Bret Stephens is a foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal and serves as a member of the paper’s editorial board. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013.
Harvard Political Review: You’ve written extensively in defense of Israel. When you write your column, is it with a mind toward persuading your audience or to provide other Israeli supporters with arguments they can use?
Bret Stephens: I’m a supporter of the side that is defending itself, the side that is fighting for principles worth honoring and respecting. It’s not about siding with Israel or some other adversary; it’s about siding with the country that is in the right. It’s not a question of the Packers versus the Cowboys; it’s not an arbitrary choice or dictated by the fact that I am Jewish. It’s the fact that I am arguing for a rational case, and I would like to think that if Israel did something awful I would be critical.
I write my column with two audiences in mind: people who are inclined to agree with me and could use arguments and facts at their finger tips, but I don’t just want to preach to the choir, and I would like to think that readers on the other side of the aisle could say, “I see his point even if I don’t agree, and it forces me to think of smarter ways to argue my point.”
HPR: In one of your recent columns you drew a parallel between the actions of the Pakistani government in an offensive against terrorists and the actions of Israel over the summer. In the West, we heard plenty of criticism of Israel and next to nothing about the Pakistani government. Why does this double standard of reporting exist and what would it take to erase it from the media?
Stephens: It was particularly striking because you would have thought you were reading about Gaza from the excerpt I quoted about the situation in Pakistan—the civilian evacuations, the airstrikes, and yet it received next to no coverage. People were wholly unaware of this and would never stop to condemn it because of the double standard that has been in place for so many decades. There is a temptation to treat the Jewish state in a way you don’t treat other states; sometimes it’s flat out invidious, but sometimes it’s a backhanded compliment. It’s OK for Pakistan to do that, what do you expect, but Israel is like Western civilization.
But this imposes an impossibly high standard on the country. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes lectures Israel about civilian casualties in comparison to how America handled casualties in Afghanistan. Yet these are not similar situations; Americans were not engaged in city combat in Afghanistan as Israel is in Gaza. When they did engage in city combat in Fallujah, there were massive civilian causalities, and Americans didn’t drop leaflets warning Iraqis about drone strikes. Rhodes was demanding Israel abide by a standard that even the United States doesn’t uphold.
HPR: How long do you think the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can persist? What will it take to fundamentally change the status quo?
Stephens: Palestinian and Arab political culture needs to change. The conflict is not fundamentally territorial. Israel could vacate every single settlement, and it would find it had not done much to resolve the conflict. They did this in Gaza, retreating behind a largely agreed upon boarder, and it produced a lot more violence and war. As long as the Arab world is not reconciled to Israel’s existence, there will be no end to conflict. How long can this persist? Germany in 1938 was xenophobic with a regime that had whipped its people into anti-Semitism. Two decades later, in the West, it was a responsible member of the international community because Germans had been utterly broken and had no choice but to change. The same happened with Japan, which had the original suicide bombers—kamikaze pilots, and now it is a passive country. It could take ten years or 10,000 years, but you’re not going to accelerate it if you look away from the nature of the problem. If you know what is on Palestinian television, in children books, how they think and speak about Jews, understand that this is the center of the conflict.
HPR: You, along with many others, have been very critical of President Obama’s lack of a coherent foreign policy. Come January 2017, what could a coherent foreign policy look like?
Stephens: The real problem we have today is a very palpable sense that Americans just want to step back from the burdens of global responsibility that we’ve had from the beginning of the Cold War, and so it creates a world in which our adversaries think they can take aggressive steps without American retaliation and our allies are beginning to ask themselves, “What should we do if America is not going to help us?” This is the sort of thing that leads to miscalculations and war.
I urge that we take seriously the idea of America as the world’s police, which is not being the world’s priest, but we can enforce certain basic expectations of global order. When Russia seizes Crimea and invades Ukraine, and we do nothing, we are inviting disorder. If we had armed the Ukrainians quickly, cut Russia out of the financial sector, and helped diminish European dependence on Russian oil, the Russians would have said, “We can’t get away with this because America is serious.” The same goes for our dealings with ISIS and Iran. The next president, whoever it is, needs to understand that being the world’s policeman is the right thing to do for our allies and us. It creates the baseline for long-term prosperity, and it requires the steady, non-utopian application of American power, including military power—but not random intervention—to make it clear to the world that we have our allies’ backs.
HPR: What role do you see yourself playing as a journalist?
Stephens: In giving me this column, this great institution, The Wall Street Journal, has handed me a sword which is 850 words a week to speak the truth as I see it, to call out the bad guys and defend those in need of defending, so there is a moral component to writing this, to take up a pen and be a voice for the sake of great causes and in defense of the right people. It’s a great privilege to be handed this trust.
HPR: What do you see as the media’s role in the landscape of political discourse?
Stephens: There is some great, very courageous journalism being done, and let’s not forget the incredible risks reporters are taking to bring news to readers, so I don’t want to neglect the superb journalism that is out there. But there is also a lot of misinformed, lazy journalism, and that’s a problem because it’s a second rate product and leaves those who read it under the impression that they are well informed, but they haven’t read a fair sense of the story. The industry could do more to attract higher caliber people to the profession and to police against mediocre or polemical or even dishonest journalism.
When I write, I try to make sure I’m not being lazy, that if I’m taking on an argument that I oppose, that I’m giving it its due and that I’m not being unfair to it; that I’m making my case against it with real honesty and I’m not misrepresenting someone else’s view. All my opinions are my own, and I speak only for myself, but integrity is one standard I think I’ve held up faithfully. I don’t pretend to be an objective journalist, I’m a columnist, but I do try to be honest and fair. Objectivity is to arrive at neutral, even-handed reporting, which can actually distort the truth if each side is not presenting honest views. Honesty is different; it is a truer picture of what is happening than what you might get from an objective source. There’s a lot to be said for honest journalism as opposed to objective journalism.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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