By Dr. David Wurmser

Part II

In part I of this essay, we examined how the strategic debate in Israel no longer revolved
around the peace process, but deeper strategic questions. In turn, we examined how there was a strategic evolution in the United States from the late 1950s until the 1970s. In this second half of the essay, we will examine how this influenced Israeli strategic culture and currently affects its political debate, if even in subtle or apparently hidden ways.

Until 1967, Israel had been in its own world, impervious largely to the influences of evolving American defense imagery. It was a land on the edge, and the concept of preemption, along with the idea of war as an episode with a clear start and end in victory of one side over the other, reigned. It had little choice. War could not be ongoing and indecisive, since Israel had too few people and was too poor to maintain full mobilization for war at all times. Instead, it had to rely on mobilization – a structure inherently bounded in terms of time and exertion. Moreover, it was so weak that it knew that unless it shaped the battle from the first shot, it would lose. Together, that implied that Israel had little choice but to embrace a strategy of preemption, speed to maintain initiative, decisive battle, and victory. Israel was a free country which could rely on the agility of their commanders to make spontaneous decisions and seize opportunities as they arose. Thus, when opposed by the top down, centrally- commanded Soviet-based Arab armies, Israel’s preemption, speed and decisiveness exploited, even caused, the fog of a fast-moving chaotic war and gave Israel the advantage it needed to win.

Despite Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, it found no peace. For three years (1967-70), Israel answered Egyptian attacks along the ceasefire line and relentlessly pressured Egypt’s armed forces. Using heavy artillery and raids, Israel made life untenable for the Egyptian army
within dozens of miles from the border. Israel’s airforce, acting as advanced artillery, did the same. Israel gained strategic advantage from this constant application of force by pushing the bulk of the Egyptian army back about 40-50km from the Suez canal, namely out of artillery and anti-aircraft missile range.

The “buffer” created by this strategy shaped the battlefield decisively. To move its forces to the front line in preparation for attack, Egypt would have needed at least 72 hours of unhampered mobilization. Israel’s estimate that Egypt needs a 72-hour widow to sufficiently remilitarize the front line to contemplate launching a cross-canal attack to breach Israeli lines gave birth to the assumption in Israeli military planning that the IDF would have at least 72 hours unequivocal warning in advance of any Egyptian attack, and thus would have
ample time to mobilize its own forces and launch a preemptive attack. Hence was born the idea of 72-hour warning in Israeli planning, but it was based on monitoring the physical deployment of the Egyptian army 40-50 km back rather than more penetrating human intelligence of Egypt’s decision-making structure. The assumption underlying all the planning was that once the 40KM zone is breached, Israel would mobilize and administer a preemptive, devastating blow to Egypt’s army at its most vulnerable moment when it was
fully exposed while in transit to the front line. In other words, Israel shaped the battlefield to ensure decisive victory.

In the wake of the ceasefire, US Secretary of State William Rogers launched a peace plan, while the Egyptians almost immediately began to deploy forces — including its missile defense system — forward onto the Canal within the 40-50km buffer. When Israel warned Washington that it will resume the War of Attrition in response, Washington pressed Jerusalem to restrain itself because it feared resuming conflict would derail the Rogers peace plan. Then, when Israeli insistence intensified, Washington offered a strategic exchange to Jerusalem: abandon the preemptive option and ignore the Egyptian strategic moves in
exchange for an American guarantee of Israel’s military “qualitative edge” over its neighbors.
This qualitative edge involved several aspects:

selling Israel the most advanced aircraft which were seen as capable of defeating the anti-missile system (the F-4 Phantom) and an assortment of other military equipment;
providing Israel strategic aide both against Russia and as cover in international forums for any actions Israel would have to take to maintain that edge; and
increasing aid to help pay for the equipment.

