Don’t Bet Everything on One Man

Throughout almost the entire 2024 election campaign in the United States and the first year of Donald Trump’s new presidency, I found myself constantly fending off my American and Israeli acquaintances, who kept insisting that my criticism of the new American president stemmed solely from his stubborn unwillingness to help Ukraine and his abandonment of the previous administration’s approach. For Israel, by contrast, Trump’s presidency is the most advantageous political project in history — as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared without mincing words.
In response, I tried to explain that I believe only in a partnership grounded in values, not in interests. If people share values, if states share values, then they will also hold to shared approaches. But if those shared values are absent, the approach can change at any moment, toward anyone.

I proceeded from the premise that the administration of Joseph Biden supported Ukraine not because it was interested in mineral resources or in strengthening America’s role in Europe, but because it wanted to uphold the primacy of international law, the impermissibility of annexing another country’s territory, and of a large state imposing its vision of the future on a neighbor. This is precisely the role of the United States as the leader of the democratic world: not to seek control over someone else’s oil or someone else’s minerals, but to help maintain a civilized world order. Because only in such a civilized world can the United States itself feel secure.

I believed that in Israel’s case, too, the very same approach ought to apply. The United States should support Israel on the basis of its right to exist, defending it from those who deny it that right. This is not a question of control over Iranian oil and American influence in the region. It is, above all, a question of justice — of a peaceful Middle East where people do not wage war but build a civilized, common future.

And I would note that the previous president practically sacrificed both his own chances and those of his allies at reelection when he refused to harshly condemn Israel during the war in Gaza — against the backdrop of radicalizing sentiment within his own party and among his own voters. Because for the sake of values, one must not fear defeat.

It seemed to me that this was a universal approach. That failing to adhere to it makes political fiasco inevitable. I was wrong not in that understanding, but in counting on a similar understanding among people engaged in politics, journalism, and business. And it turned out that many of them had, in the most literal sense, lost their moral compass — and even their business instincts.

The first alarm bell rang not when Donald Trump dressed down Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. In fact, the point of no return was passed when American paratroopers seized the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro — yet no one in Washington gave a thought to restoring Venezuelan democracy, to the need to hand power to those who had won that country’s last election. When Trump turned into a partner of the Venezuelan authoritarian regime, and extracted the Nobel laureate’s medal from opposition leader María Machado.

One would think it had already become clear back then: whoever is ready to make deals with the Venezuelan regime can, at any moment, make a deal with the Iranian one too — should it prove capable of surviving and dictating its will. If the chief interest is proving one’s own might, and Iranian oil, then political priorities can simply be reformatted.

After the Trump-Zelensky scandal and the winding down of intensive American support, Ukraine learned to survive without it. This happened in no small part thanks to the complex system of alliances that Kyiv began building after the Russian attack. And yet Ukraine could have behaved differently. Back in the Biden years, it could have put all its eggs in the American basket — and then found itself helpless and bewildered after Trump’s refusal. But now Ukrainian drones strike Russian cities, and American servicemen are trying to learn from their Ukrainian counterparts how to fight drones. That is what actually happened.

I may be told that Ukraine has European allies, while Israel has nothing to count on. Yet the entire history of the Jewish state is a living lesson in the ability to build complex systems of situational alliances and to not be afraid of moving from one arrangement to another when an ally proves unreliable. How logical, then, was the move that reduced Israel’s entire system of alliance commitments not even to relations with a single country, but to relations with a single man — and an elderly, capricious one at that? Trump’s defeat in the previous presidential election should already have convinced Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli elite of the danger of betting all their money on a single number. But Trump’s return to the Oval Office revived this approach to politics as a game of casino.

So what is the way out of the situation we are in?

First, to stop living under the illusion that Donald Trump will come to his senses, fall in love with Israel again, strike Iran, and do what Netanyahu or Smotrich expect of him. Yes, the international situation may develop in such a way that the United States again enters into conflict with Iran. But in any conflict, Trump will pursue first and foremost his own interests, and only afterward Israel’s.

Second, it is necessary to return to an approach that allows Israel to take its own actions to ensure its security without looking over its shoulder at the United States. Israel is not an overseas territory of the United States. Those Jews who want their future to be decided by the president of the United States live in the United States. Those Jews who want to live in a national state live in Israel — and must not depend on the whims of the White House or any other foreign administration. Any opposite approach effectively puts an end to the very idea of Zionism. Israel, to put it in the spirit of Vladimir Jabotinsky, is a state — not a national home ruled by foreigners.
Third, Israeli society must come to understand the importance of a partnership of values, rather than a marriage of convenience or even a marriage of love — even if that marriage of love turns out to be a marriage to the president’s daughter. Without the reputation of a democratic state in the Middle East — a state that wishes to exist itself and does not deny others the right to exist — Israel simply has no chance of renegotiating situational alliances and of existing securely in the future. And this, it seems to me, is the chief lesson that Donald Trump has taught us all.