Trump’s Turkey Bargain May Cost Israel
Behind the compliments lies a colder regional design
There are betrayals announced by trumpet, and betrayals performed with a smile, a handshake, a press conference and a few vulgar compliments about “strength”. The latter are more dangerous, because by the time the victim understands the performance, the stage has already been rearranged. Donald Trump’s Middle East policy, if it may be dignified with the word ‘policy’, now appears to be drifting towards a ceremony of managed humiliation: Israel praised in public, constrained in practice, and left to contemplate a future war with its enemies intact and its allies curiously affectionate towards its adversaries.
The most revealing object in this arrangement is Turkey. Trump speaks of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with the admiration he reserves for men who project command and resent restraint. Erdoğan is “highly respected”; he has built a “tremendous military”; he is the sort of leader Trump’s political imagination respects. Turkey is a NATO member, a regional power, and impossible to ignore. But geography is not absolution. Nor is NATO membership a moral certificate suitable for framing.
Turkey’s project in Syria has never been charitable, and its hostility to Kurdish national aspiration, especially the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, was central. Yet these same Kurds were among America’s most reliable partners against ISIS. They were the infantry of necessity, fighting in towns Western memory forgot almost as soon as Kurdish graves had made them possible.
To flatter Turkey while scolding the Kurds is flattery, evasion and ceremonial stupidity masquerading as policy. When Trump suggests the Kurds disappointed him by refusing to carry weapons in a reckless adventure involving Iranian opposition groups, he reveals the imperial impatience of a man who confuses alliance with obedience. The Kurds are not mercenaries for another man’s gamble, nor missionaries summoned to martyrdom because Washington had an exciting afternoon. They are a vulnerable people surrounded by predators, and history has taught them, with its usual cruelty, that survival often begins where trust ends.
Then there is Syria. Ahmad al-Sharaa, once a jihadist commander, is now praised as if biography could be laundered by a change of suit and title. This is the diplomatic laundering of biography, and it should not deceive anyone with a memory longer than a press cycle. Trump’s suggestion that Syria might handle Hezbollah more effectively than Israel is absurd. Hezbollah is not a neighbourhood dispute to be handed to the nearest ambitious strongman. It is an Iranian strategic instrument embedded in Lebanon, armed, ideological and patient. To tell Israel to use a “softer touch” while imagining that a rebranded jihadist authority might tidy up Hezbollah is diplomatic piffle: a theory so foolish it almost asks to be admired for its nerve. If this hallucination becomes policy, Turkey’s proxies will sit close to Israel’s northern border. Another strategic gift to Turkey.
The Egypt episode was smaller, but protocol sometimes tells the truth more clearly than policy papers. Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to the Gaza summit, then did not attend after Erdoğan and others objected. The message was exquisite in its clumsiness: Turkey appeared able to block Israel’s prime minister from a summit concerning Israel’s own war.
The Iranian file deepens the suspicion, as Trump’s instinct appears to be that Israel should perform its gratitude by obeying American diplomatic confusion, even when that arrangement leaves Iran’s network of proxies in place. He praises Netanyahu, then lectures him. He celebrates Israel, then treats it as a lever. There is something almost imperial in the performance: the pose of empire and the competence of improvisation.
And now comes the prospect of F-35s for Turkey, which was removed from the F-35 programme because it bought Russia’s S-400 system, a decision American officials themselves judged incompatible with the security of the aircraft. To restore Turkey to that circle would alter Israel’s strategic environment and place another advanced military risk on its horizon.
The betrayal, then, is not that Trump praises. He praises anyone: Erdoğan, al-Sharaa, and strength itself, wherever it flatters his own reflection. The betrayal is subtler and colder. It consists of leaving Israel’s enemies intact, elevating Turkey’s ambitions, humiliating the Kurds, restraining Netanyahu, and then calling the arrangement peace. The only remaining question is what Turkey is expected to offer in return.
Israel has survived open hatred before.
It may find false friendship more painful to bear.
