Four-Minute Refutation of the Genocide Charge

By Stanley Kurtz

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

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 affairs, he nonetheless maintains that in three fundamental ways, American foreign policy is decidedly different from the realist foreign policies pursued by most other countries most of the time.

 

According to Mandelbaum, the three distinctively American components of our foreign policy are (1) efforts to advance liberty; (2) the use of economic instruments in pursuit of political aims; and (3) the exceptionally large role played by public opinion in the formation of American foreign policy.

 

Heilbrunn pushes Mandelbaum on these points throughout the interview, and it’s interesting to hear his replies — but even more interesting to read Mandelbaum’s thought-provoking little book. By the way, Mandelbaum traces America’s three distinctive foreign-policy traditions back to the very founding of the United States, and even earlier, so the book provides a quick overview of the entire history of American foreign policy.

 

Mandelbaum’s remarks on Israel put me in mind of another important book, John Fonte’s Sovereignty or Submission, which I reviewed here back in 2011. There Fonte defends national sovereignty as a fundamental feature of liberal democracy and presciently warns against the forces of global governance.

 

Fonte argues that Israel is targeted by the advocates of global governance largely as a surrogate, both for the United States and for the idea of the independent democratic state generally. One of Fonte’s targets in Sovereignty or Submission is the International Criminal Court (ICC), and we’ve seen that issue emerge lately in Mayor Mamdani’s efforts to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for “crimes against humanity” on behalf of the ICC.

 

So, over and above the part it plays in efforts to undermine Israel’s moral standing, the bogus genocide charge is part of a broader campaign to subject not only Israel, but ultimately America, to policing by international bodies governed by a coalition of Third Worldists and European leftists — a red-green alliance that the DSA now brings to the heart of the Democratic Party.

 

I wonder how Mandelbaum would make sense of our modern European “global governancers,” as Fonte calls them. Mandelbaum’s argument for American foreign policy’s distinctiveness depends on a contrast with the realist “reasons of state” that he says truly have governed foreign policy in most other nations — certainly including Europe — over most of their history.

 

Does this mean that European foreign policy has now broken decisively with the past? Is the European progressive attempt to undermine national sovereignty, as such, a genuine abandonment of national interest as classically conceived? Maybe, yet no doubt realists would dismiss the biases of contemporary international institutions such as the International Criminal Court as a cloak for the interests of the nations that control those bodies.

 

Any way you look at the genocide charge, however — animus against Israel and/or Jews; disenchanted, overeducated American leftists in need of a new crusade; European appeasement of its Middle Eastern immigrants; Iran and its allies mobilizing international opinion against Israel; a wedge aimed at subordinating American foreign policy to advocates of global governance; or all of the above — the charge is a lie, as Mandelbaum so thoughtfully and effectively makes clear.