Jerry Bowyer: Benjamin Netanyahu Vs. Barack Obama

Jerry Bowyer is a radio and television talk show host.

On Tuesday the Prime Minister of Israel addressed a joint session of Congress and without rudeness or rancor completely upstaged the President of the United States in his own country. An international diplomatic row, which started with President Obama’s major Middle East speech in which he called for Israel to return to her 1967 borders, morphed into the ‘tension convention’ between the two heads of state in the White House, and ended decisively in the thunderous bi-partisan applause which the Congress offered to the Prime Minister in far higher quantities than it does to its own president....

Let’s go back to the beginning. George Washington left office during a time in which intense rancor about foreign affairs plausibly threatened to tear the country apart. His parting words as president were for the U.S. to avoid permanent alliances with foreign powers....

Alliances, Washington said, were fine and necessary with other nations. But they could not be made permanent. Why? For many reasons: interests change, enemy nations become friends and friends become enemies. Trade patterns expand in one region of the world, and contract in others. Foreign powers establish beachheads in our hemisphere or withdraw from them. Permanent alliances put strains on existing domestic schisms along ethnic, ideological or religious lines.

Washington had seen riots and violent clashes between Anglo and Francophile factions in America. Washington feared the domestic effect of permanent alliance not only because of the faction problem but also because of the problem of militarism. The military is the most centralist of all institutions and permanent alliances, standing armies, and the permanent military footing which tends to accompany such a policy is injurious, he said, to our republican form of government....