James Petras compares military empire building, as practiced after the second world war by the United States and Israel, versus economic empire building by Europe and Japan and now China and India.
He finds that the national economic rent of the first model is negative, while the second model’s results are positive.
Petras includes this thought on the relation between Israel and the U.S.:
Israel is one of the few – if not only – military-driven ‘emerging imperial powers’ and that is part of the reason for the ‘resonance’ between Jewish leaders in Israel and Washington policy-makers. This is the real basis of the often stated and affirmed ‘common interests and values’ between the two ‘countries’. Military-driven imperial powers, like the US and Israel, do not share ‘democratic values’ – as even the most superficial observer of their savage repression of their conquered peoples and nations (Iraq and Palestine) can attest – they share the military route to empire-building.
The thesis of common interest is also reflected in a right wing op-ed in today’s Haaretz. It contrasts the U.S. and Israel with a "pacifistic" Europe.
And indeed there is a common denominator to the European criticism of Israel and the U.S., and this common denominator apparently also stems from the lessons of that war. It is the phenomenon of European pacifism, the desire to avoid the use of any kind of force, to avoid any forceful confrontation even with evil regimes.
…
That is to say, the European sin is not anti-Semitism but rather pacifism, especially when dealing with the Europeans’ attitude toward force on the part of a Western country.
The author explains what he sees as reason for such unrighteous European behavior. The Europeans, in contrast to the U.S. and Israel, lack the will for "national and sovereign existence."
In this sense, there is apparently a deep connection
between the Europeans’ pacifism and the low birth rates on the
continent; both of them indicate a policy of "eat and make merry
because tomorrow we may die;" a deep lack of trust in life in the long
run because the wish to live – which is not merely that of an
individual but rather of the civilization in which he lives – does
indeed demand victims.It requires the effort that is involved in raising children as well
as the effort and the risk involved with waging a war on behalf of the
values of freedom or on behalf of a national and sovereign existence so
that these may be ensured for generations to come.
"These cheese eating surrender monkeys no longer strive for a 1000 year Reich – damned they be."
Lunatic. But it again throws up questions I am mulling over for quite some time.
Is it, as Petras claims, simply the communality of the method of expansion that unites the U.S. and Israel, or is there, as Yair Sheleg asserts, some deeper connection?
And if there is some deeper connection, what is it?