In exchange for a qualitative edge in weaponry and US cover in international institutions, Israel agreed to surrender strategic maneuver to shape its strategic environment and instead adopted a second-strike deterrence posture. It essentially “Amercanized” Israeli strategic thinking. Given the much closer ties to the US military that resulted, Israeli defense planners increasingly dabbled in the emerging adjustments to U.S. deterrence theory, such as the import from economics of the concept of incrementalism, during the Vietnam war.

Eventually, the idea prevailed and defined the entirety of Israeli defense doctrine among its security elites that overwhelming military power – and its offspring, the “qualitative military edge” — itself establishes deterrence. Behind it was the assumption that capability demonstrated will.

Ultimately once having embraced a second-strike deterrent concept, Israel’s security establishment and elites adopted the whole panoply of security concepts and absorbed the strategic culture dominating Western strategic thinking at the time. The era of containment
and deterrence to shape an enemy’s behavior had dawned, and the age of decisive victory in battles toward a decisive victory in war was retired.

In terms of large-scale war, since 1970, the idea of securing deterrence via a qualitative military edge with US weaponry and US strategic cover at the expense of decisive action to achieve victory, preemption and freedom of strategic maneuver has governed Israeli defense doctrine, and almost all flag rank officers in Israel’s military see this as a sine qua non of Israel’s existence. While arguably this doctrine failed catastrophically in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, it only deepened as a result of that war given the increased dependence on US
weaponry and need for cover against Russian aggressiveness in the region and Arab actions at the UN.

Perhaps influenced by the debates in the United States and the rise of the strategic
“outsiders” under President Reagan, for one brief period Israel’s own “outsiders,” Prime Minister Menahem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, launched the 1982 war. This war was the last gasp before its final suppression in the defense establishment of the old defense doctrine based on preemption, independent maneuver and decisive victory rather than deterrence.

As in the United States, where the victory of Reagan failed to budge the dominant elite strategic culture of Washington, the victory of the 1982 war did not lead to a reevaluation by the defense elites in Israel of their rejected doctrine, but instead led them to bristle and redouble their efforts to solidify it as the dominant paradigm. Indeed, after the 1980s, in both Israel and the United States the idea won the day and eclipsed all others that:

conflict cannot be won, but only managed by diplomacy, and that
the managing of conflict demanded international institutions serving as “referees” above the players setting the rules and parameters of behavior and the validity of certain outcomes,
conflict can be resolved not by the victory of one over another, but by negotiation (“there is no military solution to this issue was the clarion call), and addressing “root causes,” and that
the superiority of the West (or Israel) is inherently fleeting, either because it is the way of nature (Paul Kennedy; the organic decline of empires) or because the West (or Israel) is incapable of internalizing the attributes necessary to be a great power
(Kissinger’s pessimism). As such neither assuming nor acting to ensure the
perpetuation of its great power is not a firm foundation for national security. The problem is that when you dominate the policy, you own the resulting failure.
And Israel’s reliance on an evolution of U.S. deterrence theory – which came to entirely
dominate the strategic culture of Israel’s security elite – is in Israel under considerable stress. Israel has managed to deal with the Palestinian threat inconclusively and with incremental deterioration. A considerable part of its population spends a considerable part of its time in shelters, or dodging incendiary balloons, divining if there are any tunneling noises coming from below, or at least eyeing the shelters to make sure they are close. The entire country finds itself periodically – annually at least – in shelters. In the north, the distressed 2006 Hezbollah war shook the Israelis’ confidence in their defense establishment. And Israel’s policy of deferring to the US on the Iran issue spectacularly flamed out under the Obama
administration in the JCPOA, namely the “Iran deal.”

