An Israeli Case against Trump

Bret Stephens’s most recent New York Times column was provocatively entitled “A Conservative Case Against Trump.” Provocative of course because conservatives are supposed to support Trump.

Another group that are supposed to want Trump to win Tuesday’s election are Israelis. And, according to a recent poll, fully two-thirds of us do. And there is a logic to this support. As President, Donald Trump moved the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, correcting an absurdity that previous presidents of both parties had recognized as such, but not acted upon. He withdrew the US from the hugely unpopular (in Israel) JCPOA – the Iran nuclear deal. And of course, he (or his Administration at least) brokered the game-changing Abraham Accords.

But like Stephens, I’m going to set out the case for a minority opinion. It rests on three basic points.

First, mistaken preconceptions about his positions and likely actions.

Most Israelis believe he will be on our side against our enemies in a way that Harris will not. Harris will attempt to restrain us and tie our hands, Trump will not. Harris will push for ceasefires and “deals”, Trump will support uncompromising Israeli military action.

This certainly fits the image we have of Trump. The take-no-nonsense tough guy. Except it’s an image he has – master salesman that he is – sold us. The reality is far more mixed. As President he did take out Qasem Soleimani, the hugely influential leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But on other occasions he failed entirely to respond to direct Iranian aggression against American targets, as well as to Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia. He threatened the North Koreans with nuclear war, but then gave Kim Jong-Un the unprecedented gift of face-to-face meetings with a US President, followed up with fawning letters of admiration. The ‘deals’ these meetings spawned amounted to zero progress in arresting Pyonyang’s aggression towards South Korea.

One great source of information in digging below the surface of the pro-Trump headlines, is Trump’s Peace, journalist Barak Ravid’s exhaustive account of the  diplomacy and politics that led to the Abraham Accords. One such nugget is that, Trump was keen to meet privately with then-Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Zarif in 2019, on the sidelines of a G7 summit in Biarritz, to explore the possibility of a new deal with Iran. (Presumably. as with Kim Jong-Un, he felt his unique skills in “The Art of the Deal” could succeed where Obama and others had failed.) As Ravid writes:

Netanyahu called the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and pressed him to arrange an urgent call with the president so that he could ask him not to meet with Zarif. A frustrated Netanyahu tried every possible channel to get through to Trump – all to no avail. For hours on end, the US president was not taking his calls.

So should we really assume that a re-elected President Trump will be the enabling ally we want on Iran? Well, in addition to his past, not wholly encouraging, record, we now have a strong hint about what he’ll do once back in the White House because his putative Vice-President, J. D. Vance, has told us:

Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct — like sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran…

And in the case of Trump, “America’s interests” could change according to the whims and personal desires of the president. As Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has said, “Trump’s support for Israel is not guaranteed in the second term, because Trump’s positions are made on the basis of what’s good for Donald Trump, not on some coherent theory of national security.”

Bolton – like many other senior staffers of his previous administration – has been relentlessly critical of Trump. But even some strong critics of the Biden administration’s Iran policy are nervous about a Trump victory next week. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies thinks Kamala Harris would be bad for Israel, but that Trump might be even worse:

…when you go in with Donald Trump, you’re either going to win really big or you’re going to lose really badly… The lose-badly [situation] is Trump, for whatever reason, he tells Bibi, immediately, ‘Wrap it all up. I don’t want to see any more violence and escalation,’ … and Trump does a nuclear deal with Khamenei, which is worse than the 2015 Obama deal, but he calls it the best deal ever negotiated.

If you care to look, there is in fact plenty of evidence that a Trump presidency will not be that different from a Biden (or Harris) presidency in terms of what it encourages/enables Israel to do, and what it will try to block. Just yesterday we learned that Trump told Netanyahu “he wants Israel to wrap up the war in Gaza by the time he returns to office if he wins the election”. In September, Trump demonstrated he would continue America’s horribly misbegotten embrace of Qatar, obsequiously praising the Emir in Doha as “a great and powerful leader of his country… who strongly wants peace in the Middle East and all over the world. We had a great relationship during my time in the White House, and it will be even stronger this time around.”

So while it may be that Trump will make some decisions in Israel’s favor that Harris wouldn’t make, it’s entirely possible he’ll make the same decisions she would, or worse ones. But it’s when you expand the analysis beyond his direct focus on the Middle East, that you see scales tip in favor of Kamala Harris.

The second part of the Israeli case against Trump is his relationship with authoritarians, and with authoritarianism.

Here, I’m sharing a platform with Bret Stephens, who, in his conservative case against Trump, points out that American conservatives laud freedom, and the idea of a liberal democratic ‘free world” which the US leads. And Trump is – in the words of Madeline Albright – “the first anti-democratic president in modern US history.” Trump is entirely uninterested in America’s role as the world’s leading democracy. In his first term, he assailed American civic institutions and ended his tenure by seeking to prevent the peaceful transition of power; not merely a norm of  liberal democracy, but the fundamental norm. His former Chief-of-Staff John Kelly has said he could never get Trump to understand why US Generals pledged their loyalty to the Constitution, and not to him personally. He regards the rule-of-law as a weapon to wield. “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law,” is a quote from a former Peruvian dictator, today by pro-democracy activists to describe the likes of Putin and Viktor Orban. For Trump it works better if you replace “friends” with “myself and my family”.

