Now that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed will be making the charge of Israeli genocide a centerpiece of the midterms, it’s helpful to have a powerful and compact reply ready to hand. That reply is provided by Michael Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. You can find Mandelbaum’s elegant and eloquent four-minute refutation of the genocide charge from the 38:18 to 42:17 mark of this video interview of Mandelbaum by Jacob Heilbrunn.

By the way, Heilbrunn’s entire 47-minute video interview of Mandelbaum is well worth watching. The topic is Mandelbaum’s brief, fascinating and important study, The American Way of Foreign Policy.

In that book, Mandelbaum offers a novel argument: that American exceptionalism carries over into foreign policy. Mandelbaum sets out to refute the strong realist claim that all nations act internationally largely on the basis of power politics and that cultural differences therefore play no significant role in the formation of foreign policy. While Mandelbaum is far from denying that classic realpolitik influences American........

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