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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Power, Liberalism, and Moral Responsibility Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. We’re recording on Wednesday, January 7th, 2026 on my 49th birthday. We’re grateful to the Charles H. Revson Foundation for supporting the Shalom Hartman Institute’s digital work, including our show Identity/Crisis.

The effort to build a liberal society, which is to say a free society, a society committed to maximizing the freedom of the people in it, is beset by a paradox: Freedom for all requires that everyone relinquish some amount of freedom. Sir Isaiah Berlin described this in reference to maintaining balance that our societies have to weigh and measure bargain and compromise between our competing commitments to freedom and justice in order to make sure that all of us have as much as possible of what we need, acknowledging that no one really gets to be fully free to have or to do whatever they want. 

Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, writing about this in the early two thousands, actually in the shadow of 9/11, around the time of the Second Intifada, expressed this by saying that the rights that we as humans seek within a society are not those of Robinson Cruso on a deserted island. Our rights are interdependent not only with the rights of others, but the needs of the society itself. Sometimes those constraints are going to constrict liberty itself.

But the critique of liberalism and the ways that it actually can shut down liberty, that critique goes deeper than simply what I’ve described. It’s sometimes even characterized as the “paradox of subjugation.” Critics of liberalism—and there are more and more of them today—argue that the very effort to construct a liberal society requires not just the balancing of the needs of various people, but the actual subjugation of some to make possible the freedom of others.

This underlies what I would call a pessimistic reading on the rise on the American left about America’s founding, characterizing it as not a free society, but as an oligarchic society that pretended to liberalism, but actually depended on chattel slavery and other forms of economic injustice in order to create its vision for American democracy. And it goes beyond the borders. In what ways does the effort or has the effort to build strong liberal democratic societies depended on power wielded over other countries and peoples, on economic subjugation, on others, on—in the American context, especially a kind of American imperialism that we don’t really want to talk about?

As these questions rise, proponents of liberalism—I put myself in that camp—find ourselves increasingly squeezed between worldviews that respond to this tension in opposing ways. The ascendant right in America and all over the globe stops apologizing for the power that it affords itself and that it wields over others, and advancing itself interests a power which then often metastasizes into authoritarianism. The left, meanwhile, translates that paradox of subjugation. Into a broader claim about the fundamental illegitimacy of liberal societies. It argues that that liberalism was always a lie and therefore seeks their unmaking. 

This is the squeeze for liberals today, trying to persist in a squishy place in our attitudes towards patriotism and love for country, in our belief in the possibility of progress, in our recognition of the paradoxes that beset our liberal project, our attitudes towards power, and ultimately in our hope that we can continue to pursue the liberal project in spite of these mounting challenges.

Let me just zoom into that key word in the last sentence: “our attitudes to power.” Our organization, the Shalom Hartman Institute is pro-liberal democracy, we call ourselves liberal Zionists, and we have long taught on the ways that Judaism assesses far more sophisticated thinking on how we’re supposed to relate to power beyond the current silly binary of power as moral evil versus powerlessness as a moral good, mostly a Christian idea, or the version, also silly, on the right, rooted in a kind of veneration of power. 

The grand experiment for many of us liberals who believe in the necessity of the state of Israel is ultimately the question of whether the power that the state wields—something the Jewish people do not have a lot of experience with—whether that power will save us or destroy us. I answer that question differently depending on the day.

Into this mix,primarily concerned about America. But I would not say unconcerned about Israel as well comes Shadi Hamid, a columnist at the Washington Post, a senior fellow at Georgetown, the author of several books with a new and provocative offering entitled The Case for American Power: A Liberal Argument for American Global Dominance. Shadi’s book is a case against the squishiness that I alluded to earlier. It’s both a personal and analytical take that tries to balance the realism of living in a world in which power is an irrefutable reality,  nevertheless requiring of us the commitment to democratic ideals and norms, which should not only keep it in check, but maybe are the framework through which that power is supposed to be expressed.

It’s interesting. I woke up this weekend and realized we were gonna have to do a show on Venezuela. That wasn’t, like, part of the plan. We don’t really do much on Venezuela at the Shalom Harmon Institute. Unfortunately, I remembered that a show on literally The Case for American Power was already scheduled for this week, for better or worse, I suppose.

I think we’re witnessing the first solo gambit of the Trump doctrine about American power, a different way of asserting, maybe reasserting American power and global dominance on the map. It feels like a powerful opening frame to today’s conversation. Shadi, thanks for coming on the show, and let’s start with Venezuela.

