Israel: Strategic Liability?

The Trump - Netanyahu relationship's breakdown has a larger geopolitical context.

On 15 January, President Donald Trump shared on social media a clip of Professor Jeffery Sachs, an ardent critic of American foreign policy, in which Sachs blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the American decision to invade Iraq. We were not sure what to make of it at the time, especially given Trump’s initial enthusiastic support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and the fact that his policy team largely consists of Israel supporting hawks.

With Trump’s first Middle East visit excluding Israel, it is becoming evident that Trump is experimenting with policy: first he gave Israel a blank cheque to go after Hamas and even to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Israel failed to achieve this policy objective. Now, Trump is placing pressure for a ceasefire. Trump negotiated the release of the last living American citizen held by Hamas from the 7 October 2023 attack. He bypassed Israel in that negotiation.

Similarly, Trump went after the Ansar Allah (the Houthi) in Yemen to re-open the Red Sea to international shipping. The policy failed. So he reversed it and made a separate, America-specific agreement with the Houthi. This allows the Houthi to continue to attack Israel.

Now, the US is close to agreeing to give Saudi Arabia support for a civilian nuclear programme, in exchange for deeper ties, more military acquisitions, and keeping the Saudis in the American orbit. Previously, the American policy was to tie such agreements to Israeli-Saudi normalisation.

Strategic cost of supporting Israel

Trump most likely wants to keep American allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey on side, and prevent them from drifting closer to China. It is worth recalling that Saudi Arabia reconciled with Iran under Chinese auspices without meaningful consultation with the US. Rather, the Saudis had increasingly seen that the Americans were poor security guarantors. With the Israelis unable to win decisively against Hamas in Gaza, or to agree to a Palestinian state, it is getting hard for the US to realise its ambition of integrating its allies into a single economic and security bloc. (We view this ambition itself as highly unrealistic, but, for now, the Americans are probably blaming the Israelis for the inability of Israel and Saudi Arabia to normalise, which is a pre-requisite first step).

Over the last decades, American policy in the Middle East has been shaped by the need to protect Israel. This led to the Americans backing jihadis in Syria while fighting them in Iraq, a country that they would have never invaded were it not for the role of the Israel lobby and the delusional idealism of liberalism.

Now, with Arab and Muslim states having China as an option, the US is risking fulfilling Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a Sino-Islamic alliance against the liberal West. Israel is a contributing factor to that alliance. The high human cost of the war on Gazan civilians, combined with Israel’s inability to decisively win, are making the war very costly politically for America’s Muslim allies. This is driving Muslim countries closer to China, to compensate for the American support for Israel, as President Nixon explained (speaking about the Soviet Union rather than China).

Commercial Implications:

• The most likely scenario is that this is a crisis stemming from the personality of Netanyahu. Trump’s team is mostly supportive of Israel and deeply so.

• However, this does not change the fact that there is a growing geopolitical divide driven by conflicting interests between Israel and the USA.

• For the Americans to beat China, they cannot allow her to have a collection of resource-rich (Iran, Saudi Arabi), militarily capable Muslim allies (Iran, Turkey, Pakistan). Rather, the Americans need a divided Eurasia.

• Pursuing this objective is at odds with giving a blank cheque to Israel.