A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.

The New York Times’ most favorite Jew, Peter Beinart, is back in the paper with a new factually misleading column attacking the company that makes the Iron Dome system that helps protect Israeli civilians from rocket attacks by Hamas terrorists.

Beinart misleadingly claims that “the Biden administration has proposed a military budget higher than America’s at the peak of the Vietnam War.” As support for that preposterous and deceptive claim, Beinart hyperlinks to a press release written by a longtime boycott-Israel publicists and issued by a project of the extreme-left Institute for Policy Studies. If one looks to actual government data rather than biased agitprop, the facts of the matter become more clear. If one looks at the White House Office of Management and Budget historical table 8.4, one will find that national defense spending in 1968 was 9.2 percent of GDP, while in 2023 and 2024 it is estimated to be 3.1 percent of GDP.

Anyway, America lost the Vietnam War, so suggesting that the spending levels from then should be the upper limit of US defense spending is silly. For comparison, context, and historical perspective, why not instead take a war that America actually won, such as World War II, when defense spending ran at more than 40 percent of GDP, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

If Beinart or his defenders are tempted to argue that percent of GDP is not a useful spending measure, it would be hypocritical: As recently as 2018, Beinart himself was measuring defense spending as a percent of GDP, writing for the Atlantic, “America’s NATO partners don’t need to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, let alone 4 percent.”

Beinart offers innuendo that the Biden administration’s defense spending levels are driven by some nefarious cause other than a sincere desire to promote American interests, national security, freedom, and democracy. Beinart does that by writing:

Before returning to government, [Secretary of State] Blinken and [director of national intelligence] Haines worked at a consulting group whose clients included defense contractors. [Secretary of Defense] General Austin served on the board of the weapons maker Raytheon. At least 11 senior Biden foreign policy officials — including the National Security Council’s “Asia czar,” Kurt Campbell, and the person who ran the Pentagon’s China task force, Ely Ratner — are alums of the Center for a New American Security, which, according to a 2020 study, received more funding from defense contractors than any other Washington think tank.

Not surprisingly, given these backgrounds, the Biden administration has proposed a military budget higher than America’s at the peak of the Vietnam War…

Unlike Beinart, I’m not going to cast aspersions on people’s motives. Yet it’s intriguing that the single defense contractor he names, Raytheon, is Israeli defense firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.’s partner in the development of the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and SkyHunter interceptor systems and Tamir missiles that defend against incoming rockets, artillery, and mortars. Beinart is on record calling for elimination of the Jewish state and its replacement with a different country Beinart calls “Israel-Palestine,” “a Jewish home that is also, equally, a Palestinian home,” “a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”

Personally, I’m grateful Israelis are protected by defense systems of the sort built by Raytheon and Rafael. I’d think ties to Raytheon would be a plus in a potential Pentagon official, not a disqualifier.

Even Beinart concedes, “The Biden administration deserves credit for speedily arming Ukraine.” Who does Beinart think manufactured those arms that went to Ukraine? Without the defense contractors Beinart is casting aspersions on, the Ukrainians would be crushed under the tracks of Russian tanks. Raytheon, it turns out, also helps make the Javelin antitank missile that has been so useful to Ukraine in disabling Russian armor.

Modern weaponry requires extended research, development, manufacturing, testing, and training lead time. Without adequate military spending even in peacetime, speedily arming any country — Ukraine, Israel, the United States itself — that needs protection from an advancing tyrant becomes impossible. This was a point made memorably in 1938 by Winston Churchill in While England Slept and in 1940 by John F. Kennedy in Why England Slept. By the years those books were published, the realizations were, alas, too late to save much of European Jewry.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.