I’d love to your take on whether we’re supposed to be surprised by this, what story you think it tells about the version of American power that the Trump administration represents, and then we can get into how, my guess is you feel very differently about the case for American power that you’re trying to argue for.

Shadi: Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. I think that I’m put in a kind of uncomfortable situation as someone who wrote a book titled The Case for American Power, and then we see what the US is doing abroad under Donald Trump. And I have to kind of go out of my way a little bit to say, I’m making a case for American power; it’s not the case that Donald Trump is making. And I think what we’re seeing there is, as you put it, a veneration of power, “might makes right,” a sense that there’s almost inherent good in domination. You see this in a lot of Trump’s language, this desire to lord over, to dominate, to subjugate.

And that to me is fundamentally immoral, but I think it’s also fundamentally amoral. I think that Trump doesn’t really talk about morality. He seems indifferent to it, so it’s not as if he’s really going out of his way to be bad. He doesn’t care whether or not he’s being bad. It’s almost at a different kind of level, in that sense, which makes it a little bit hard to analyze. 

And you know, I’m someone who, I’m against what Trump did in Venezuela, and I think it sets a dangerous precedent. I think it’s bad for all those sorts of reasons that might seem obvious to listeners, at least some listeners, hopefully. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s enough to merely condemn it. I think that now that it’s happened, we can stop being surprised. It can’t be undone. So the question that I would like to focus on now is how can we try to make Venezuela a more democratic and give the Venezuelan people a better chance at living a better life, and one that is in line with our values as liberals and as Democrats. 

What troubles me about Trump is there is no language of morality. There’s very little discussion of democracy and wanting Venezuela to transition to something less authoritarian. There’s almost none of that language, so it’s striking that there’s not even the pretensive morality. That used to be the way it was done, that even if we were doing bad things, we pretended that we were doing good things. Now we don’t even pretend. Some people might say that’s refreshing. I don’t think it’s good because it means there’s no longer a standard upon which to judge what Trump is doing, because he’s not even trying to be better than he actually is.

Yehuda: So it’s interesting, because I think Trump actually was playing with some language of, we’re doing this, not because we can, right, but because there are these arguments that you can argue about, whether they’re the legitimate reason for why he’s doing it or not, but he at least was playing the game of language by talking about the drug trade as being facilitated through Venezuela, the oppression of Maduro’s people. He talked about, at various times over the last couple of months, the immigration threat as originating in Venezuela. Those were at least moral arguments, by which, I mean, not that they’re good arguments, but they’re appeals to the good, meaning appeals to arguments that are motivating.

I’ll say in contrast, I think this is maybe where you were trying to go, the quote from Stephen Miller from this week was, “We live in a world where you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

I have a lot to say about that, but that feels to me like your argument is better about Miller than it is even about Trump. Right? That’s where I feel like some of the tension lies, is—is there even a claim that this is something that’s good for the Venezuelans, good for the world order, good for America? Or is it about simply, if I have might in power, I can exercise my will over others? 

Shadi: Well, I think that before the intervention, there was language about values and morality and the oppression of the Venezuelan people. What Trump has focused on since the intervention is largely about the oil. We want control of their natural resources. We want an oil empire. It’s gonna be good for American corporations. Now you might say that that’s good for America, so maybe there’s some moral component there if you think that capitalism is always a good thing, even if it’s predatory. 

But I guess what I’m speaking to more is that there seems to be no concern about the Venezuelan people, because we’ve left the regime intact. There’s been a very conscious decision to leave Maduro’s allies in place, including his brutally repressive interior minister, including the top military brass. And there’s a kind of pouring water on the idea that the opposition can play a role. 

Maria Machado, the Nobel Prize winner—Trump and Rubio have been somewhat even critical about her, that she’s not able to rise to the occasion that this isn’t her moment. So I think that that’s what I’m pointing to a little bit more. But I think you’re right that the Miller quote is most striking of them all. He really gets at this issue of domination that “might makes right” in a way that is so transparent, ot’s almost refreshing that he’s so straight up about it because now we can at least call him out that this is what’s going on.

Yehuda: Yeah. In fact, I was discussing this online with Jay Michaelson, another writer, journalist. He was asking with curiosity, but I think also a cynicism—what are the Jewish sources someone might draw on? Are there religious sources, Jewish tradition to draw on to make that argument about the fundamental exercise of power as its own good? And the broad answer was, yeah, not really. It actually is a deeply secular idea that is divorced from any of the pretenses that liberalism often answers of like, well, we’re doing this to liberate those people, to bring them democracy. There’s something brutal about it.

