Israeli leaders must be suffering whiplash as they watch the dizzying events of recent days across the Middle East, with President Donald Trump sidelining the Jewish state and cozying up to some of its bitter rivals.
The president traveled the region without stopping in Israel, surprised Jerusalem by unilaterally cutting deals to free a U.S. hostage in Gaza and to stop the Houthis from bombing U.S. vessels, lifted sanctions on Syria and met with the former al-Qaeda fighter who now presides in Damascus, struck a huge arms deal with Riyadh while letting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) pursue Israeli-Saudi normalization “in your own time,” re-launched nuclear talks with Iran while sending mixed signals on his bottom line for a deal, and gushed over the gift of a new Air Force One from a nation that supports Hamas.
As a result, Israel will have to fight the Houthis alone while MBS got his coveted arms deal without normalizing relations with Israel, Iran got a chance to stretch out nuclear talks long enough to free itself from expiring global sanctions, and Hamas got to help widen the rift between Washington and Jerusalem.
The larger challenge for Israel, however, is less about how to prevent any future U.S. slight than it is about how best to respond to Trump’s revolutionary new approach to the region and the world.
“[T]he basis of [U.S.] support for Israel is driven by the perception of Israel as a country that shares America’s values,” longtime U.S. Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross wrote in Doomed to Succeed, his history of the U.S.-Israeli relationship from Presidents Truman to Obama.
That was then. As Trump just made abundantly clear in Riyadh, he cares not at all whether a Middle Eastern nation is a vibrant democracy that guarantees basic human rights to its people or – per the far more common model across the turbulent region – a well-entrenched autocracy that brutalizes its people.
“The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neocons,’ or ‘liberal nonprofits,’ like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities,” Trump said in Riyadh after lavishly praising MBS, who was a U.S. pariah not too long ago due to his human rights abuses. “Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves.”
In other words, the United States will no longer promote freedom and democracy in a region that sorely needs both and will center its foreign policy overwhelmingly around military, investment, and other transactional deals.
If so, then in Washington’s eyes, the traditionally close U.S.-Israeli relationship that has benefited both nations so much for three quarters of a century will no longer be a special one, and no longer different than other U.S. relationship in the region.
For Washington under these circumstances, the question will be: what can we get from Israel? So, for Jerusalem, the question must be: what can we offer the United States of a transactional nature?
At first blush, the outlook may seem bleak. Unlike such Arab nations as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, Israel lacks the capacity to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States.
Fortunately, Israel has lots to build upon of both a military and economic nature. The United States and Israel have long collaborated on security matters, worked together to develop new defense technology, shared intelligence, and traded with one another under a bilateral free trade agreement that dates to 1985.
Israel shared the technologies it developed to destroy the tunnels of Hamas and Hezbollah with the United States, which then deployed it to attack tunnels that ISIS was using to attack U.S. military bases in the region – and to attack the tunnels that drug-smugglers were using at America’s southern border.
Meanwhile, Israel has contributed mightily to Washington’s global nuclear non-proliferation efforts over the years by destroying Iraqi and Syrian nuclear infrastructure and attacking Iran’s nuclear pursuits in various ways.
Israel will remain a cutting-edge creator of new technology that strengthens its security while driving its economy. Through the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the United States will continue to benefit from Israel’s inventions.
But, with U.S. foreign policy far less about values than economic and military transactions for the foreseeable future, Jerusalem would be wise to strengthen its relationship with the United States accordingly – by leveraging its technological expertise to create new transactions with a newly mercantilist America.
Lawrence J. Haas is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of, among other books, Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World.