Earlier in this decade, in the wake of these stresses, the “outsider” crowd began drifting back into power advocating an older, more “Zionist” outlook on defense questions. They date to an older time, perhaps even to before Ben-Gurion (namely, to Jabotinsky’s concept of victory through the Iron Wall). For these thinkers, war needs to be more decisive and victory possible. They advocated decisive answers to Gaza, warned of American abandonment of Israel on the Iran issue, and believed in the inevitability of preemptive action against Iran.
Plans were even made, and decisions almost taken, but this was sabotaged when Israel’s prime minister faced a “general’s revolt,” namely a situation in which the elite defense
establishment internally, domestically, and even in international structures overtly opposed the prime minister’s emerging decision to launch a preemptive attack on Iran. In the end, they even launched an external public relations and foreign diplomatic campaign to sabotage the decision if finalized.

Israel never struck Iran. Instead, it found itself shaken by a US-Iranian deal which left Israel exposed. A fundamental tenet of the post-1970 Israeli defense imagery had been shattered. The danger was laid bare behind the idea that strategic reliance on the United States was far more important than independent Israeli strategic maneuver and action. And still, Israel’s defense and security establishment sailed on, confident of their grip of defense institutions and institutes, and impervious to the growing sense of their inadequacy which Israelis held.

The defense fissures also converge with, reflect and filter through the current political divide gripping Israel, which also has many other aspects dovetailing with it in terms of “insider” or “Mayflower” elites vs “outsider” or “riff-riff” constituencies which make up the bulk of
Israel’s population right now.

At the moment, a background nervousness has arisen among Israelis because of the frustrating and inconclusive ability of the IDF to return a sense of strategic control and provide a path to victory over the much weaker foes who are increasingly able to hold life in Israel hostage periodically every few months nationally and every few days locally along the border. Currently, an overt debate on this strategic question is crowded out by the other
more visible fissures which drive the choices facing Israeli voters, but deeper down, this
unease with Israel’s defense concept has been growing steadily. Not on the level of its soldiers, but at the top, at the strategic level. Every Israeli gives the Israel Defense Forces and security establishment behind it their two most precious and personal treasures – their sense of personal security and their kids – so any erosion in the confidence of that institution’s top echelon has a profound effect on Israelis’ faith in their institutions and government, and thus influences their vote.

So slowly, the suspicions grow that many Israelis harbor that their defense elites just don’t get it. Israelis are not flocking to bookstores to pick up their copies of Liddell-Hart, Clausewitz or Sun Tzu to sort this out, but they know something is amiss in the one sector Israel cannot afford to get it wrong.

The response of the defense establishment to this growing frustration is essentially to blame the Israelis for their frustration, and those among the leaders who question them. After every round of inconclusive flare-up, the response is consistently, “we have shown the other side how strong we are. They will now be deterred. And if they forget, we will remind them of how strong we are. We are winning, and we always have the upper hand.” And the truly impressive tactics and technological advances are then highlighted to emphasize this superiority and lend Israelis a sense that maybe the IDF does indeed still have what it takes. For the defense elite, the problem is not one of needing a substantive reevaluation, but of needing a better structure of public relations and explanation. For them, the concept is not wrong, but slick “outsiders” have been simply too successful in seducing Israelis with facile answers and leading too many of them astray.

The very formation of the Blue-White Party, while an instrument politically to unify the left and center to oust Prime Minister Netanyahu, can be understood as the culmination of an initiative by Israel’s “defense elites” and their supporters over the last decade to stop the growing suspicions and preempt the rise of new defense concepts occasionally advocated not only by Prime Minister Netanyahu, but by others on the right-side of the spectrum (including Naftali Bennet and Avigdor Lieberman), to embrace a fundamental departure from the 40-50 year old defense imagery. Perhaps most disconcerting to the defense and security elite is that the new Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt.Gen. Aviv Kokhavi, a strong advocate of the idea of decisive victory and who is now beginning to reshape the entire IDF structure along his concepts. He is arming the IDF not to reestablish deterrence, but openly saying his intention is to position the IDF to win the next war speedily and decisively. He is reshaping the IDF, not only in terms of weaponry, but structure as well, more to administer a swift, lethal blow rather than a long term indecisive conflict waiting for non-military means to resolve. In other words, the new Israeli chief of staff is upturning the entire defense
establishment’s settled body of doctrine and ideas.
Since these defense elites sensed this growing anxiety of the Israeli public, but dismissed it as simply the fruits of a political attack from the right, they thus saw its resolution as political, namely by forming a counter-block based on generals, specifically Benny Gantz, Gabi Ashkenazi, and Boogie Yaalon. Allied with the owner of one of Israel’s major publications, it was not their first attempt since the earlier part of this decade to create a new party based on the defense-establishment alumni or leadership, but it was their most successful. Again, the assumption was that the problem was a failure of public relations, not substance.

