Baselines

Trump’s second election win was greeted with resigned forbearance by the Atlantic establishment last November. The pace was set by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, who turned on a dime from anathematizing the Republican candidate to explaining in the friendliest terms why a great dealmaker like Trump should adopt Friedman’s plan for the Middle East. Yet within weeks of the January inauguration, feathers are flying on both sides of the Atlantic. The Economist fears the us may be lurching into an age of McKinleyite overseas land grabs. A former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party sees it retreating to a heavily fortified hemispheric bunker, from Greenland to Patagonia. An nyt reporter tentatively suggested that many of Trump’s tweets might be mere bluster, ‘myriad diversions to grab attention and aggravate Democrats’, as the President apparently assures his friends. A few days later, Trump had rung Putin to propose a deal on Ukraine and denounced the beatified figure of Zelensky as an election-avoiding dictator. His Vice President’s assault on European curbs of free speech and democracy reduced the head of the Munich Security Conference to tears.footnote¹

Amid the clamour, it may be helpful to draw up a telegraphic aide-mémoire, looking back at what Trump actually did from 2017 to 2020 with the world bequeathed to him by Obama, and what Biden then did with the one he inherited from Trump. The aim would be to set some baselines in place—overseas, on the Middle East, Russia and China; at home, on borders and economic policy—as a way to measure which of the Administration’s interventions constitute an actual Trumpian rupture and which should be considered merely a cruder version of business as usual. The past is not necessarily a reliable guide to the future, but it is the only one we have.

Entering office with the onset of the Great Recession, Obama inherited two Middle East wars from Bush and embroiled the us in several more. He began his first term by sending 30,000 extra troops into Afghanistan—‘this is a war we have to win’footnote²—and ended his second by ordering a new lunge in Iraq. In 2011 he helped steer the Arab Spring towards its deadly winter of restored dictatorships and civil-war devastation, aided by the Arab ruling classes and their military and intelligence chiefs, not to mention the haplessness of the Muslim Brotherhood. He launched the nato war on Libya, then stoked disparate anti-regime proxies in Syria, instructing the cia to coordinate the exchange of Gulf money, American arms and Turkish bases. His Administration kept the Saudi–uae assault on the Yemenis going with a steady flow of weapons and intelligence, while he pursued his personal drone war against unarmed targets in northern Pakistan. He backed the Israeli blockade of Gaza with arms, cash and diplomatic protection at the un Security Council as the idf fired on Palestinian fishermen and bombed civilian housing in 2012—thanked by Netanyahu for his ‘unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend itself’footnote³—and again in 2014, during the Israeli offensive that killed over 2,000 Palestinians and destroyed a quarter of Gaza City’s housing stock.

Two years later, Obama brokered a record us subsidy of $38 billion for Israel over the following decade. On Iran, he inflicted the toughest sanctions to date and threatened bombardment, to extract compliance with the jcpoa, under which Tehran would slash its nuclear-enrichment capacity and open its sites to 24-hour monitoring by the West, in return for eventual sanctions respite.footnote⁴ Foolishly backed by Beijing and Moscow as well as Paris, London and Berlin, the deal was assailed by Tel Aviv and the Israel Lobby in the us for failing to cut Iranian missiles and curb links with Hezbollah and Hamas.

In 2016 Trump thus inherited from Obama a ring of devastated states surrounding a muscle-flexing Israel and a booming Gulf. In his first term Trump took little interest in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, handing decisions on troop deployment there to the Pentagon, in contrast to Obama’s obsessive micro-management. He was rhetorically vituperative with Iran, shelving the jcpoa in May 2018 after the Supreme Leader failed to agree to missile cuts.footnote⁵ But he had big hopes for Saudi Arabia and Israel, destinations for his first presidential visits in May 2017. A son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the yeshiva and Harvard-educated scion of New Jersey slumlords, also a personal friend of mbs and the Netanyahus, was appointed Senior Advisor in charge of the Israel–Palestine peace process.footnote⁶ Working with us Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and a major funder of the far-right Beit El settlement, Kushner came up with a blueprint: on the one hand, Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements; on the other, Palestinian disarmament and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, in return for a self-rule on 15 per cent of their homeland.footnote⁷ Kushner it was who mused last spring about the possibilities of the Gaza Strip as a glitzy waterfront development, its inhabitants decanted to reservations in the Negev Desert or camps in Jordan and Egypt.footnote⁸

The 2020 ‘Trump Peace Plan’ was dismissed out of hand by Palestinians, as by seasoned American negotiators, annoyed that it involved dumping the quisling leadership they had been nurturing for thirty years. But it was a Rorschach test for the Arab capitals. Bahrain thanked the us for its work and urged the two sides to start direct negotiations under us sponsorship. The uae thought the plan a serious initiative that offered an important starting point. Sisi’s Egypt called on Israelis and Palestinians to undertake a thorough consideration of the ‘us vision’ for peace. Morocco and Saudi Arabia both ‘appreciated’ Trump’s efforts.footnote⁹ These craven capitulations laid the ground for the so-called Abraham Accords eight months later—bilateral deals granting Israel over-flight rights and degrees of diplomatic recognition—rewarded by Trump with specially chosen gifts: for Morocco, American blessing of the annexation of the Western Sahara; for the uae, a fleet of F35s; for Sudan, a $1.2 billion loan and removal from the ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ list. Kushner’s investment firm for Israeli start-ups was awarded $2 billion by the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, of which $25 million a year was absorbed by Kushner’s ‘management fees’.footnote¹⁰

Trump’s first term appeared to plumb the limits of us identification with Zionist expansionism, but Biden found ways to take it further. Enveloping Netanyahu in a long man-hug on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport after the Hamas attacks in October 2023, as the idf was massing for slaughter, Biden used emergency powers to command some $18 billion in extra funding for Israel and dispatched fleets of cargo planes bearing missiles, bombs and shells, used by the idf to bury Palestinian families alive under the rubble of their homes, while the occupiers bombed hospitals, blocked food supplies, left corpses for carrion, positioned snipers to aim for children’s heads and set up mass torture camps on Gaza’s borders. Secretary of State Blinken listlessly went through the motions of regret as the Israeli onslaught killed over 80,000, directly and indirectly, with hundreds of thousands wounded and millions traumatized and displaced.footnote¹¹ In July 2024, the us Congress gave Netanyahu fifty standing ovations for all this.