What it feels right about Miller is that he may be correctly assessing human nature and why people have historically gone to war. That seems like consistent with a lot of what the Trump administration is about, is just stop pretending like there are norms. Just exercise power for your own purposes. I mean, in a tragic way, it almost makes the liberal pretenses to the good reasons to go to war look like lies. 

Shadi: Yeah. Look, I think there’s something to be said, though, for pretending. And I take the point that a lot of people are making, that Trump unmasks imperialism. He makes it clear what’s going on. There’s no longer a facade. And I get that people who are really opposed to America, they don’t want to deal with the facade because that complicates matters. The fact that we as a country have a distinct moral mission, and we’ve had one since the founding up until Donald Trump, every American president has called on those higher ideals. I think that’s good because as long as we have ideals, then at least we know what we can aspire to. When we give up on the ideals, then we have Trump without any kind of aspiration. 

So I wanna hold onto those aspirations because I still believe in the American project. I believe that we can be better. I think that the record of American foreign policy is checkered at best and tragic and terrible at worst, especially in the Middle East, and I’ve been a long time critic of what America has done, especially in the region. But that doesn’t prevent me as an analyst and as an advocate in some ways to say that America, just because we’ve been bad in the past, doesn’t mean we’re doomed to repeat those mistakes in the future. So I wanna keep that sense of progress and progression, and Trump doesn’t have any sense of progression. He just says essentially, this is the way it is. This is the way it will always be. Miller says, these are the iron laws of human nature, and then we’re done. There’s nothing beyond that. 

Yehuda: Yeah. He doesn’t have a sense of the future. He has a sense of a mythic past. I feel like that’s the rhetorical difference, is, liberals are always in pursuit of some better version of the future. It’s no surprise that his whole slogan is about recounting some mythic version of American past where we stopped hedging on American power and imperialism. We just kind of were the dominant superpower in the world. 

I wanna get to The Case for American Power and the idealism that you talk about in a moment, but I wanna start a little bit more personally. You write about this in the book of kind of coming of age, I think you said maybe you were in high school around the time of 9/11 and then the Iraq War that followed. I’m probably, I guess I’m a few years older than you, I was out of college when 9/11 happened, but I do feel shaped, in my early twenties, I can remember, like a real sense of rupture, of the Warhawks who led America into the war with Iraq on the basis of deception, false intelligence, for a whole bunch of reasons, including like re-litigating old battles with Iraq, pursuing regional dominance for its own sake, natural resources, whatever the reasons that you might adduce. But it has left a kind of real bitterness, it’s why I know my initial reaction to an invasion in Venezuela is like, I can’t believe we’re, we’re doing this again.

I guess I’m curious for your reflection on that as having influenced your own thinking, and in what ways are those memories helpful to us, and in what ways did they actually obscure our ability to analyze what’s taking place now that might be meaningfully different than something that formed our viewpoints beforehand?

Shadi: Yeah, so I was a freshman in college when 9/11 happened, so I was two weeks in. So in that sense, it was the decisive moment, you know, it changed my life. I was politicized. After that, I decided that I wanted to write about politics. I was angry at the US for what it did. Post-9/11, I was really active in the anti-war movement about Iraq, of course, and I was organizing on campus at Georgetown.

And I was one of those classic leftists who was reading Noam Chomsky, and kind of buying into that standard critique that America is a font of evil and destruction in the world, and that America is the problem that has to be solved, effectively. I mean, I still think that America has often been a problem, but I think my prescriptive lens has changed. I don’t think that we have to accept that America is always bad, forever bad, that as I was sort of alluding to earlier, that we’re capable of change, where I think the left is critiqued, doesn’t allow room for that possibility of change, that America is always going to be this imperial force that destroys a third world.

And America is made up of individuals. People who wield policy have different views depending on the administration. If we elected someone like Bernie Sanders, then presumably America would have a different foreign policy towards the Middle East. So this idea that America is one thing always is something that I wanna resist, but I mean, at that time I was very much a skeptic about all things American foreign policy. 

That started to change a little bit with the Bush Administration’s Freedom Agenda, and I saw some positive things there. That’s when George W. Bush was willing to put some pressure on Arab autocrats to open up their political systems. This was mostly in 2004, 2005, and that’s when my view started to shift a little bit. I saw how power could be used to promote the values that I care about. What do I care about? I’m a big pro-democracy person. And I think that one of the moral stains on America’s record is supporting these pro-American Arab dictatorships in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Morocco, Jordan. I mean, that’s kind of most of the region. So I’ve been very critical of that. 

