quick to fight as soon as a cause we can readily understand comes to our attention.
The line between Jacksonian and Wilsonian foreign policy is very clear: we go not abroad in search of dragons to destroy, says the former (which actually is a line from John Quincy Adams, who was no friend of Andrew Jackson!), and certainly not in search of strange faraway lands to turn into free and democratic societies like ours. But we never turn away from a righteous fight, either, and we get it done as quickly as possible. By contrast, the Wilsonian line, indeed from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (in sharp contrast with his father), is to get us into a briar patch from which we can never extricate ourselves.
Vance surely knows this. He surely knows, as well, that the Trump-inspired Abraham Accords, which Netanyahu saluted in his speech, represents the best chance, after so many decades of failed solutions, to bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East. To give them a fresh momentum, with a security as well as an economic and political-diplomatic dimension, would be, as the prime minister said, a bold and grand vision for the next U.S. administration’s foreign policy.