Ok. This doesn’t sound great. But what does it have to do with Israel? Does it matter if the US is run by a wannabe autocrat? Well, yes. The US-Israel relationship is built on shared values. An America that rejects those values has lost the most compelling argument for its alliance with the only democracy in the Middle East. And Trump’s authoritarian streak extends to his admiration for authoritarians. Stephens writes in his column:

Trump was and remains a sycophant to Putin — and to China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. What president can lead the free world when he’s so consistently effusive about its enemies?

Biden and Harris, however imperfectly, are explicitly opposed to this authoritarian axis. Trump is, at best, indifferent to it, sometimes openly admiring of it. Israel can only be weakened by its indispensable ally abandoning its historic place at the head of the camp of free nations.

But there’s another, less theoretical issue here. Stephens again:

…Today, my Trump-leaning friends acknowledge that his pledge to cut off aid to Ukraine would be a victory for Putin and a calamity for the West — but that it’s counterbalanced by what they see as his stronger support for Israel. But the Middle East and Ukraine are, at bottom, different fronts in the same war. Allow Putin to succeed in Ukraine, and Israel’s threats from Russia’s allies in Iran, Syria and Yemen will multiply.

This is critical. A number of Israel’s most outspoken supporters in the West, people like Douglas Murray and Bari Weiss, are also strong supporters of Ukraine and – like Stephens – see the fight against Russian aggression as part of the same war for Western values against its enemies. Russia is increasingly formally allied with Iran. There is today a coalition of authoritarian powers working together against the interests of the West and its allies. This isn’t the Comintern; there’s no overarching ideology shared by these regimes. (As the writer and historian Anne Applebaum says in her recently published Autocracy Inc. these countries are connected “not through ideals but through deals”.) But Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and Venezuela are looking to help each other evade the effects of Western sanctions, and even to win wars. Iran and North Korea are both directly helping Russia in its expansionist war with Ukraine.  “America First” was not a slogan picked at random. In the 1930s it meant that the US should stay out of Europe’s problems, even if it meant giving Hitler a free hand. It has the same isolationist, amoral connotations when Trump employs it, and this is not good news for democratic, West-aligned Israel.

The final part of this case against Trump is not about Israel per se, but American Jews, and it is antisemitism. Antisemitism abroad matters to Israel. Despite the anti-Trump tenor of this piece, it would be disingenuous not to state that the wave of antisemitism that has swept the US this past year has come mainly from parts of the left. And it has been loudly and unequivocally condemned by far more prominent Republicans than Democrats. It is entirely legitimate to be concerned about a Democratic Party in which rabidly anti-Zionist and antisemitic ‘progressives’ are increasingly influential.

But the Republican Party has an antisemitism problem too. It is just a different brand of antisemitism that’s less in vogue right now. It’s the good, old-fashioned, far-right variety, and its exponents are not just part of the GOP – as progressive antisemites like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are part of the Democratic Party – they have been embraced by Trump and are his surrogates on the campaign in a way that Omar and Tlaib are certainly not for Harris. Tucker Carlson should have been persona non grata with Jews long ago, as a prominent promoter of the “Great Replacement Theory” – when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us”, this is what they were referring to. Even some Jewish conservatives who downplayed that could not ignore Carlson’s fawning recent interview with a Nazi apologist “historian” who claimed Winston Churchill was “the real villain” of the Second World War.

Despite all this, Carlson had a front row seat at the Republican National Convention and is part of the official campaign. As are other far-right conspiracy theorists and antisemites like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green and the ‘Pizzagate’ blogger Jack Posobiec. Meanwhile, Trump himself has refused to distance himself from the antisemitic QAnon movement.

And then there’s the way he talks about immigrants: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country”. They have “bad genes.” “They’re not humans; they’re animals”. Any Jew who does not get a chill listening to this kind of language by an aspiring president needs to read up on their Jewish history. Whatever Trump’s personal view of Israel or of Jews, he is unarguably a conspiracy-spinning, pathologically lying demagogue. And they have never been good news for Jews.

So let’s sum up the Israeli case against Donald Trump. Though it’s true to say he might pursue more Israel-friendly policies than Harris would, this is not a certainty. And he might also sell Israel out completely, influenced by pro-Iranian autocrats like Putin or Erdogan. His disregard for the democratic values that tie Israel to the West weaken Israel internationally; and his anti-NATO, pro-Putin instincts place him very much on the wrong side of the civilizational battle that Israel is engaged in. And finally, his embrace of right-wing conspiracy-theorists and antisemites completely undermines the sincerity of his professed philosemitism.

According to the polls in Israel, most Israelis will be celebrating hard if Trump wins on Tuesday. I’m not at all sure they’ll be ready for the four-year hangover that awaits.