In a discussion held several years ago as part of a lecture I gave to senior officers, the decision to move more and more of the Israel Defense Forces' weapons production to the US came up for debate. In response to concern over that decision, some of the officers argued that we are completely dependent on the US anyway. That is a mistake: Dependence is not a binary matter. It is not true that we are either completely dependent or completely independent.
There is always a degree of dependence, and that degree matters a great deal. Dependence on weapons, for example, or on diplomatic support, another very important example, can be extreme or moderate. Dependence can be tempered, especially when the stronger ally is itself dependent to some degree on the same alliance. When dependence is extreme, a Biden administration can force Israel to withdraw from places in southern Lebanon that we are now being compelled to recapture.
But the officers' response was not only a miscalculation of power. Accepting extreme dependence also carries a severe psychological and practical cost: the loss of a sense of sovereignty and, as a result, the loss of the aspiration to shape one's own destiny.
Dependence within an alliance, decline followed
That is what happened to the countries of Europe: extreme dependence on America that developed within the framework of an alliance and went so far as to undermine sovereignty and create an existential danger. This is now being illustrated in the face of Iran. Iran's nuclear-ballistic project has moved close to posing a critical risk to Europe's vital interests, not only to those of Israel and the US, and yet European leaders declare that thwarting that risk is not their concern and that a joint US-Israeli attack would violate international law.
They back up those declarations by obstructing US military transit and through French efforts to appease Iran at the United Nations. In doing so, former powers such as Britain, France and Germany are giving up control over their fate, over their ability to prevent a malicious Islamist force from blackmailing or attacking them, and over their ability to secure vital energy supplies for their economies. They are displaying a clear loss of any sense of sovereignty.
At the start of the 1990s, before that process of decline had been completed, they still joined America in containing Saddam Hussein. Now, by contrast, they shrug as though Iran is not their problem.
But the process began immediately after World War II. Europe's countries were unable to stand against the Soviet Union on their own and needed American protection. West Germany was completely dependent on the US for its defense against the East, while Britain, and especially France, tried to moderate their dependence on the US and cultivated nuclear power as well as conventional armies and navies. But the fall of the Soviet Union led them, too, onto a path of military and naval reduction, to ludicrous proportions, and then to weakness and extreme dependence on America, which were exposed in the war in Ukraine.
Globalist ideas without validity
Decades of degeneration in European countries, as well as in Canada and Australia, eventually undermined their sense of responsibility for their own fate. They developed distorted conceptions of international law that are not anchored in sovereignty sustained by military power. In all their weakness, they cling to a detached idea of floating international law, as though it can emerge solely from an abstract system of "human rights," without being grounded in sovereign power that upholds and enforces it.
Such globalist ideas have no validity, not in practice and not even in theory, whether for organizing democracy, governing a state or imposing international order. This kind of globalism led to the abandonment of national sovereignty in favor of the quasi-federation known as the European Union, which is itself detached from the sovereignty of any people.
This is what lies at the root of Europe's helplessness in the face of the influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, and in the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It is also the source of Europe's appeasement in the face of the Iranian threat.
Therefore, precisely when our alliance with the US is deepening, at least for now, we must beware of the pattern of decline that afflicted America's European allies. Israel will never enjoy complete independence, but it must regulate and temper its dependence on its allies. Our clear national identity, unlike the dissolution of national identity in Europe, can help us do that.
