Tucker Carlson is right. American policy-makers have a “moral duty” as well as a paramount professional obligation to “represent the interests” of the United States. That, however, is where Carlson’s rectitude ended in his recent soliloquy on the dangers associated with America’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself and its people from the genocidal terrorists with whom it is surrounded.
Carlson expressed far more concern for the repercussions that could result from an Israel response to the slaughter of at least 1,300 of its civilians than for the conditions that would follow in the absence of a robust response. He worried that Israel and Iran could become engaged in direct conflict — eliding the attack on Israel from Lebanon by the Iranian cutout militia group Hezbollah that would precipitate that conflict.
He said that he could “easily imagine the use of nuclear weapons” in such a conflict, which fails to account for the dynamics of nuclear deterrence, which have kept those weapons safely interred in their silos for 70 years despite regular periods of direct and indirect conflict between nuclear-armed powers (a misapprehension Carlson shares with Joe Biden). He warned that Americans might have to endure an “unprecedented energy crisis” in the event of such a conflict between Israel and Iran, as though the United States is both uninvolved in that war and its people are incapable of concern for anything less parochial than their own wallets. Hamas murdered at least 25 Americans on October 7, and its barbarians have taken an unknown number of American hostages, whom Hamas has promised to execute on camera if their unacceptable demands are not met.
It is a logical error to believe that the targets of this attack were Israeli Jews alone — a fallacy from which all of Carlson’s subsequent misconceptions spring. Iran and its terrorist proxies regard strikes on Israel as blows meted out against the United States — they say as much to anyone willing to listen. America “is participating in this war,” Senior Hamas official Ali Baraka told an interlocutor this week. The American president “is a partner to this aggression,” he added. “He must pay the price. He confessed that Iran and Hezbollah provided material and political support for this attack, that Russia “sympathizes with us,” and that their collective strategic objective is to ensure that “America is getting more embroiled in Palestine.”
America’s enemies are not disunited. Their objective is to degrade the capacity of the United States to defend its allies and, ultimately, to midwife into existence the brutal, ugly post-American world for which they hunger. America’s retreat from the world stage would suit Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia just fine.
Carlson reserved his most observably emotional denunciations not for the murders and hostage takers attacking Americans and their allies but his fellow citizens who recognized the threat and proposed that we address it. He called Nikki Haley “ignorant, cocksure,” and “bloodthirsty.” He castigated Senator Linsday Graham for recommending attacks on Iran’s oil infrastructure if and only if Hezbollah “attacks Israel” — the definition of a deterrent posture — because Iran might retaliate. But this inverts the sequence of events. Iran would not be retaliating at all. In this scenario, Iran is the aggressor.
Carlson’s errant thoughts concluded when he invited Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy onto his program to echo his own thoughts. Ramaswamy indicted Washington for its “selective moral outrage.” Why are American policy-makers fit to be tied over the wars in Ukraine and Israel and not, say, in the Caucuses or Africa? The answer to that question is that American policy-makers are seeing to the critical U.S. material and historical interests in preserving security in Israel and the Levant and on the European continent — interests that are far less well-defined in Sub-Saharan Africa and Nagorno-Karabakh. These two commentators insist they are dispassionately focused squarely on U.S. interests while apparently having little understanding of what American interests are.
In a final note that betrays the declinist preconceptions to which the so-called “America First” wing of the GOP is beholden, Ramaswamy impugned the motives of Israel’s defenders. “A lot of it comes down to money,” he said. While allowing for the possibility that some advocates of America as a force for good on the world stage are earnest in their “outdated” ideological predilections, he maintained that “the corrupting influence of super PACs” and “mega money” is mostly to blame.
Americans — public officials and average voters alike — do not support Israel in this time of testing because they’ve been bought off. They recognize a partner nation in need when they see one. They understand that when our enemies chant “death to America” after murdering Israeli Jews, they’re not confused. They comprehend the high stakes of a conflict they did not seek and do not want but was thrust upon them, nonetheless.
It is the weakness projected by Americans who advocate retreat and retrenchment that emboldens our would-be killers, not the other way around. It seems like most Americans can see that. It’s a shame that those who presume to speak for manipulable masses cannot.