But I think that American power can be used to criticize that, to oppose that, and to maybe help Arabs live freer, more democratic lives. Eventually, I, it didn’t turn out that way. Of course, the Arab Spring failed and so forth, but I still hold out hope that one day the US can actually live up to its values abroad, and that was the promise of the George W. Bush administration and the Freedom Agenda. So I’m very critical of Bush for the Iraq war, but I’m more sympathetic to him because of the freedom agenda. 

Yehuda: So the developmental arc for you went from feeling like because of America’s history of political intervention, it was an imperial force that was using force for bad to feeling like well. If America has power, it might as well use its power for good. 

Shadi: Yeah. I think that a part of it for me too was to see how the neocons were able to kind of capture the levers of American power. That this was a small group of ideologically committed individuals. A lot of them knew each other in grad school, and they had ambitions. They had ideals. I don’t agree with their ideals, especially in regards to the Iraq war, but I think that I appreciated what they were doing, this idea that they thought that they could actually wield power in a way that was aligned with their aspirations. 

I think all of us should aspire to that, that if we have ideals, we should want to use power to promote those ideals instead of seeing power as something dirty.

And I think on the left you see a lot of skittishness about the very idea of power. I think as you put it, there’s almost a kind of moral purity in the idea of powerlessness, which is, I think, as you said, more of a Christian idea or a certain kind of Christian idea of being without power, of being weak. I don’t think there’s anything to be especially happy about when you’re weak, that doesn’t make you morally pure. And that it’s better to have more power than less power. 

So what I wanna do in the book, and what I’m trying to do in my writing more broadly is to say to the left and progressives, and also my fellow Arab and Muslim Americans, who I think are very distraught over what America’s doing in the world, especially in Gaza, that there is a better way that America is worth fighting for and believing in, but the way you do that is by participating in the system instead of exiting the system altogether. 

Yehuda: How would you summarize or characterize what you understand that American vision or American project to be about? What is the summary version of what that idealistic, optimistic project of America is, that you say you believe in?

Shadi: In short, to make the world safe for democracy. That might sound a little bit imperialistic, although—

Yehuda: It does.

Shadi: It wasn’t—so I just wanna clarify what I mean here. It doesn’t mean going around and toppling dictators through military force. When I think about power, I usually think about it in terms of… that could be diplomacy, it could be political pressure, it could be using our aid packages to incentivize regimes to behave better. It could mean soft power. I really wanna get away from this notion that power is only hard, that it’s only military. ‘Cause that’s what frightens people. And I think that’s understandable because of the Iraq war. 

And to go back to your previous question, which I guess I didn’t really get at this part of it, I think there’s a danger of overlearning the lessons of the Iraq War. Not everything is Iraq all over again. There are bad interventions like Iraq, but there can also be good interventions. Bosnia, in the 1990s, Kosovo also in the 1990s, we ended a genocide in Bosnia. That’s something we should be proud of. We were a little bit late to intervening, but we ultimately did intervene and stopped mass killing. We also stopped the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military. So there are things that we’ve done that we can look back to and say, okay, the record is not all bad. 

I mean, we can also go back to World War II, of course. We can talk about the Marshall Plan. We can talk about the security umbrella that we provided Europe. Europe wouldn’t have been able to develop into the peaceful and prosperous European Union if it wasn’t for that security umbrella. So the post World War II era is one where there are things that Americans can be proud of.

It just happens to be the case that the last 20, 25 years have been pretty bad and almost uniformly bad. I tend to think that the Libya intervention was positive. I’m one of the last people on the planet to make that case openly. I stand by that, for reasons we don’t necessarily have to go into, but there was a mass killing that was ongoing. Gaddafi was marching into Benghazi. The Libyan opposition was begging for us to intervene, and we did, and we were able to stop a mass killing while it was happening. Granted, Libya didn’t turn out well afterwards, but that doesn’t mean the initial intervention wasn’t justified. 

I think there’s also a case to be made that non-intervention can also lead to bad outcomes. The fact that we didn’t intervene in Syria under Barack Obama, I think that led to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands more Syrians being killed, because the US stood back and turned a blind eye to what was going on, and we said, oh, there’s nothing we can do when there was something that we could have done. So I think that is just to kind of paint a picture that’s a little bit more morally complex about intervention. 

Yehuda: Great. So there is a version of the world which would say, if our objective is to make the world safer for democracy, in the non-imperialistic way, as you said, if that’s the goal, and if we have come to terms with the fact that there is such a thing as power and nation states, and we are better off working through those frameworks than it is against them, there’s also a conceivable post-war consensus argument that that is best achieved through international alliances, you know, international cooperation, which is actually at odds with the kind of European model, which is at odds with the idea of essentially America, as, you even acknowledge the book, something of an Imperial superpower. We don’t even know how powerful America is in the world.

