Israel's Real Strategic Worth

By William W. Cover

Israel is constantly proclaimed as an ally and a strategic asset of the United States. As history shows, however, an ally is not necessarily also an asset. In fact, since it has become impossible to make an airtight separation between overall military strategy and the wider political and economic considerations of national strategy, one must look carefully at an ally constantly at odds with its neighbors and one that cannot exist without regular, massive injections of outside economic and military assistance. Given the ever-mounting volume of U.S. taxpayer aid necessary to maintain Israel, the question arises whether Israel is a strategic asset, as its partisans suggest, or is in fact a strategic liability to the U.S.

Israel sits amid 185 million Arabs, whose vast lands, resources, and key communication routes and nodes stretch some 4,300 miles from the Atlantic east to Iran, and from the southern tip of Somalia some 2,800 miles north to Turkey. Looking at Israel's minuscule size, its population of only 4.2 million, its lack of natural resources, absence of key communication features, the disastrous state of its mismanaged economy, and its financial dependence upon external largesse, what would an objective strategist of the traditional school conclude? In net terms, with due allowance for the qualities of Israel's industrial/scientific base and armed forces, the strategist would conclude that Israel as an ally would be a strategic liability to anyone—including the U.S.

The oft-repeated strategic catechism of Israel's partisans usually includes the following arguments:

Israel, in a non-democratic region of turbulence and instability, is a democratic, stable ally committed to the defense of Western interests and resistance to Soviet expansionism.
Israel provides the U.S. with important data on the combat performance of American equipment.
Israel is a key intelligence partner by providing the U.S. with captured Soviet material, political advice and warnings on Middle Eastern affairs, and potential electronic surveillance and monitoring of the U.S.S.R.
Israel's armed forces are a U.S. asset in the military balance against the U.S.S.R. in the Middle East.
Israel provides the U.S. with great potential wartime advantages for land-route access into the Middle East, as well as air bases, deep water ports, and staging, maintenance, and communications facilities.
Israel's armed forces are willing and able to go into combat in support of U.S. interests.

Debunking Myths One by One

Point 1 above (Israel as stable, Western-oriented democracy) ignores the interaction of this particular Western-oriented democracy with its neighbors, and the impact—both historical and ongoing—of that interaction on U.S. efforts to maintain and extend its influence elsewhere in the area by having strong political and economic ties with Western-oriented Arab nations. The great reservoir of Middle Eastern good will for America built by American explorers, educators, and medical missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th century was full at the end of World War II. After four decades of almost unrelieved, predominant United States partiality for Israel, that reservoir is now essentially empty.

Point 2 (Israel as military equipment tester) has some validity since, clearly, performance information from Israel is useful. But is it essential or critical to U.S. security and strategy? Hardly.

Point 3 (Israel as "intelligence partner") refers to Israel's contributions that have been a strategic asset of some importance. As with all such exchanges, however, it has not and does not come free.

Point 4 (Israel's armed forces as asset versus the U.S.S.R.) and point 5 (Israel as basing and maintenance area) are again simplistic arguments that seem at first glance to be wonderfully attractive. Yet they are premised on the outbreak of world war, with U.S. and Allied forces committed, World War II style, against a Soviet conventional invasion of the Middle East undertaken on the flank of the primary Soviet attack in Europe. This Armageddon scenario may well be a necessary subject for contingency planning, but it is not a workable vehicle for day-by-day positive strategy directed to Middle East peace and development.

There is no belittling Israel's formidable and modern military capability. It is well to recall, however, that Israel's military successes have depended in large measure on being able to operate with short, interior lines of supply, in violent but brief engagements within conflict areas of small size. Israel has matched military organization to task requirements, and its unaided capacity for long-distance transport of forces and supplies, by air or by land, is quite limited. Protracted, heavy conflict and a high level of casualties could not be sustained.

This leaves point 6 (Israel as military surrogate short of general war), a proposition that immediately prompts the counter-question: "Where, and under what circumstances?" Only the really fanatical would contend that Israel's invasion of Lebanon was a "direct action in support of U.S. interests." First and foremost, Israel pursues its own interests. Certainly, Israel is opposed to Soviet expansionism in the Middle East. Short of general war, however, or embracement by the U.S. of old-fashioned imperialist conquest, Israel's ability to do anything about the infiltration and expansion of Soviet influence in local Middle Eastern situations has been, and is, non-existent. The notion of Israel as an acceptable, usable, hired gendarme for the U. S. in the Middle East is fanciful in the extreme. Logistical limitations and distances, to say nothing of political unacceptability as a factor impacting on all concerned—including Israel—rule it out.

Israel's Disaster in Lebanon

But is there room, perhaps, for Israeli surrogate action in the limited area of the Levant—the eastern Mediterranean littoral? The initial military goal of the invasion of Lebanon—ejection of the PLO from the south—was attained, but Israel's momentum turned into over-extension and disaster. The U.S. allowed itself to be drawn into the maelstrom of this disaster under no-win conditions, with the resulting necessity for detachment and reevaluation of American interests in that small, troubled piece of the Middle East called the Levant.

It is especially interesting to note the purview of the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), the unified command activated on January 1, 1983, as successor to the Rapid Deployment Force. With headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, USCENTCOM has responsibility for U.S. security interests in an area 43 percent larger than the continental United States, covering 19 nations from the Horn of Africa across the Middle East to the western border of India. This sweep includes the oil exporting routes of the Gulf, which are critical to U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East. However, the Levant states—Israel, Lebanon and Syria—are not included in the purview of USCENTCOM. (They apparently remain appended under cognizance of U.S. European Command.) The extensive basing arrangements developed, and under development, by USCENTCOM do not include Israel.

For the Middle East as a whole, our strategic interests are clearly access to oil, extension of U.S. influence (along with denial of Soviet extensions), and Israeli-Arab peace. In furthering these interests, Israel can play a major role only in the third—and that by negotiation, not force.

So, is Israel a strategic asset? The official U.S. commitment to Israel's security and well-being is by now so firmly institutionalized as to make a flat answer to the question purely academic. Israel's security, support for its defense capability, and economic survival are underwritten by the U.S. Thus, efforts to assess the net strategic value of Israel by traditional strategic analysis unfortunately have become irrelevant. Israel's U.S. partisans should not try to equate that country's asset value in the general war scenario and its real, but non-critical intelligence contributions as balance sheet repayments for U.S. support, because such cost accounting cannot meaningfully be made and serves only to mislead the American people.

Assured by the strong U.S. commitments it has already received, Israel should pursue enlightened, moderate policies directed toward the broad strategic goal of Israeli-Arab peace. Recent exchanges between Prime Minister Peres and President Mubarak of Egypt, and between King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat of the PLO, suggest that a salutary new phase may be opening. No "strategic asset" Israel could possibly offer to the United States—or to Israel itself, for that matter—would even closely approach in value an effective, sustained contribution to this process.

Colonel William W. Cover, U.S. Army Retired, is a 1943 graduate of West Point who has served as attache with the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, and has held other military posts in Turkey and Tunisia. Since retiring he has become a military research analyst in Washington, D.C.