The parallels are eerie. Israel is at war, following a successful surprise attack enabled partly by a failure of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services. The Jewish state is confronting enemies on all three borders. It is the object of virulent hatred across the Muslim world, faces widespread indifference in some European countries, and in the U.S. some are reasserting the familiar argument of “moral equivalence” between the Israeli and Palestinian causes.
In Washington, the American president has his own troubles, with plummeting approval numbers, a sputtering economy, a sour national mood following a long unsuccessful war, and an opposition party sponsoring investigations alleging lawless behavior, discussing impeachment, and determined to end his presidency.
The above descriptions, with but marginal variations, somewhat portray the conditions of Israel and the United States both today and in 1973.
Back then, President Richard Nixon responded to Israel's plea for assistance by ordering, within 8 days of the initial attack, a massive airlift--Operation Nickel Grass”—that delivered in roughly a month’s time 22,325 tons of tanks, artillery, and ammunition. This extraordinary effort allowed Israel to decisively turn the tide of the war against the invading Egyptians, and effectively deterred other bad actors—including Russia—from any further involvement in the conflict.
The world has changed dramatically in the half century since the Yom Kippur War. The relative strength of the United States in the international balance of power is greatly diminished from what it was in 1973. The detente with China that Nixon achieved in 1972 is a thing of the past. Today China is a committed opponent, determined to overturn what it sees as American hegemony. Iran—once a U.S. ally under the Shah - is now one of America's most implacable foes and a sponsor of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations attacking Israel.
In the Middle East, Israel is a small nation of just 9 million people, surrounded by authoritarian Muslim regimes with an aggregate population of over 200 million who view the Jewish state as the illegitimate oppressor of the Palestinian people. The most dangerous of these is a near-nuclear Iran, deadly earnest about “wiping Israel off the map.” And both the Israeli and the U.S. governments have emphasized there’s no moral equivalence with regard to the terrorist tactics of Hamas.
America's worldwide commitments today are nearly as great as in 1973, but the economic resources needed to meet them are far less—a condition that British historian Paul Kennedy in 1987 described as “imperial overstretch.” At present, the United States is in the untenable position of being committed to defend the territorial borders of three nations thousands of miles from the American homeland—Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine—while our own southern border is being massively overrun by migrants.
Clearly, our country has reached a time for choosing where our truest national interest lies.
In a different world, we might attempt to simultaneously protect the borders of all four countries, but today that task is self-evidently impossible. By way of illustration, consider how starkly the immensity of our 1973 logistical support provided to Israel by Operation Nickel Grass contrasts with our current posture. Though we have moved warships and aircraft to the region, only a few months ago President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly justified sending cluster bombs to Ukraine by conceding that we're “running out of ammunition” for our own troops.
Our country has often been described as a “world policeman,” but we must remember that a good policeman knows both the limits of his jurisdiction and the identity of the people he is sworn to protect. So, in prioritizing our obligations, the obvious first commitment must be to our own homeland.
More and more Americans express a growing dismay and even anger over the government’s failure to deal with a metastasizing crisis on our southern border, which has now spread to some major cities once designated as “sanctuary cities” for migrants.
If the American people were asked about the three foreign countries where we have made commitments of varying kinds over time, many undoubtedly would say that Israel should be our highest priority. Israel came into existence fundamentally as a moral response to a monstrous and historically unique crime: the Holocaust. Through four wars since 1948 that represented attempts to destroy the Jewish state, America stood with its ally. Now we are called to do so again. The U.S. and its allies—France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom—have pledged to “ensure Israel is able to defend itself.”
With regard to Taiwan and Ukraine—tempting targets in a time of crisis, bordering and respectively threatened by our greatest adversaries, China and Russia—America's challenges are more difficult and complex. The choices we make will not be easy, and, ultimately, they must be made in the Oval Office. As Harry Truman said of that desk long ago, “The buck stops here.” President Biden, sir, the eyes of the world are now on you.
William Moloney is a senior fellow at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate at Harvard University.