So here’s my second version of the question of what the American project is about. It can’t just be about making the world safe for democracy. It has to also be to do so within a framework in which America itself remains strong. What’s your argument about why that’s the best way for this to play out in the world, rather than building essentially greater parody between democratic regimes all over the world, the kind of collaborative model that also is facing challenges today?

Shadi: I’m fine with the collaborative model. I just think we have to acknowledge that America will remain first among equals. This idea that we can share equal power with Europe—Europe doesn’t even aspire to that. Europe doesn’t have that ambition to be a military power and I think our allies, for better or worse, are dependent on us. They still expect America to play that outsized role. 

And I think also with the so-called rise of China, and I say so-called because I think we overestimate China’s power and we pretend that China’s going to overtake us when there’s actually very little evidence that it will achieve parody either economically or militarily anytime soon. Now it’s possible in the far out future. But I think in terms of deciding how to proceed in the foreseeable future, America is going to be largely unchallenged. 

And I think what that means is if America is going to remain the dominant power, whether we like it or not, then all the rest of us, even those who are skeptical of American power, we should think about, well, if this is the way it’s going to be, let’s at least use American power for better ends, for ends that align with our moral vision.

And this is where I think, to be truly powerful, you need to have some moral guidance. You need to have some moral constraint that guides the use of power. If it’s power on constraint, then you’re inviting the kind of maxim that power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely. So on some level, we want to be constrained because constraints can be good. We don’t want full absolute freedom, whether it’s as a country or in our own lives. That’s why we know that unfettered freedom needs to be balanced by some level of wisdom and judiciousness. 

I think that at the end of the day, America is the only game in town, but even if it wasn’t the only game in town, even if China was able to achieve parity, that would actually strengthen my argument more, that China is a brutal dictatorship, and if it’s a choice between us and them, then the choice should be clear. 

Also, we’re Americans, so we should want our country to be dominant. Putting aside all the moral arguments, if you’re a citizen of this country, you’re gonna have an inherent bias towards the success of your own country. The idea that we should have a kind of self contempt, a kind of self hatred, I think is a very odd one, and I think those views are too often prevalent on the left. Maybe it’s not self-hatred, but a kind of self dislike. And I think I want to push back against that idea that we should dislike ourselves. 

Yehuda: Yeah. You write about this extensively in the book about that self contempt, and I think it’s a powerful rebuke. I identify with it as someone who, even as a fourth generation American, my kids are fifth, the sense of gratitude that I grew up with from my parents and grandparents of what America gave to us, especially after like the unique conditions that the Jewish people had to withstand through European diasporas for so long. I mean, it’s just… It was basic, that sense of gratitude and to see it wither away, I don’t know… It feels, uh… It feels baby-ish to me. Like, um, I don’t know, has very little historical awakening. 

I guess, though, probing at something you said, you said if you’re a citizen of your own country, you should want your country to be dominant. And I think the one nudge back is, I would say, well, maybe it’s sufficient for me, for my country to be safe. 

Shadi: Hmm. 

Yehuda: Maybe it doesn’t have to be dominant. I think that’s where even the case for American power goes off the rails a little bit is when it insists that the only way this is possible is through American domination as opposed to America making sure that it itself and the causes of democracy are safe around the world. Maybe the two things are dependent on each other. Maybe the only way it can possibly do that is through dominance, but I don’t know. That’s where it starts to get a little bit risky morally. That’s where it hovers into Stephen Miller territory. 

Shadi: I think a world where we’re not dominant is one where our adversaries and enemies have more of a chance to compete with and challenge us, and that can affect us or our allies. We live in a globalized, interconnected world. What happens in China or in Russia doesn’t just stay there. I think there’s this fantasy sometimes that we can be an island unto ourselves, and I just don’t know if that’s possible. 

But I would also say that we’re not a traditional nation state. We’re a mission-driven state. We’re an ideological state. That’s actually relatively rare in human history. The vast majority of the world’s countries are just normal nation states. They want to just be content within their own boundaries. They want to prioritize safety above any kind of idealism. 

So I think there’s also a question of who are we and who do we want to be? Do we wanna become just like any other country? Is that something we’re okay with? And I think there’s a lot of evidence when you ask Americans in polling, do you care about these ideals abroad? Now, Americans may disagree on how that should be practiced or realized abroad, but there’s generally a sense of pride that America plays a global role. 

