What Roger Cohen Leaves Out
The framing of discussion about the Middle East war
I've spent considerable time discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict on this blog in the past year. The news has never been good and in the past three weeks it has gotten steadily worse. It's now more accurate to speak of "the Middle East war" than "the Israel-Palestine conflict." That's demoralizing, and that partially explains my failure to post on a weekly basis recently. Let me see if I can get back some momentum by discussing one news analysis piece that appeared recently in the elite media and how it reflects the way political discussions are framed in that media.
Roger Cohen on the Middle East War
The article in question is "Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War" which was published on the New York Times website on Sunday, September 29. The article was by Roger Cohen, a correspondent, mostly overseas, for the Times for three decades and currently head of its Paris bureau. Though Cohen's apparent political stances are far more "centrist" than mine, I generally find him to be a cut above most of the other writers for the Times and the Washington Post whom I regularly skewer on this blog. Hence the limitations in the way he frames issues are more subtle than those of his peers. Paying attention to that framing is therefore more challenging and more important.
Cohen leads off this article by observing:
"Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure."
Let's first examine that fuzzy term, "major powers." Who might they be? As Cohen clearly demonstrates, neither Russia nor China has any particular interest in playing the role of "Middle East peacemaker" right now, and Russia in particular has its own war with Ukraine to occupy its attention. The leading European states -- France, Britain, Germany -- can no longer be considered "major" powers. Cohen devotes ink to the United Nations, which is not a "power" and is largely ineffectual. Who does that leave? The United States. So Cohen is essentially saying, "The United States has proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure."
This strongly implies that, once upon a time, in a less turbulent world of more centralized authority, the U.S. did have the power of stopping or significantly influencing armed conflicts in the Middle East. However, you'd probably have to go back to the Suez conflict in 1956, when President Eisenhower condemned Britain and France for their intervention on the side of Israel and against Egypt, to find a case where U.S. military, political, economic and diplomatic pressure actually made a significant contribution to ending such an armed conflict. But Cohen is thinking more about the diplomatic efforts of the Carter and Clinton administrations, where the U.S. could be said to have exercised leadership in the diplomatic sphere. He is acknowledging that in the Israel-vs.-Palestine conflict since October 7 of last year and its recent escalation to an Israel-vs.-Iran-and-all-its-alleged-proxies conflict recently, the U.S. has been "incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting."
The U.S., in this perspective, now is exposed, in terms we might borrow from Richard M. Nixon, as a "pitiful, helpless giant." The U.S. has tried to play the role of peacemaker, but things are more "decentralized" now, so nobody is listening or obeying.
"The world, and Israel’s primary enemies, have since [the 1990s] changed. America’s ability to influence Iran, its implacable foe for decades, and Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah is marginal. Designated as terrorist organizations in Washington, Hamas and Hezbollah effectively exist beyond the reach of American diplomacy."
True enough, as far as it goes. But then Cohen writes:
"The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Biden."
So the U.S. is not quite as powerless over all parties to Middle East conflicts as Cohen's framing originally suggested! Cohen goes on:
"But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms."
That last sentence overflows with ideological framing. Let's take it point by point.
Cohen's Ideological Framing
An ironclad alliance: As I noted above, at least at the time of the Suez crisis the United States was capable of acting to discipline Israel's excesses. Cohen implicitly dodges the question: When and how did that alliance become "ironclad"?
[S]trategic ... considerations: Cohen is suggesting that Israel is a valued military ally of the United States, capable of serving as an extension of American power adjacent to the biggest oil producers in the world (outside of Russia). But Israel played no important role in either the first or second Gulf wars.
[D]omestic political considerations: Here Cohen is implicitly nodding to the power of the Israel lobby -- but that must not be named; keep it outside the frame of the discussion.
The shared values of two democracies: Presumably Cohen qualifies both the U.S. and Israel as democracies because both have periodic elections for public office and most of the countries surrounding Israel do not. Could Cohen possibly be referring to the fact that both the United States and Israel started off with indigenous populations who had to be stripped of their land in order to make way for European settlers? Could he be referring to the similarities between the at-best-second-class status of Israeli Arabs and the enslavement of Black people in the ante-bellum U.S. -- or the status of Black people in South Africa during the apartheid era -- an era where governments were selected via elections?
Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms: Well, here Cohen has a point. Absent a massive political movement in the U.S. to cut off the flow of arms to Israel -- a movement that will have to inflict political defeat on the Israel Lobby -- the bombs and missiles will keep flowing from the U.S. defense industry to the Israeli Defense Forces to the skies over Gaza, Lebanon and soon perhaps Iran and Syria as well.
As I suggested above, Roger Cohen is one of the few New York Times writers I actually respect. He's certainly much more likely to persuade me of his opinions than Thomas Friedman, the Times's chief opinionator for foreign affairs and for Israel in particular. That's why important that we keep an eye out for what Roger Cohen leaves outside the frame.