American ties to Israel are evolving but will remain deep, Henry Kissinger said.
“I think the relationship remains essential,” the former U.S. secretary of state told The Jerusalem Post in remarks published Sunday.
“I think there is a fundamental conviction that the security of Israel is in the American national interest. That has not changed.”
Some have speculated recently that the faltering Middle East fortunes of the Bush administration could prompt an American backlash against supporting Israel.
Whereas once Israel was seen as a vital U.S. foothold against the Soviet Union, polemicists such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” argue that the alliance endangers Americans by stirring up Arab and Muslim anger.
But Kissinger saw no great impact on popular thinking.
“The American public continues to support the relations and resistance to any threat to the survival of Israel,” he said.
“In the early years it was a question of states interacting with each other, and now it is part of a whole global situation,” Kissinger added, apparently alluding to the U.S.-led war on Islamic terror.
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