Main Edition
US
FR
We all know where Trump's loyalties lie. Ronen Zvulun/Pool/AFP/Getty Images.
It is tempting these days to think that all reality revolves around the State of Israel, but Donald Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was overwhelming enough to discredit explanations that stress any single factor. The psychic shocks of the post-October 7 environment and the failure of liberal institutions to reckon with their own extremists drove a potential record number of Jews to support a Republican for president this time around, but Trump gained in just about every conceivable demographic group compared to 2020 and is on pace to win an outright majority of the popular vote. In surveys, voters repeatedly rated the war in Gaza as a secondary or even tertiary concern.
But the Middle Eastern conflagration is an issue that encapsulates the weaknesses of both the Harris campaign and the administration in which she serves. Since the October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden has pursued an incoherent set of policy aims calibrated to satisfy different elements of an inherently unstable Democratic Party coalition, which is split between supporters and opponents of Israel and whose foreign policy elite is often deferential or admiring towards Qatar, Iran, and political Islam more generally. Weapons transfers to Israel have been authorised and then slow-walked. The administration publicly opposed major Israeli war aims such as the seizure of the Hamas-controlled Gaza-Egypt border and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon only to shrug when Jerusalem finally lost patience and launched both operations anyway. Biden invested supreme amounts of time and diplomatic capital in a deal to free Hamas-held hostages and secure a ceasefire in Gaza, but exerted little real diplomatic pressure on Egypt, Qatar, or Hamas in order to reach one. Perhaps the height of Biden’s Middle East triangulation was the decision to greenlight an Israeli response to Iran’s most recent mass volley of ballistic missiles — but only as long as Israel didn’t attack Iran’s nuclear sites, the regime’s most valuable and dangerous strategic assets.
Harris could never clearly articulate her preferred outcome to the fighting in the Middle East. She met with members of the Uncommitted movement, reportedly telling them she would seriously consider their demands for a US arms embargo on Israel. Whether this was election season pandering or a reflection of her actual beliefs remains unclear even now. She spoke repeatedly about both the suffering of Gazans and Israel’s absolute right to self-defence, but never really discussed the strategic benefits of the US-Israel relationship, or the American national interest in an Israeli triumph over Iranian-backed jihadists. Harris named Iran as America’s most threatening adversary during the race’s closing weeks, but her top foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon, is a leading proponent of detente with the Islamic Republic regime and an architect of the 2015 nuclear deal which Trump discarded. Harris neither endorsed nor repudiated Biden’s post-October 7 policies, addressing one of the most divisive issues on earth though a muddle of hard-to-reconcile platitudes that had no clear vision or purpose at their heart.
This was the story of Harris’s entire campaign. In an October interview, she appeared to endorse the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border, thus embracing a major Trumpist objective that Democrats once widely abhorred. She ran as the change candidate despite having been the second highest-ranking official in the US government for the prior four years. On the Middle East, as on numerous other topics, she never had a compelling or coherent or politically appealing approach to undoing the mess she’d helped make, arrogantly believing her contrast with the supposedly extreme and unpresidential Donald Trump would be enough to bridge her campaign’s glaring contradictions.
Instead, Trump appeared a paragon of decisiveness and authenticity when juxtaposed with someone as simultaneously vacillating and over-managed as Harris. That Trump is imperious and perfectly legible in his motives explains how a man who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights won a plurality of votes in the Arab-American stronghold of Dearborn, Michigan in the midst of the deadliest episode in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Strict truthfulness is generally not considered one of Trump’s qualities, but unlike Harris he could at least say what he really believed free of the transparently gross and corrupting logic of Democratic-style coalition politics, which voters of all backgrounds have now come to distrust. The president-elect never seems to be balancing various warring sects and interest groups against one another, and instead operates according to a singularly Trumpian alchemy of charisma and instinct. These instincts often aren’t that mysterious, including where the Middle East is concerned.
