For some unfathomable reason, President Trump announced on Tuesday that military aid to Israel would end this year. His explanation is a mess of the rational and the irrational.
Is it a good idea? Absolutely.
Was it announced without any thought and without any political advantage? Absolutely.
Here is the transcript of the interview, and here is the salient portion.
Why? Because they don’t need it, Brian. I mean, I asked them, because they don’t need it. And because why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayad when they don’t need it? It’s a bad — it’s a bad talking point because when you say, why don’t we give everybody $4 billion? Israel’s our number one; we give them more than anybody else and they no longer need it. We’ve been doing it for years, I’ve been doing it, but Israel is a very thriving country, they don’t need it. If they did need it, I would say keep it going.
Regardless of whether the aid is a good idea, El-Sayad’s comments should be refuted as contrary to the current law and policy of the United States government. Recognizing the political pitfalls of aid to Israel is reasonable, but changing that dynamic as an afterthought on election Tuesday, rather than using it to his and the Republican Party’s political advantage is simply stupid.
As for the aid itself? Israel obviously requires a large and sophisticated military to counter to many threats against it, and since American weaponry is the best in the world, it is appropriate that it prioritize that technological advantage. But that aid has been a millstone around Israel’s neck for a very long time. It has given the American president a huge amount of power over Israel’s military decisions, and to a lesser extent its foreign policy. Most recently, Drooling Joe Biden (or someone in his administration) restricted shipments of certain weapons to Israel to control its military operations in Gaza. And before that, in 2014, the Obama administration restricted shipments of Hellfire missiles.
But the real control occurs behind the scenes. The threat is not that Israel will be unable to purchase American weaponry, but that there are strings attached to each purchase. And that is a caustic and dangerous situation, because Israel cannot always act in its own interests, but must defer to American foreign policy demands and the whims of the president, whoever he might be.
Those 2,000 and 500 pound bombs that Biden restricted? How many Israeli soldiers died because they had to go house-to-house (a brutal and dangerous tactic), rather than simply destroying the terrorist hives from the relative safety of the air? How many hostages were killed because the Biden administration slowed the Israeli military effort?
The military and technological relationship between Israel and America is strong. Civilian high-tech and military cooperation makes us both stronger. While the loss of four billion dollars in aid will hurt the Israeli military budget, the freedom to act independently is, in the long term, a far more valuable thing.
But the political calculation was ham-handed at best, and non-existent at worst. It did nothing for President Trump except buttress JD Vance’s drift toward Tucker Carlson-style Jew-hate, and it may very well have injured Bibi Netanyahu’s political machinations in Israel to create a strong coalition.
Was it off-the-cuff pontification, or was it planned? Who knows, but the result is a mess. I doubt that this announcement, had it been made at a politically opportune moment a few weeks or months ago would have prevented the ass-kicking of the mid-term elections, but it might have mitigated it somewhat.
Political capital is ephemeral, and whatever President Trump might have earned with this ill-timed announcement will be dissipated by the time he needs it.
And that is illustrative of the problem with the Trump administration!