The Hamas war has made Trump seem far better than Biden on the Middle East
Turns out the Middle East wasn't quieter than it has been for decades
TIM STANLEY12 October 2023 • 5:56pm
Have you noticed that the people most rhetorically committed to the “international order” are generally the worst at upholding it? The case against Trump in 2020 was that he was the chaos candidate – isolationist, reckless with alliances and dismissive of the foreign policy establishment. Yet under his leadership there were no wars. Joe Biden now has two.
Biden’s response to
the Israel crisis has been strong, his speech on Thursday a model of anger and resolve. Trump is firmly on Israel’s side, too – but he has tastelessly linked the crisis to the Mexican border and criticised Netanyahu for failing to support a military action he took as president. Some Republicans have seized the opportunity to denounce the antiwar wing of their party; Hamas was emboldened, claimed Mike Pence, by the isolationist language of populists like Trump.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have marginalised the far-Left within their own ranks, denouncing calls for de-escalation and the language of moral equivalence. This is an historically Zionist party; it is estimated that it won the support of 68 per cent of Jewish Americans in the 2020 presidential contest.
Trump, of course, once claimed that Jews who voted for Democrats were “disloyal to Israel”, a silly, self-aggrandising statement of the sort that makes many glad he isn’t in charge today. But then there’s a gap between Trump’s iconoclastic image and his more constructive record. He was – we were told in 2016 – fatally pro-Moscow, so expect him to throw Ukraine under the bus. Instead, he armed Kyiv and evidently deterred Putin from invading till after he left office. It was
Biden’s mad dash from Afghanistan, not Trump’s, that showed America had lost its nerve.
As for The Donald’s record in Israel - well, Israelis appear to like it. Last year, Ruth Margalit observed in a New Yorker essay that Trump sometimes did things for Netanyahu apparently without expectation of reciprocity, including recognising Jerusalem as its capital and moving the US embassy there. He brokered the Abraham Accords, which bypassed the Palestinian question to normalise relations between the Jewish state and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco (Netanyahu did reportedly suspend a plan to take territory in the West Bank). This had the added advantage of solidifying those states’ resistance to Iran, bolstered by proposed US arms sales.
Trump’s suggested peace plan for the Holy Land (the “deal of the century”) offered conservative Israelis almost everything they wished; it is speculated that had he won a second term, he might have approved annexation of parts of the West Bank, too. No wonder that a poll in 2020 found 63 per cent of Israelis would vote Republican if only they could, or that a stretch of the Golan Heights has been branded “Trump Heights” to commemorate his recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the township.
Thus it is speculated that Hamas wouldn’t have dared launch this attack had Trump been in office, though the counter hypothesis is that it was the very carte blanche that Netanyahu enjoyed in his handling of Palestinians that made it more likely; indeed, it’s not inconceivable that Hamas attacked precisely to undermine the Abraham process just as it risked not only abandoning the Palestinians but locking Saudi Arabia into an anti-Tehran axis. This brings us to the main difference between GOP and Democrats. How does one handle Iran, the financier of Hamas?
Trump walked away from the Obama-authored nuclear deal, reimposing sanctions on Tehran. Biden, on the other hand, has drawn criticism for agreeing to unfreeze $6 billion in oil revenues in exchange for the release of hostages, money that Republicans have suggested could find its way to Hamas. Technically, this is false: the cash is earmarked for humanitarian programmes and controlled by Qatar. But, goes the counter argument, having extra money in the pot frees up Tehran to spend more off the books on destabilising the region, and anything that helps shore up that regime is a bad development. The oil sales plus Washington’s attempts to revive the nuclear deal add up to the sense that Biden has dawdled into disaster thanks to an excess of liberal good will. Only a few days ago, National Security Adviser
Jake Sullivan said: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
The Trumpian argument is that with the US humiliated in Afghanistan and overstretched in Ukraine, the conditions have been created for an Iranian power grab. One must note that Iranian complicity has not yet been proved; US officials seem to be downplaying it. But if Biden’s election meant a restoration of State Department orthodoxy, this elite groupthink certainly appears to be archaic, out of touch with reality – naive and reactive.
Finally, no matter how strongly the Democrats might cleave to a revived pro-Israel consensus, the fact remains that they have flirted with organisations now exposed as troublingly fringe – and with intellectual currents being used to justify violent “decolonisation” (Black Lives Matters appears firmly in the corner of the Palestinian resistance, suggesting that some lives matter more than others).
By embracing fads that question the superiority of Judeo-Christian values, the liberal-Left has helped to erode the self-confidence of the West. It should not have taken the murder of Israelis, or the invasion of Ukraine, to reunite and energise our civilisational ethic – to remind us that the sanctity of life is a universal value, not a matter for academic debate.
