God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy

4. Three Zionisms in the Shaping of American Foreign Policy

87 James W. Skillen Three Zionisms in the Shaping of American Foreign Policy Chapter 4 INTRODUCTION A materialist disdain toward religion has been unconsciously at work in the minds of many of the theorists and practitioners of American foreign policy and international relations. The precipitous collapse of the Soviet Union abruptly called attention, and not for the last time, to the abiding power of religion in political developments around the globe. Yet despite mounting evidence of the profound influence of religion and religious identity on global affairs, American foreign policy analysis of religion has for too long remained content mainly with sporadic analyses of the empirical clout of conservative religious organizations on national foreign policymaking.1 Why have the normative religious domestic sources of U.S. foreign policy been so poorly understood? Part of the answer to this question lies in what Scott Thomas calls the modern invention of “religion” as a private affair, a myth that is alive and well in the field of foreign policy in the United States.2 The myth of private religion, he notes, is closely linked to the modern understanding of the “separation of church and state,” often thought to mandate a hermetic seal between 88 James W. Skillen religion and politics in American civil identity. A privatized religion would never have the capacity to affect America’s interaction with other nations. Such conceptions were hardly likely to encourage an investigation of American domestic religious beliefs as a formative factor in the shaping of foreign policy. Moreover, the gatekeepers of the discipline of International Relations have long made careers out of keeping not only religion, but ideational and ideological factors altogether, away from the investigative lens of the discipline. Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler write in Bringing Religion into International Relations that the disciplinary bias against such investigations is rooted in its character as perhaps one of the “most Western of the social sciences.”3 These conceptual and professional barriers are now under severe strain in light of the irruption of religious factors in international crises across the globe in recent decades. Serious questions about ideology, religion, faith, and foreign policy are being asked once again. One of the most important, and unsettling, is whether America’s own religious identity might itself be a significant influence on its foreign policy orientations. If, as Fox and Sandler argue, religion is a primary source of identity and legitimacy, the implications on the foreign policy of a democracy, or indeed any state, may be profound indeed.4 This chapter presents a case study of such influence: the role of “three Zionisms” in the shaping of U.S. Middle East policy. It proposes that these three strands of religious thinking must be properly distinguished, and their interrelationships then grasped, if we are to make sense of the recent direction of U.S. policy in the region. It concludes by calling for a critical assessment of the three strands in order to clear the way for a more successful Middle East policy. Let us begin with a more recent signpost, and work our way back. On December 22, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly voted 142 to 1 to approve a two-year budget of $4.17 billion. The lone vote against the budget was cast by the United States. Why? Because some of the funds were designated for a conference that the United States thought might prove to be “prejudicial to Israel.”5 The United States cast that vote one month after it had hosted a multinational conference in Annapolis , Maryland, to promote renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. But just as the UN vote showed the Bush administration’s solicitous preoccupation with Israel, so U.S. actions (or non-actions) following the Annapolis conference showed unwavering support of Israel despite the latter’s decision to move ahead with construction of a major settlement project on occupied Arab land east of Jerusalem, something the Annapolis agreement was to put on hold.6 Three Zionisms in the Shaping of American Foreign Policy 89 Those two actions might seem questionable given the need of the United States to win friends in the world at a time when American influence has weakened. But the actions are not surprising; they reflect a strong and fairly consistent position the United States has taken since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and especially since September 11, 2001...