Is Obama turning up the pressure on Israel?

Look, I am not in favour of the SATFP, but it is the only theory of IR in circulation here and I am not here to invent an alternative theory based on State, etc. I see "state" as a useless concept and keep demonstrating how it is so.

I have an alternate theory, but unfortunately it does not predict well in detail. Neither does your SATFP, though.

I say that states are composed of governments that take resources from "citizens" or "subjects" who do not resist too hard. For the moment I will ignore the relation between government and citizen, except to point out that citizens supply resources (taxes, inflation, etc that the government uses to buy stuff, and whatever government buys is then unavailable to private citizens to buy). And citizens don't resist too hard when government takes from them.

I'm going to say that government consists of two classes. There are people who decide what to do, that I will call policy-makers. And there are people who do it, that I will call workers. In practice the two functions are mixes, but there are some people who mostly make policy and there are some who mostly work, and I find the theoretical distinction useful.

Governments get organised in different ways, and the organisation makes a big difference in how they function. So for example, some governments don't pay their workers very much. The workers are expected to take bribes from citizens who want them to work. Each worker has a supervisor who could fire him, and so the worker must pay part of his bribe money to his supervisor to pay for letting him keep his job. This system has obvious disadvantages. The government winds up working for rich people, and does little to protect the poor. There can be little central direction for the good of the whole public, because government workers concentrate on the work that individual bribers want done. These governments are inherently weak. But it's hard to change the system even if the top people want to change it. If your supervisor wants his bribe money you had better collect it for him. And if he doesn't want it, you can still collect it and keep it all. You can send spies to try to entice bureaucrats into taking bribes, but when almost everybody does it then getting caught is only an occupational hazard. Can you trust your spies? When somebody gets caught it's only natural they'd try to bribe the spy into letting them go. If you pay your spies bounties to catch people will they catch the innocent to collect the bounty? It's hard.

Here is another approach. When the government can collect lots and lots of money from the citizens, then it can pay workers a reasonable salary and expect them not to take bribes. And a worker who gets caught and fired has lost a big income stream. He risks that every time he takes a small bribe. However, there's still the matter of hiring and firing. That big income stream is worth something, and whoever chooses the workers may choose them for bad reasons. In the USA where political parties change government leaders regularly, it was only natural to fire the government workers and hire new workers who would be loyal to the party in power, every time the leadership changed. This was disruptive. So they made it hard to fire workers. Low-level workers can be fired only for long-term documented incompetence, or sexual harassment, etc. Higher-level workers can be fired somewhat more easily, but still with considerable difficulty. The result is that government workers must do some minimal consistent level of work, and are safer not to express political opinions, and the system operates slowly and somewhat erratically.It used to be that government workers felt that they had considerable job security. But that's no longer the case. While it's still hard to fire them and replace them with someone who is politically loyal to the new politicians, in bad times the government can fire lots of workers and not replace them. The security is much less than it used to be.

I hope that these examples show that the issues are not all policy. The question how a government can get its workers to actually do things efficiently is still not solved. Policy is always constrained by what workers can reasonably be assumed to accomplish.

Now about policy. Your SATFP theory appears to use a metaphor. We suppose that nations are somehow like individual people, and they make decisions based on what they think is good for them. They have "national interests" and they try to achieve their goals.

But in reality, people who try to influence policy see that it doesn't work this way. Or maybe individuals don't work the way the theory describes either.

When you try to influence policy it isn't enough to make convincing arguments that your ideas will further national interests. Each individual who listens to you will think about what your proposed policies will do for *him*. Actual policy makers will think about their careers. Bureau heads (who might be considered workers, but the policy makers rightly check whether these workers will commit to achieving policy goals) will think about their careers too. New policies provide an opportunity to hire new workers and become more important. But they also provide an opportunity to fail and be punished for failure. Very rarely a bureaucrat might be rewarded for success, beyond the opportunity to supervise more people at a higher salary.

Every individual who has any influence on policy will think about how it will affect him personally. (You probably thought of that before you recommended the new policy, didn't you?) They each think about whoever else they care about. In your words I think these individuals care what happens to their SPEEs and that influences their decisions.

Nations don't exactly act in their own best interest. Each individual decision-maker chooses according to his own personal goals. And to get a nation to act according to national interests it's necessary that it somehow have structures that channel the decisions.

One way that was effective for that was monarchy. When the king owns the whole country, he will tend to make decisions that are good for the country. Because it's his possession and he wants it to prosper. To the extent that what's good for the king is good for the nation, his interests are the nation's interests. I think this is where the SATFP started. Kings did their foreign policy with other kings as if they were individuals, because they were.

But now nations don't make their decisions as if it was a nation making choices, trying to get what's good for it. They make decisions some ways to fit the desires of some of their individual people, and some ways at random. This makes it hard to predict what nations will do. Too bad that a good explanation why it's hard to predict government behavior is worth so much less than a good prediction of government behavior.

It's easier to look at national capabilities. In 1900, a nation that did not have iron ore or coal was at a big disadvantage for making weapons etc. The Great Powers were all nations that had iron and coal, though that was not enough -- poland had iron and coal and was a battleground instead. Likewise alsace-lorraine.

In 1940, a nation that did not have oil wells was at a big disadvantage. Germany failed to get the caucasus oil. Japan did get indonesian oil. When US air raids cut back too far the oil from poland, germany was finished. Great powers needed oil, and as the colonial powers lost their colonial oil they stopped being great powers. As US oil is depleted USA is becoming less of a great power. The saudis gave us the oil for Gulf War I. Kuwait sold us the oil to invade iraq, and we sometimes paid more than $100/gallon for fuel delivered where it was needed. The F-22 uses more than 3,000 gallons/hour and that's less than the planes it replaces.

We can't predict well what nations will choose to do, but physical reality and the details of how governments are organised will limit what nations can actually do.

Your post could have been a lot shorter if you'd just admitted that you cannot prove your theory has any predictive power and is therefore useless, but you think it's the best we've got. So, it seems you're willing (if implicitly) to admit that you were wrong in your original assertion that I objected to that if Israel became an apartheid country, it would inevitably cease to be a functioning state, etc. After all, historical determinism went out of style over a hundred years ago. Beyond that, though, this points to the fact that your theory is really worse than useless if one is making policy decisions based on it, just as if Bush decided to invade Iraq because Jesus told him to.

Functionally, there's little difference between your predictions based on your theories and a spittle-flecked fundamentalist on a street corner predicting the world will come to an end because of a theory written in a book centuries ago. Your predictions don't upset me anymore than those who claim the world is going to end in 2012 because the Mayans' theories say so. If you study logic, you will understand this crucial point; you are in the realm of religion, not science. If your theory has no predictive power, then it is useless.

If you learn this basic form of introductory argument, you will progress far beyond all your theories and obscure definitions:

Premise 1: Socrates is a man.
Premise 2: All men are mortal.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

This basic form of argument will serve you well if you understand its implications and apply it to any theories you encounter. And remember, redefining something doesn't change it: You seem to be making a mistake that among those who study semantics is known as 'mistaking the map for the territory, the menu for the meal.' Words are symbols of shared meanings, they are not the things themselves.