The Wars in Gaza and Ukraine Are the Same War

First published in the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

GUEST OP ED | By: Michael Mandelbaum | September 2024

Featured Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via REUTERS, Official State Department photo by Chuck Kennedy via ABACAPRESS.COM.

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The deep partisan divisions in the United States affect many public issues, including the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East. The Israeli war of self-defense in Gaza commands strong support among Republicans but elicits less enthusiasm among Democrats. By contrast, Democrats generally endorse Ukraine’s war of self-defense against Russia, following the lead of President Joe Biden, while a significant fraction of the Republican Party wants to stop American military assistance to Ukraine.

The partisan divisions are unfortunate and, in a sense, odd. Anyone who supports Israel should support Ukraine and vice-versa, because in fundamental ways the two countries are waging the same war.

Both conflicts began with cross-border aggression against internationally recognized sovereign states, which is the most basic violation of international law. The aggressor in each case is a vicious dictatorship with a clearly stated goal: to wipe the country it has attacked off the face of the Earth. The Middle Eastern aggressor, the terrorist organization Hamas, asserts that Israel has no right to exist. Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator, says the same thing about Ukraine. For both Israel and Ukraine, therefore, the stakes in their wars of self-defense are existential.

In addition, both Israel and Ukraine are democracies under assault from authoritarian regimes. Both wars thus exhibit one of the defining features of both World War II and the Cold War, which most Americans regard as having been just wars as well as successful ones. Furthermore, the two aggressors have conducted their wars in brutal fashion, concentrating on murdering civilians. Both have thereby committed gross violations of the laws of war, not to mention of civilized behavior, both of which the United States has traditionally sought to uphold.

There is a further, crucial similarity between the two conflicts. The attacks by Hamas and Russia have a common goal: giving radically anti-Western regimes dominance in their home regions. Hamas acts as a proxy for the Islamic Republic of Iran, which uses the several terrorist groups that it sponsors in the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, to expand its own influence there. Russia seeks its own hegemony in Europe. The regional supremacy that each is pursuing requires ejecting the United States from their respective regions, and that is a major Iranian as well as Russian aim.

Europe and the Middle East hold enormous strategic and economic significance for the United States. American foreign policy has had Europe as its focal point since the founding of the republic; the Middle East contains the planet’s largest readily accessible reserves of oil, which is the fuel on which the world’s industrial economies operate. The United States, and the democratic world in general, thus have an immense investment in the military success of Israel and Ukraine. Both are fighting to defend the West’s interests as well as its values.

A common source of Americans’ reservations about supporting the two beleaguered democracies is wariness about being drawn directly into foreign conflicts in general. Israel and Ukraine, however, are not asking for American troops. They can achieve their military goals with their own soldiers, provided that they receive continuing supplies of armaments and ongoing political support from the United States and its allies.

The current American role in the two conflicts reprises Great Britain’s preferred, and often successful, strategy from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, for safeguarding its interests in Europe at relatively low cost. To prevent any single power from dominating the continent, the British supported, mainly financially and without dispatching British soldiers, any single country or group of countries that was resisting a would-be hegemon. This was the strategy of “offshore balancing,” and it is what the United States is doing now, by assisting Israel and Ukraine, in the Middle East and Europe.

Support for these two embattled democracies has also come in for criticisms targeted at one but not the other. Critics of Israel’s military activities in Gaza assert that these operations take a disproportionate toll on Palestinian civilians. The charge is unfounded for three reasons. First, the widely circulated numbers of Gazan civilian deaths deserve no credence. They come from Hamas which inflates them and counts its own terrorists eliminated by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as civilian casualties. Second, Hamas deliberately causes civilian deaths by placing weapons and combatants in homes, schools, and hospitals.

Third, Israel has taken unprecedented steps to avoid civilian deaths. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has said of the IDF that he has “never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy’s civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings.” He added that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history – above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

As for Western assistance to Ukraine, critics of that policy say that persisting with it will lead to a nuclear war with Russia. To be sure, whenever the United States opposes a nuclear-armed country, this theoretical risk exists; but the only certain way to avoid it is to yield to any demand that such a country, in this case Russia, chooses to make. Such a strategy would create a very different world and, from the Western point of view, a far more dangerous one. Moreover, America and its allies faced this problem during the Cold War and found a way other than preemptive surrender to cope with it: deterrence through the threat to retaliate, with their own nuclear weapons if necessary, against Soviet aggression in Europe. That formula kept the peace in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and has also deterred Russia from expanding its war against Ukraine to other European countries. Abandoning the Ukrainians, moreover, could increase the chances of nuclear war by tempting Putin to attack countries such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. That would cause a direct Russian confrontation with the United States, which America is bound by the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty to defend.

A final common objection to support for Israel and Ukraine holds that such support takes attention and resources away from the confrontation with the single most formidable current threat the West faces, which comes from the People’s Republic of China. A military failure by Israel in Gaza, or by Ukraine in eastern Europe, however – which abandoning them would risk — would do nothing to fortify the prevention of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Indeed, it would be more likely to encourage such an attack by broadcasting American weakness to Beijing.

Most importantly, it is possible to defend Western interests and Western values in all three places. The coalitions opposing Chinese domination of East Asia, Russian domination of Europe, and Iranian domination of the Middle East are broad and cumulatively very wealthy. Together they have more than ample resources, in each case, to defend the interests and the values of the West – if those resources are mobilized for the task.

Mobilizing them depends, ultimately, on American leadership in all three parts of the world. America is more likely to exercise leadership effectively to the extent that the country is united in support of it, as is not now the case. Bipartisan support for major foreign policy initiatives is an American tradition. To be sure, the country has not always followed that tradition. Division over foreign policies is a familiar feature of American history and today’s divisions are not unprecedented. Still, bipartisanship was notably robust during World War II and the Cold War and was indispensable for American success in those two conflicts. The next American president would be wise to try to revive it.

Michael Mandelbaum

Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the author of the new book The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made, a study of Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gandhi, Ben Gurion, and Mao, published by Oxford University Press.

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