The emerging tension between the political and cultural direction of Israel, and the
dominant strategic imagery still guiding Israel’s security elites, suggests it is reaching a watershed moment as it deals with its strategic challenges in the region which are increasingly distant from the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War order in which the concepts were born and the ideological nature of the common enemy both Israel and the United States faced and defined through their proxy enemies yields to a new sort of adversary.

As such, while not consciously discussed in these terms, what is really on the table in Israel in these elections is the direction of Israel’s defense imagery. And while the debate revolves mostly over frustrating conclusions to a series of conflicts for the last two decades, the roots of the debate really reach back to the immediate months after the 1967 war, and ultimately to the corridors of power in the United States. Specifically, the divide is really between the “Americanization” of Israel’s defense imagery surrounding the centrality of deterrence versus other strategic concepts, some of which preceded this “Americanization.”

In the hilltop village of Latrun in Israel, at the national armored corps museum, there is a wall of remembrance listing the names of all those from the armored corps who had fallen in combat. The names are listed in chronological order of the time of their sacrifice. When looking at the wall, one cannot help but notice that almost the entire wall were names of soldiers who died until 1982. Only the tiniest of a fraction died since.

Of those that died since 1982, while still a very small number compared to the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and early 80s, one disturbing thing sticks out: they are more recent and accelerating in numbers. While imperfect, this itself could be seen as a morbid measure of the coherence and health of Israeli strategic doctrine.

As such, the way these strategic concepts will play out in Israel could be very relevant as a harbinger of a similar debate which will likely emerge here in the United States.

By Dr. David Wurmser

Part I

Israel has had three elections within about a year and may even require a fourth. The drama surrounding this deadlock, and the chaotic mechanics of forming, or failing to form, a government is obscuring deeper trends which also affect the elections’ outcomes. These are trends in some cases which have been building for a decade or more, and some are well- known and others tediously discussed. And yet, of the numerous factors informing voting in the recent rounds of Israeli elections, one of the least discussed but most important is a debate over strategic defense concepts which have governed Israel’s security establishment for decades. And this debate has serious reverberations across the seas to our shores as well.

Israel’s strategic debate is not about the peace process. After the intense assault by the Palestinians on Israel in the terror campaign from 2001-03, Israelis stopped believing a negotiated settlement with their Palestinian neighbors was possible. In terms of domestic politics, that issue was formally retired by the unilateral withdrawal by Israel from Gaza in 2005-06, which was an admission by a center-left government at the time of the end of the possibility of a negotiated, bilateral peace agreement, known as the “Olso process.”

Moreover, polls consistently suggest a continued lack of faith in a peace process. It is true that some parties, or more accurately, some Israeli politicians and media opinion setters, out of inertia, on the left still talk about the need to avoid unilateral actions and instead opt for negotiated arrangements with the Palestinians. And yet, in terms of the narrow question of faith in a negotiated settlement, Israelis poll to the right of their actual voting patterns,
meaning some who are “right wing” on the peace process nonetheless vote for center and center-left parties. They do so precisely because they believe it is “safe” to vote leftward and that any party – regardless of its rhetoric — would be unable to successfully embark on a leftist peace process agenda again. Indeed, it was for this reason that about a half decade ago, Israel’s major left-leaning party, the Labor Party, under its leader at the time, Sheli Yehaimovich, reoriented the core message of the party away from the issue of the peace process, and more toward social issues and a reinvigorated socialist ethic (although that did not work either to gain votes).

The Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century” codifies what had long already been digested by Israelis: devise a mechanism to give other states a bridge to move beyond the Palestinian issue and reach out to Israel directly to address far broader strategic interests. Israel’s ability to transcend its unnatural state of isolation, even regionally, can no longer be held hostage to solving the Palestinian issue.
Viewing the debate through the narrow prism of the peace process, many commentators today thus conclude that there is little, if any material difference between the Likud Party and the Blue-White party since both largely dismiss the idea that there is a viable peace partner on the Palestinian side because Palestinian leaders are either unwilling to make peace (Hamas), or unable to do so since they are irrelevant (PLO).

And yet, there is a difference in terms of strategic thought between the two parties. Israelis increasingly feel their inability to suppress security challenges that often disrupt their lives is eroding. Over the last two decades, Israelis are simply losing confidence that their security establishment is effectively dealing with the threat and defeating these far inferior military forces along their southern and northern borders.

Two particular developments emphasized and exacerbated the unspoken but rising nervousness about the security establishment’s inability to maintain strategic initiative and stay ahead of the enemy: the 2006 war against Hezbollah and the series of mini-wars against Hamas starting about 2008. Israelis increasingly suspect the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are ever more often being shown up and taken for a ride, not tactically or in terms of localized fighting ability – Israelis still hold great faith in the soldiers and their technology — but by their enemies’ ability to take and keep strategic initiative when the IDF should be able to decisively destroy them.

This perception is not alleviated by the historical memory Israelis have. For Israel’s first 40 years, it was much weaker relative to its enemies than in the last two decades. And yet, despite its weakness and the fear of great power reaction, Israel still always carried the war into the enemy’s territory and kept Israel’s homeland relatively calm, even in major war. Life in Israel was always under a shadow, but the level of violence Israelis faced in their homes and cities on a daily basis, and even in wartime itself, was not only limited, but receding with each decade. In contrast, in the last decade and a half, the hunkering down, sheltering in place, and ongoing disruption of Israeli life in major parts of the country, and the inability of the IDF to bring that to a decisive end – let alone the regional perception of failing Israeli deterrence and the resulting global erosion of the legitimacy of Israel — has gnawed away at the confidence Israelis had in their security establishment. And this is not helped by the fact that the problem is not fading, but instead is growing with each round.

Moreover, this nagging and rising suspicion of strategic inadequacy is beginning to affect
popular confidence in the IDF’s competence in dealing not only with the highly irritating and costly threats from Gaza. It is beginning to bleed their confidence in the IDF’s ability to deal with looming existential threats such as Iran, or any successor threat to Iran (like
Erdogan’s Turkey).
While dramatic in itself, and as noted while not being about the peace process, the growing discomfort was also not really about embracing more or less hardline policies on Iran, nor even about the lessons and aftermath of the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 – although those debates also happen in Israel.

To truly understand the current debate, one has to return the days after the end of the War of Attrition (1967-1970). Although not always overtly or consciously expressed, Israeli strategic thinking in the early 1970s underwent a profound shift as new strategic concepts which had arisen in the United States seduced Israeli defense and security elites, migrated to Israel’s defense structures, and then dominated Israel’s strategic thinking.

Until 1970, Israel settled on a strategy of preemption, decisive war, and “knock-out” blows partly out of contemplation and design set by such strategic thinkers as David Ben-Gurion – who took nearly a year off in 1947 to read and study carefully the history and current state of thought regarding the concept of national strategy — and partly out of necessity. After 1970, however, Israel departed from the strategic concept which had prevailed and yielded to a
new doctrine anchored to the centrality of the US guarantee of Israel’s quantitative edge, the
guarantee of US funding to secure it.