And I don’t think that’s completely gone away, granted that MAGA has pushed back against that idea, but if we look at MAGA as represented by Donald Trump’s actual policies, that is not isolationism. It’s very hard—whenever you, like, scratch an American. You’re not gonna find, like deep down, we’re not isolationists. And I think it’s telling that MAGA can’t be as isolationist as it originally wanted to be, that it’s being dragged into this kind of aggressive international role. 

Yehuda: The trickiest part of power is that once you get a taste of it, you recognize you’re a hammer and everything else is a nail and it actually gets worse when you start to lose it. The lust for getting it back becomes so profound. 

I think this is a very tendentious example, but there’s a famous scene in Schindler’s List where the Ben Kingsley character explains to the commandant, that man that you wanna punish, actually the most powerful thing you could do would be to walk over and pardon him. And he tested out in the mirror, he says, “I pardon you. I pardon you.” And he realizes that an immense amount of power comes through it and then he turns around and shoots the guy in the head, because actually, once you have a taste of power, it tends to become a fixation and to actually recognize that you can have power but not wield it is very hard to do.

And I do find myself both drawn to many aspects of your argument and very worried that it almost is something that you can’t put back into the container. How do you cultivate a society that wants to be dominant in order to advance its worldview, but can’t resist that when it feels like it has anything standing in its way, it’s going to use this amount of force to get its way as opposed to the more restrained way of using its force? It’s going to gravitate towards the US military as a solution to its problems as opposed to the power of diplomacy? That feels to me like it’s the bugaboo that underlies, and it should be the fear that underlies even something that you would characterize as the case for American power. 

Shadi: And I think we should have some level of fear. You know, I’ve described my book as a kind of anguished manifesto because I’m torn on some of these questions. Sometimes I almost worry, am I sounding too, kind of imperialistic? Do I like what I’m saying? And I have to push back against myself sometimes? I’m like arguing with myself in maybe a kind of Talmudic way, I suppose. 

And I go back and forth, but ultimately I have to try to not compare America to some kind of ideal that doesn’t exist. That maybe there is this ideal vision in our own minds that could be possible, but in real life, in the real world, America is going to fall short of what we want it to be. And at some level we have to accept that imperfection. That’s part of living tragically in the world, that we don’t get everything we want, but we also shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I think this is where morality cultivating a moral sensibility is important. 

Now, that is sometimes overwhelmed by the realities of power. But I think at an individual level, this is where religion becomes important and why I’m a vocal proponent of religion playing a role in public life, is because I think that sense of accountability to God can be part of a moral sensibility that constrains us. And that’s what’s so frightening about Trump, not Trump himself, who is not a Christian, as far as we can tell, ut so many of Trump’s acolytes is, they claim the mantle of Christianity, but don’t do anything that seems recognizably Christian to me. And I think if they had more of that Christian sensibility, maybe they’d actually think to themselves, “Maybe we shouldn’t blow up that boat, you know, off the coast of Venezuela. How am I gonna face my own maker on the day of judgment when I’ve done these horrific things?” And they don’t seem to have that level of self-awareness. 

So it’s probably not satisfying. But I think all of us as individuals can aspire to that sense of morality and hopefully if we ever in our lives hold real power—I probably won’t, ’cause I’m, you know, I’m a writer—but if I did, I’d like to think that my sense of God-consciousness would play some constraining role. 

Yehuda: I mean, unfortunately, the majority of the nature of human history is that when God is brought in as a piece of a person’s identity, when they’re connected to power, it’s viewed as an entitlement more than as a source of restrain. But from your mouth to God’s ears, as they say. 

Let’s talk a little bit about the case that I struggled with the most, and it’s near the end of the book and I couldn’t quite tell—maybe this hypothesis is right—that a lot of this book was written and then you had to wrestle with Israel and Gaza. It kind of felt that way ’cause it kind of really shows up in the epilogue. Like it shows up earlier, but it’s really a challenge in the epilogue.

And what becomes clear to me is that you view America’s support for Israel’s actions in Gaza as a failure of the American exercise of power. Perhaps your example would be the failure to apply the American ideal of promoting that moral vision for the world through a naked exercise of power.

I disagree, and I’d love for you to give your take, ’cause there is a world in which America standing up to the Iranians is the exact expression of what it means to stand up for the cause of democracy, and that it feels very continuous with America supporting the Ukrainians against a Russian incursion and supporting Israelis against an Iranian incursion. But that’s obviously not the way you read it. 

