Politics & Power Quote by Mary Douglas

The line lands like a cool, surgical cut: Israel’s posture in the region, Mary Douglas suggests, isn’t just the product of ideology, trauma, or theology, but of subsidy. “Assured American largesse” is doing heavy lifting here. “Assured” implies predictability, the kind of backing that removes urgency and dampens the normal pressures that push states toward bargaining. “Largesse” isn’t neutral aid; it carries the whiff of patronage, an imperial allowance that reshapes behavior precisely because it can be counted on.

Douglas’s intent is less to moralize than to reframe causality. Instead of treating the Arab-Israeli stalemate as an eternal ethnic feud, she points to an incentive structure: when a powerful external actor underwrites security, arms, and diplomatic cover, the smaller ally can afford maximalist positions. The subtext is uncomfortable for Western readers: American involvement doesn’t merely “stabilize” the conflict; it may prolong it by insulating one party from the costs of non-agreement.

Context matters. Douglas, best known as an anthropologist of institutions and “group” boundaries, was attuned to how systems protect themselves. Read that way, her claim is almost institutional: reliable patronage hardens identity politics into policy, turning “accommodation” from necessity into optional virtue. It’s a provocation aimed at the story America tells itself - that support is purely defensive or humanitarian - and at the way certainty, not just power, can be the most corrosive ingredient in diplomacy.