Tucker's Folly

Tucker Carlson recently drew attention while in Qatar - a place where power, money, media, and American military infrastructure converge- using that setting to challenge long-standing assumptions about U.S. foreign alliances, particularly Israel.

According to multiple reports, Carlson criticized U.S. policy toward Israel, describing the country, home to roughly nine million people, as insignificant and lacking natural resources, with its strategic relevance, he argued, deriving primarily from the American security guarantee.

By contrast, he suggested that the six Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC] nations provide more essential assets to the United States, concluding that America’s relationship with Qatar in particular is far more consequential than its connection with Israel.

That reasoning did not go unanswered.

Victor Davis Hanson, the American historian, classicist, public intellectual, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, took direct issue with Carlson’s moral and factual claims.

Speaking with evident reluctance, Hanson observed that Tucker Carlson in making these arguments was not the man with whom he had shared a seven- to eight-year professional relationship.

“Everything he just said is demonstrably untrue,” Hanson stated flatly. “Israel is not an insignificant country.”

What followed was not sentiment, but substance.

First, Hanson noted that Israel is not merely a geopolitical actor, but the historical and spiritual home, indeed the cradle, of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is the protector of Jerusalem.

Can there be any earnest argument that Jerusalem was better governed under Jordanian control than under Israeli sovereignty? Or that the Middle East was a more humane or stable place before the modern State of Israel? Israel’s historical and cultural significance is not debatable.

Second, the claim that Israel lacks natural resources is simply false. Israel is entirely self-sufficient in fossil fuels and a net exporter of natural gas. It is working with Cyprus and Greece to develop offshore Mediterranean gas fields; resources that could supply Europe and reduce Western dependence on hostile regimes, assuming Turkish interference does not derail those efforts.

Third, Hanson addressed the implicit moral comparison with Qatar. Qatar is an autocracy in which only about 20 percent of the population are citizens; the remainder are foreign laborers with few, if any, civil rights.

By contrast, Arab citizens within Israel enjoy full legal status, vote, serve in the civil service, and hold seats in the Knesset. Israel may be imperfect, but it is the only functioning liberal democracy in the region.

Fourth, the assertion that America “gets nothing” from Israel already collapses under minimal scrutiny. Israel has produced 12 Nobel Prize winners! Israeli innovation has yielded technologies ranging from flash drives to drip-irrigation systems, advances that have transformed agriculture, medicine, cybersecurity, and water conservation worldwide, including in the United States.

Fifth, on military cooperation, Israel is not a passive recipient of American aid. When the United States supplies Israel with advanced platforms such as the F-35, Israel is the only country that adapts and improves those systems, and then shares those innovations back with the U.S. That is not dependency; it is partnership.

Finally, Hanson posed the unavoidable security question. Are Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis not enemies of the United States? Hezbollah murdered U.S. Marines and bombed our embassy.

The Houthis have attacked American shipping. Hamas has committed repeated terrorist atrocities. Who has most consistently deterred, disrupted, and degraded these forces? The Israelis have.

This debate, however, extends beyond geopolitics.

As Os Guinness has long argued, no enduring free civilization has ever been built on atheistic foundations. A culture with no claims upon its members, and no curbs on their desires, has no future.

“Freedom,” Guinness writes, “requires a firm refusal of what is false, what is bad, what is excessive, what is ugly… When everything is tolerable, nothing will be true; and when nothing is true, no one will be free.”

That warning echoes powerfully in Mark K. Lewis’s recent Townhall column, The Miseducation of America. Lewis reminds us that people can only act on what they have been taught. If they do not know what freedom and tyranny are, or the sources of both, they cannot defend the former or resist the latter.

Scripture warned as much long ago: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” [Hosea 4:6] “My people have gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge.” [Isaiah 5:13].

Lewis notes that China does not teach Christianity or free-market capitalism; it teaches atheism and Marxism. The result is one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. The people believe they live in a ‘democracy’ because the state perpetuates the myth, just as North Korea cloaks itself in the terminology of ‘democracy’ while denying the people any meaningful authority.

Carlson’s praise of the GCC states, including Qatar, is therefore instructive rather than rhetorical. In China and North Korea, the state claims to rule for the people while denying them any role in governance.

The GCC monarchies operate on the same principle, only more suavely. In Qatar, the people do not rule; they are administered.

The GCC states are autocratic regimes tempered by wealth, not democracies evolving towards maturity. They function through hierarchy, patronage, and control, instead of by representation, accountability, or consent of the governed.

That distinction matters, not just for foreign-policy realism, but for moral clarity. The Hanson-versus-Carlson dispute is ultimately about what kind of authority produces order and freedom. That debate is as old as man himself.

Adam brings death and domination. Christ brings life and empowerment.

The Swiss Protestant theologian Frédéric Louis Godet [1812-1900] captured the contrast with unforgettable clarity in his Commentary on Romans: “Death reigns; it is a tyrant. But life does not reign; it has not subjects; it makes kings.”

That is the question before us, politically, culturally, and Biblically.

Gideons and Rahabs have begun to rise.

David Lane


American Renewal Project