The increased dependence on the United States after 1970 was also accompanied by exciting access to American thinkers and military strategists. Israeli military planners and strategists were now accepted in the “big leagues,” and were thus quite exposed, indeed vulnerable, to the prevailing ideas of the time.

But it was right around this time, perhaps slightly earlier, that the United States itself was embarking on a brave new world of strategic thinking. After World War II, the United States had developed a mobilized national structure defined around a twilight international struggle to frustrate a totalitarian Soviet ideology into collapse, namely containment. Containment as originally conceived did imagine victory, and while there were several quite novel and innovative aspects to this concept of strategy, in part because the threat was quite novel and innovative, but it was still grounded in traditional thinking.

Whether Carl von Clausewitz and his insights into dealing a fatal blow to the adversary’s political will by striking decisively at the point of his critical mass, or Sir Basil Henry Liddell- Hart’s indirect approach to wear down and cause a similar collapse of that point of critical mass of political will, the strategies nonetheless understood victory the same. So too the original concept of containment. The U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, George Kennan, outlined in the secret cable, which came to be known as the “long telegram” of 1947, how a constant strategy of pressure and frustration of Soviet expansion would eventually lead to an ideological crisis. That expectation of ideological crisis offered a path to a concept of victory and the war’s end. Containment thus originally was designed to globally
hem in and constantly frustrate Soviet ambition to the point where it would lead to ideological crisis and collapse. The framers of containment understood that communism, being a historical-determinist idea firmly anchored to faith in an arc of history, could not
digest the indefinite suspension of the global revolution’s advance. Sooner or later, frustrated ambition would yield to collapsed confidence in the idea’s inevitability. While a Cold War, it was a war with a strategy toward decisive victory.

By the 1960s, the structure, while maintained, was repurposed and its foundations shifted. It became grounded to new theoretical ideas of international relations. The old structure was to be underpinned by a new idea, at the center of which was an ongoing effort to manage an
enemy’s behavior through rational incentivization. This strategy was no longer unique to our struggle with the Soviet Union; it could as easily be applied as well to a semi-literate tin-pot dictator as to a hyper-intellectualized Communist leader. It was strategy anchored to the rational actor model of economics rather than political theory, cultural knowledge, or civilizational historical analysis.

Most importantly, gone was the idea of victory. Gone was the idea shared by all strategic thinkers until then, from Clausewitz to Liddell-Hart: that wars are episodic, and they end when the adversary’s political will is broken at its most critical aspect or foundation.

But as the strategy changed to the new, economics-based theory based on the rational-actor model, so too did the objective. Moreover, the view emerged that science could be applied to international relations, and the interactions among nations could be understood as a “system,” operating with systemic rules. The idea that ideas and ideologies drove nations’ actions was challenged by the new ideas of international relations.

On top of this, a pessimism had set in about the intellectual power of American purpose and the resolve (many even questioned the dominance) of American power.

When the scientific outlook and the pessimism combined, the idea that our adversaries’ threatening ideas could be defeated yielded to a more modest and restrained outlook that our adversaries could only be managed. So, management replaced victory as the goal, and competition became perpetual rather than episodic, with a beginning and end. The purpose of war was not to defeat an enemy, but shape the rules of conflict and engagement.

And it was applied quickly to the war in Vietnam.

The malaise of the Vietnam War did little to challenge the new strategic concept. Instead, American security elites used the failure of the Vietnam war to validate the doubt they harbored to begin with over the resolve of the will of people of the United States to maintain a twilight struggle. Ironically, the failure of the Vietnam War was used to justify the
rejection of the underlying strategy which had already been abandoned before the war and validate the new theories, through which Vietnam had been fought, that were very heavily influenced by economic theory and rational-actor models of incentivization not to win, but manage the enemy’s behavior. So, despite the failure of the Vietnam War, the defense and security establishment of the United States descended deeper into transforming the containment structure in its entirety, not only in Vietnam, into a perpetual, global “conflict management” structure and commitment without a concept of victory at all. The conflict between the free world and the communist bloc was demoted from being a real, but cold war, to a competition freed of most of its moral baggage.

