My aunt and uncle were big Maddow fans from her start, and in 2017 I remember them becoming deeply concerned about Russiagate. For months we talked, them going through every detail of the case until I finally said: What is the difference to me? Foreign Russian elites are diverting the Trump administration away from my interests--would it have served me otherwise? Is there any difference between being controlled by alien American capitalists, versus alien Russian ones?

A similar question comes to mind reading the discussion around the Zionist Parastate in this magazine and its letters. I think the comrades who are pushing this thesis are doing important work--just talking to friends, relatives, coworkers, it is clear that there is a hunger right now for understanding just what is happening between the United States and Israel. It is important that the socialist left try to bring answers to these conversations, and I thank our comrades at Cosmonaut for starting the conversation. That said, we still have responsibility in our roles as socialist agitators to write truthfully and accurately, and I think that the milieu around this magazine has allowed itself to fall for the socialism of fools in its flirting with antisemitic language and explanations. Our comrades at the Cosmonaut editorial board justify this through a hardheaded appeal to free discourse against hysteric accusers but I think they’ve fallen for the socialism of fools.

It seems that this current war does not serve the interests of the US empire, it is being done in conjunction with Israel, and so our comrades allege this war (and the events of the last several years) can be explained by a zionist capture of the US state apparatus, leading to a US empire that acts against its own interest. This is a salacious claim, which evokes populist feelings about our lack of agency under the war and the seeming madness of it. This claim is then opposed by people largely on its most salacious part, ignoring the real question gestured at by comrade Gary Levi: is Israel acting in its interests? Indeed, has the US empire ever acted in ‘our interests’? What are they, and who gets to decide them?

“The National Interest” is a scientific sounding phrase but interests do not exist in physical reality, and its deployment here has to make us wonder. Was the Iraq War in the US national interest? Was the invasion of Afghanistan? Were the bombings of Bosnia and Serbia, the War in Vietnam, the First World War, the Spanish American War, Reconstruction, the Civil War, slavery itself, matters of the US national interest? All of this is arguable. Interests are both matters of analysis, something we’re extrapolating from the information given to us, and matters of the states definition--we can disagree with Trump on the national interest, but say it too loudly and he can arrest you, not the other way around. It was leaned on as a tool of analysis by the realists precisely as an answer to a political moment where the US seemed to be shirking its obvious interests (the Iraq War), and once Mearsheimer found a new situation his theory couldn’t explain (the genocide on Palestinians post-23) he leaned on a new tool of analysis, saying that there existed in the US a lobby driving us away from our interests. This whole conversation has then proceeded from the realist assumption that there exists objective national interests that nations ‘rationally’ pursue.

That idea justified a century long insulation of foreign policy into the Executive branch, but there is nothing about unchecked power that says it will only be used rationally. Trump is acting ‘irrational’, he is hardly justifying this war, but let’s not forget that a war with Iran has been a matter of bipartisan consensus since 1979. Were we controlled by a foreign cabal then? When has America not been controlled by a foreign cabal?  To accept all of this would require we give up the things that brought us to Orthodox or Republican Marxism in the first place--the systemic critique it gives of the US empire (including the critique of an ever less accountable security state) and the path forward (the struggle for democracy).

The rational national interest that realism rests on was an invention within the theory of empire, which allowed people to critique imperialism from within its ideological bounds. It was always a ruse, a cope, a way to say that yes everyone with a political science degree knows that the wars of the US empire have nothing to do with their citizens, but there is a deeper rationality which could be in play. It was advocated for by Kissinger as he helped Nixon murder hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians in a pointless war, and it has had a revival in the wake of Bush’s failed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It has always existed in the negative, as the reflection of a war which was obviously pursued irrationally. Now confronted with this under a declining empire, the ideological agents of empire have discovered something socialists have known for a century--that there are lobbies within the state with their own interests. It is tempting to just take this thesis and use it to our own ends--to play within the populist anti-Israeli rhetoric appearing across the country and the world.  But accepting this thesis requires accepting far more than just that there is a segment of the US state which operates under the logic of Zionism. Like all populisms the ZPS thesis requires that we accept that there was a time before the fall, when the US did operate by its national interests, and that is nonsense. I think socialists need to do far more work if we are to develop an international relations analysis that corresponds to reality. Until then, this is a stabbed in the back myth given new paint.

In solidarity,

Jean Allen