It’s Trump’s Middle East now

Israelis who still can’t get their heads around Trump’s recent moves should read what conservative journalist Abe Greenwald published yesterday:

Yesterday in Doha, Donald Trump spoke a bit about his philosophy of enemies. ‘I have never believed in having permanent enemies,’ …

In his first term, he started out threatening Kim Jong Un with annihilation. But before long, he was dining with Kim in the Demilitarized Zone and praising his ‘beautiful vision for his country.’ Trump used to talk tough about Qatar’s financing of terrorism, too. Today he’s accepting Qatari planes and building a golf resort in Doha…

We all know that Trump doesn’t believe in permanent enemies. Nor does he believe in permanent friends, as evidenced by his treatment of Ukraine. Trump doesn’t believe in anything permanent. That’s why the word ‘transactional’ has become the default characterization of his thinking. If you enter a deal with Trump, and he gets something of value out of it, you’re a friend—at least for the moment. If he doesn’t, you’re an enemy—until you make it up to him.

That last paragraph should be read and re-read by those Israelis and Jews who insist “but Trump loves Israel!”, until they understand who they’re dealing with.

Yes, it is true that Trump did things that no other President had done which were great for Israel. But the reason was not because of any deep love for Israel. In fact, many previous Presidents who would never have moved the Embassy to Jerusalem, or taken out Soleimani, or pushed along the Abraham Accords, genuinely loved Israel in a way that Trump is incapable of.

Trump’s great benefit to Israel has been his willingness – unique among US Presidents – to completely dismiss the conventions and unwritten rules of “what’s done”, declared by the State Department or by international institutions. Many of those conventions are not fit-for-purpose when dealing with the Hobbesian reality of the Middle East; Trump, who thrives in a ‘state-of-nature’ environment where the most powerful and the least restrained triumph, instinctively understands that.

The problem comes, as we are now discovering, when he decides that other Middle East countries can benefit the US – and him personally. Unlike a Reagan, or either Bush, or Clinton, or Biden, there’s no voice in Trump’s head telling him that Israel has something all these Arab autocracies lack: shared democratic values with the US. He just doesn’t think like that. The idea of America as the leader of the democratic world does not speak to him; democracy itself does not interest him beyond its utility as a means of achieving power. (And, as we saw in 2020, when it does not do the job of getting him into power, he rejects it.)

A different Israeli government than the one we’re currently saddled with could be leveraging Trump’s unique take on the Middle East to our advantage. Imagine just how different these last few months would have been with a different government – one not constrained by the ideological commitments of the far-right. As Yair Lapid said yesterday:

Netanyahu had two options. Either to do something in Khan Younis for the sixth time, or to be in Riyadh — to sit at the head of a table in Saudi Arabia and be part of agreements on a scale we’ve never known, bringing historic change to the Middle East.

The opportunity that Trump’s election provided could have taken us in a completely different direction. The bonkers notion that Trump might just be serious about creating a “Gaza Riviera” did force the Sunni Arab states to finally stop their finger-wagging on the sidelines and come forward with their own post-war plan. Their sudden willingness to help create a new Gaza without Hamas could have been, if not necessarily embraced, then not summarily dismissed without any discussion.

A Prime Minister Lapid (or Bennett or Gantz) would likely not have ended the ceasefire after the first phase, preventing the return of more hostages, but would have sat down with the Americans, the Egyptians, and the Emiratis, and potentially agreed on a plan that Israel could live with: Hamas not totally destroyed, but out of power, replaced by an Arab states/Palestinian technocratic government to rebuild and stabilize Gaza, while Israel would retain freedom of military action to eliminate terrorists. (As already proposed by a number of Israeli security and policy veterans.) The war would be over, more hostages would return, and we wouldn’t be calling up thousands of exhausted reservists to abandon their families and their jobs for another indefinite period.

And think about what’s happened in the last few days. Trump has just signed a gargantuan defense agreement with the Saudis, with no requirement for any positive moves towards Israel! Imagine that different Israeli government, one that had ended the war in Gaza and was willing to at least commit to the principle of Palestinian statehood in the future (following a program of Palestinian deradicalization and reform of their government and education system). Saudi normalization would be back on the table. Trump might well have been on his way to Israel from the Gulf to help move things along, instead of the current situation where he sees Netanyahu as fundamentally an obstacle to progress.

I’m not naive about Trump, and if I were an American I’d be appalled by the sledgehammer he’s taking to the US Constitution; but his total disregard for the rules of the game does create opportunities in the Middle East, where Israel has frequently been disadvantaged by being the only player trying to observe the “rules”. And ironically, it’s this Israeli government, doing its best to ape Trump’s assault on institutions and the rule of law at home, that is criminally wasting the opportunities he’s providing in the region.