Along with that shift, so too shifted the role of international institutions. At first just a modernized form of the Concert of Europe – a balance of power structure anchored to the
world’s greatest powers – the body of post-World War II international institutions, foremost among them the United Nations, transformed into more of a structure of regulation and codification of the conflict management structure, acquiring ever more supranational sovereignty along the way. A referee stands above the players, and thus so too must international institutions stand above the nations.

And yet, something did not sit right in this strategy with Americans, who still saw themselves as the force of freedom and morality and capable of boundless power and grit. This limited and pessimistic vision of our power and purpose was joltingly askew with our having just landed a man on the moon. While deeply suspicious of this constant strategy and mobilization of global conflict management, Americans could still not bring themselves to reconcile with the pessimism, or “malaise” as President Carter called it, let alone retreat.
Americans still understood conflict in a traditional sense: a war ends when there is a victory, and ultimately, so too must communism be vanquished, not managed. Landing a man on the moon was a victory, not a stride in managing conflict. And then in victory we can all go home to do what free peoples do best: mind their own business and pursue their dreams.

As such, the stage was set for an American resurgence toward victory, where the underlying defense concepts shifted again: the Reagan era. But this refocused conflict with the Soviet Union was no longer moored to economic theory with its rational-actor based models of containment that had evolved in the 1950s and 1960s. America under President Reagan rejoined the twilight struggle with Russia with an aim of victory, not eternal management of conflict. His was an old America, a traditional America.

His defense department started planning force structures and tactics that drive home the point to the Soviet Union that a conflagration would be won by the West. He employed rhetoric that emphasized the West would win and communism would die. He reminded Americans what the ideas of the United States and communism were about, and that the former will prevail over the latter. He was the sheriff who walked into a saloon and
reminded himself, the outlaw and everyone present that the town was too small for both to coexist and manage their conflict.

While Reagan believed the cold war can and must be won, he understood – as did Kennan — that it will require a constant frustration of the enemy that engenders an ideological crisis and eventual collapse.

America’s security and diplomatic elite met these new Reaganesque ideas – really revived traditional ideas — with horror. The elites flung accusations of irresponsibility, sported a snarky dismissiveness of this “simplistic” and warned of the dangerous “cowboy-like
adventurism.” They joked that he could not differentiate between their sophisticated world of realism and his simplistic make-believe world of Hollywood. Especially distasteful to the security elites seemed to be the retrograde idea, beyond which they believed they had progressed, that the Cold War – or any war – could be won in decisive victory. The moniker that “military means cannot solve problems” had prevailed, but suddenly Reagan and his outsiders either did not get, or failed to heed, the memo. Simply, the entire strategic imagery of Reagan and his outsiders upturned a generation of American security and defense experts, and the institutions they built to manage conflict were repurposed to execute their outsider revolution and win a war.

Indeed, Soviet collapse and America’s victory came, exactly as Reagan had predicted, but faster than imagined even by those who crafted the strategy, in 1990.

As such, Reagan may have focused on defeating the Soviet Union, but he had also launched a war against the Washington defense, security and diplomatic establishment. Ironically, the Soviet collapse led not to humility, but only to intensified rage under which the jilted defense and security establishment elites bristled. The anger and disdain harbored among
America’s defense and security elites toward the upstart Reagan defense and security team was deep and long lasting, the reverberations of which are felt all the way into the present day.

American’s victory in the Cold War did little to change that and validate the Reagan-era defense concepts. The establishment’s elites were determined to prevail, and had the
bureaucratic and institutional power to do so. Indeed, the security and defense establishment of today in America is largely a descendent of the Kissinger-era’s, not the Reagan era’s, strategic imagery, assumptions, and concept.

In part II of this essay, we will examine how the debate in Washington over strategy played out also in Israel, and is now the backstory in current and future elections.
will likely emerge here in the United States.