Shadi: Yeah, exactly, and you’re right to notice a little bit of tension in the book. I wrote most of it before October 7th, and then I really had to wrestle with it after October 7th and seeing what was happening in Gaza, which to me has been, I think even perhaps more so than 9/11, the decisive political moment. 

And I know people look at me and they say, Shadi, how can you, like, aren’t you giving this too much weight? It’s a longer discussion of why it’s been so important to me. But I do see what has happened in Gaza as one of the great crimes of the century. We don’t have to get into like my views on whether it’s a genocide and all of that. I do have those views, but I’ll just say how it relates to my book, ’cause I think that’s what you’re getting at. 

I think that we could have used American power to stop the atrocities that Israel was committing. I saw that Israel was doing terrible things to the Gazan people. I think Israel had a right to defend itself initially, and it had a right to target, in a precise way, Hamas’ assets and military capabilities. But I think it went well beyond that. And it prolonged a war that didn’t have to be prolonged. 

And we also know that at various points during the Biden administration, there was a sense of getting close to a ceasefire, but Netanyahu had his own personal vested interest to prolong the war, to stay in power and keep his far-right coalition intact. So I think there’s a lot we could sort of unpack there. I think the basic argument is that the war didn’t have to be as brutal as it was, and it didn’t have to go as long as it did, and not all those Palestinians had to die. 

And I think that the US, if you agree with my premise, then it follows from that, that the US should have used its leverage with Israel, to put serious pressure on Israel to stop the killing and to end the war and to accept ceasefire, which Donald Trump ultimately did do. But I think that could have been done much earlier. 

So my idea of American power is to say—here’s an ally, Israel. Israel is not living up to our ideals and even our interests as Americans. I don’t think it’s an America’s interest to be seen as facilitating Israeli war crimes. So for that reason, I think that America sort of abdicated its power. Ultimately, Israel is the junior partner in the bilateral relationship, just like Egypt is a junior partner, Saudi Arabia is the junior partner. I think this applies to a lot of countries, not just Israel. When we are the senior partner, when we’re the dominant player, we should be able to use leverage effectively and put pressure where pressure is necessary. 

Yehuda: Yeah. Look, I mean, I definitely identified with one of the earlier chapters of your book when you talk about the ways that the Obama administration, in some ways, was the biggest failure around the Israeli-Palestinian process, precisely because Obama came in with very different viewpoints than many of his predecessors—a seemingly a commitment to trying to actually bring Israel to the table somewhat coercively, backed off. 

I thought it was one of the strangest things I ever saw politically, which was, he got upbraided in the Oval Office by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and instead of being the president of the United States, who would say, what the hell are you doing? He just let it happen and then backed off. And it just became actually almost like a personal feud, as opposed to, I don’t care whether you like me or not, I actually hold all of the cards in this relationship and I’m gonna make this an instrument of American foreign policy. 

I think where it gets tricky for me in your read of the last two years is, I think certainly for many Jews, for many Zionists, for many Americans, October 7th was a 9/11 moment in a way that’s different than how you describe Gaza as a 9/11 moment, or as a significant earth-changing moment of recognizing like, oh, this is actually a battle between good and evil, October 7th bred. Now, that’s a very dangerous conclusion if you then think your job is to eradicate evil, but it means that the fundamental fight against Hamas—and all of it was enabled by Iran was a legitimate war, a just war. And therefore, the exercise of power in carrying out that just war is a legitimate exercise.

I guess we eventually meet each other up again two years later, where I can say, yeah, I think the war went on too long. I don’t think they had to kill as many civilians as they did. I think America could have and should have accelerated the process to that ceasefire. I think Netanyahu was not on Team Ceasefire until it was convenient and politically legitimate for him.

I guess the real challenge, which becomes the problem of the argument, I don’t mean it’s a weak argument, I just mean it’s a hard argument, is that you’re taking a scalpel to a discourse on power that usually is hammer and nail. You’re trying to, like, exactly get right, when is the right time to exercise power and when is it too much? 

And unfortunately, in the environment in which we live, the dialogue between those who believe Israel was the primary culprit in this conflict, and those who believe that Israel is the primary victim in this process, it just… those conversations don’t happen. They don’t meet up.

Shadi: They don’t. 

Yehuda: Because there’s actually a lot of what we’ve said comes pretty close to each other, but there’s kind of a crux of a moment in there on which we feel like we’re on different sides. You feel like that’s accurate? 

Shadi: Yeah, and this is why I think that the lessons of 9/11 are instructive. I mean, I think from an American perspective, we shouldn’t have seen post 9/11. As a war between good and evil, that led us to overshoot the mark considerably. It led us into Iraq and to stay in Afghanistan for two decades. We shouldn’t have overreacted.