Trump was not fixated on Israeli-Palestinian peace during his first term in office, but he discussed the topic with an almost messianic sense of his own dealmaking skills. An elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace was “the toughest of deals”, then-president Trump said in 2019, adding that he thought an agreement was possible by the end of his term in January 2021. In 2020, his administration bucked decades of precedent by releasing maps of possible territorial swaps within a US-endorsed peace framework. The so-called “Deal of the Century” was widely mocked at the time, largely because it drew wildly impractical borders between Israel and a future Palestine state, with an eye towards keeping nearly the entirety of the country’s disconnected West Bank settlements within undisputed Israeli territory. Even a generous Trump-brokered peace is highly unlikely after the October 7 slaughter, which is liable to sour several generations of Israelis on the idea of entrusting the country’s survival to any Palestinian-ruled entity. But Trump is transactionally minded, and has long believed he can solve the world’s problems through his unique force of personality — including the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
As we learned during his first term, Trumpian charisma is often expressed by proxy through loyalists and family members. Last week, Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman and father of the husband of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, claimed he would be appointed as the incoming administration’s Lebanon envoy. Boulos told Lebanese media the president-elect will “end the destruction in Lebanon” as part of a “comprehensive regional peace agreement”, adding that “Trump is committed to ending the war before he enters the White House”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeTrump, for all his anti-elite posturing has much of the same worldview of the elite he supposedly rails against. A highly transactualist view of human relations, a materialistic conception of the world, believe s that truth is subjective, and believes that anybody can be bought, as well as a mechanicistic view of society. I don’t think Trump really understands America’s enemies all that well because he views the world through those lens, and thus cannot conceive of the fact that there are people in the world who value things more than money power or material comfort. There are those out there who actually have beliefs and values that they adhere to deeply even though those beliefs can quite terrible in reality. My fear is that Trump will attempt to make a deal these people and be caught flat-footed because he can’t understand that why people are willing to sacrifice material things and money just to live up to some abstract ideal that doesn’t directly benefit them, and as a result he’ll panic because people who view the world like he does tend to panic when things don’t go their way because they can’t understand people behave like that and we’ll act rashley. I also fear that Trump and his desperate need to prove himself to others but he’s the genius he thinks he is, Will be left open to manipulation by America’s enemies who will sense that weakness and lure him into a trap through flattery which results in America and the west suffering badly as a result. The attempt to reapproach with North Korea is a pretty good example of this, he was so desperate for a deal he was willing to ignore reality Just to desperately prove himself to the world with nothing to results but embarrassment.
Bollocks. Trump is a man of peace.
0 01 – Please offer one of your factless, pejorative, TDS-style critiques of Biden-Harris.
Recall Russia first invaded Ukraine in the Obama-Biden administration. Then, the second Russian “small incursion” (Biden’s term) started in the Biden-HARRIS term. Oct 7 was under the Biden-HARRIS term. So forth and so on.
Gee, in the entire Trump Administration, there was peace ️.
Maybe you should get a tattoo of the Trump Doctrine on your forehead:
Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. (“If You Want Peace, Prepare For War.”)
there are people in the world who value things more than money power or material comfort.
Who are these people you mention? And how exactly has the world suffered from his approach to North Korea? What reality did he ignore?
I think you’re making up just about everything you said.
You write about Trump’s deep motivations as if you have been his analyst for a decade, and in every respect conclude he is unfit. Yet, his record in office belies that conclusion. Perhaps you need to investigate the basis for your priors.
Interesting article. As to Iran, I think Donald Trump will do his damnedest to drive Iran to the negotiating table so he could then use his flattering technique and praise the mullahs for their wisdom. I don’t think it will work, but he started down that path in his last term. I think he will continue that this term. He smells an Iran deal, and it has him salivating.
As I have said elsewhere, I think Donald Trump is a master negotiator, and I like to see him at work. But like all of us, he has his blindspots and weaknesses. I don’t expect many, if any, miracles from him. He’s not a messianic figure who will get the lion to lie down beside the lamb.
But I think Donald Trump does take a view that more of us should. He looks for compromise, for the positive-sum win-win instead of the zero-sum win-lose. He’s not an authoritarian, he’s the opposite of one. A fascist? Not hardly.
Like Donald Trump or hate him, I think we can learn from him. Not by listening to what he says, necessarily — he can be crude and off putting with his words. But by looking at what he does.
He is risen…why shouldn’t he have?
“Harris neither endorsed nor repudiated Biden’s post-October 7 policies, addressing one of the most divisive issues on earth though a muddle of hard-to-reconcile platitudes that had no clear vision or purpose at their heart.”
What a perfect summing up of the Harris campaign. And they still cannot understand why their girl lost. The MSM hand-wringing is a sight to behold.