So I think a similar argument can be made that, yes, October 7th was a 9/11 moment for Israelis, but Israel fell into the trap and overreacted to the nth degree, and there wasn’t any sense of constraint there. And this brings us back to, I think, your good points about—how do we find ways to constrain power, especially when people feel that they’re in the right.

It’s kind of, it’s not funny per se, but it’s, there is a kind of irony to, at the end who decides who’s good and who’s bad. It’s subjective. Israelis feel that they’re fighting a war that is good and right. Many others, probably most of the rest of the world, feel that Israel is committing grave evil. That’s a tough one to resolve, and they’re just two diametrically opposed visions of Israel’s role and what Israel has done. 

And I think that if you are someone who’s been a victim of a terrorist attack, just like we were on 9/11, you can get this sense of moral righteousness that is intoxicating and then you just lose sight of things. And I think there is such a danger there. I don’t have a solution to it. I don’t think there is a solution. I think this is always gonna be an occupational hazard when anyone feels that they’ve been wrong. 

Yehuda: Yeah, I guess I am still holding out hope, knowing that this is a viewpoint that runs counter to the Israeli current day political establishment, that the story that you tell about American power and its plausibility to do good in the world, rooted in the ability to be superior to its enemies and advancing a moral good. I genuinely believe that the state of Israel can be that project as well. 

What I live in fear of from this argument is that it just puts Israel on the side of the kinds of authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes that you want America to use its blunt force against, and I want America to partner with in advancing that vision for good in the world, and I’m gonna keep fighting for that. Do you think there’s a plausible way in which this conversation can continue in which that image is possible? 

Shadi: It depends what we mean by partnering. I would like to think that partnering can include some tough love. So I think I even say this in the book that I’m not under any illusions that the US is going to completely cut off Israel. I don’t think that’s realistic, even if I might want it. But I think there’s also something to be said for the fact that Israel proper is at least still somewhat democratic and it is an ally and it has been historically. We can’t just get rid of our allies overnight. That just wouldn’t be right. It would set a bad precedent.

But can we put pressure on our allies? Can we say, hey guys, we’ve been friends for a long time. We got your back. We’re not gonna let Israel be destroyed. We’re gonna protect Israel’s right to exist. That doesn’t mean you can do anything you want to the Gazan people and just like pummel them into oblivion and make Gaza uninhabitable for the rest of eternity. Like there’s a way for us to say, sorry guys, this is where we draw the line, and if you are our friends, you should listen to us because we’re your friends.

Yehuda: It’s interesting though, Shadi, in and of itself, that argument would be most antagonizing, ironically, to the current left. Because the willingness to use in their phrase, “We are your ally. We basically support you. We see you as partners, but you have to use more restraint on your power.” Great. Congratulations. You’re a liberal Zionist and the current discourse around the basic legitimacy of Israel and the exercise of power, as you correctly indict in your book, doesn’t really make space for that kind of viewpoint.

So ironically, your argument may wind up being able to be useful to advance a vision of a world where you may have some disagreement with how it’s being expressed, but the ideas themselves are compatible with that worldview as well. 

Shadi: Yeah, I mean, I think in that sense, I’m a little bit more realistic than a lot of the left on Israel-Palestine. I mean, I advocate a tough line, but I also know that it is this question of how do we reckon with the fact that the things that we might really want in theory are simply not possible? I do think that Israel has a right to exist as a state. I don’t believe in a binational state or a one state solution, but also on somewhat pragmatic grounds, I don’t think that it’s… You can’t ask Israeli Jews to self dissolve their own state, that would just be kind of unprecedented. And I don’t know how you could do that democratically. You’d have to do that against their will, and I wouldn’t be comfortable with that. 

So I think at some level. I’m more sympathetic to a two-state solution, and if I say those things publicly, some of my pro-Palestine friends see me as kind of a sellout. But I’ve always kind of fit in a sort of uncomfortable space in that regard. And am I comfortable with that? I mean, I don’t know, but if my arguments can be useful to liberal Zionists like yourself, Yehuda, that would be great, because ultimately people like you are gonna have to make the argument to folks in Israel. They’re not gonna listen to someone like me. Maybe they’ll listen to someone like you and others like you. So I want anyone who can find something useful in my arguments—you know, go at it. 

Yehuda: Shadi, thanks so much for taking the time today. I really appreciate it. 

Shadi: It was my pleasure. Thanks so much.