America’s 19th nervous breakdown by Richard Baehr
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=18353 With apologies to the Rolling Stones, America’s nervous breakdown since President Donald Trump’s inauguration seems to be of a different order of magnitude than the many other emotional meltdowns of recent decades (the Clinton, Bush, or Obama derangement syndromes). It will almost certainly worsen in the weeks ahead with continued fights over immigration and the Supreme Court nominee.
Sunday night, America celebrated one of its true national holidays: Super Bowl Sunday, an event watched by 100 million people, a third of the population. This year, the political fog that envelops all matters these days naturally also surrounded the football game, which turned out be a masterpiece as these games go. In the weeks leading up to the game, one team became the Trump team, the other the anti-Trump team. A startling come-from-behind victory for the Trump team (the New England Patriots) was immediately viewed as a repeat of the upset on Election Day, Nov. 8, and was caricatured as such.
The absurdity, of course, is that the owner of the Trump team is a Jewish Democrat (though friendly to Trump), and the owner of the anti-Trump team (the Atlanta Falcons) is a Jewish Republican. So, too, Trump carried Georgia and was beaten badly in Massachusetts. The halftime performer, Lady Gaga, was attacked from the left for not making a personal statement slamming Trump. Everything now has to be viewed as political.
With the game over, America’s annual six-month nightmare without professional or college football has begun. This will allow partisans to focus more intently on the heated political wars. On the U.S.-Israel front, however, there is likely to be significant change and arguably far fewer political battles between the two countries.
In the final weeks of President Barack Obama’s term, the administration seemed somewhat obsessed with Israel. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power abstained on Security Council Resolution 2334. Secretary of State John Kerry felt the need to give an hour-long speech justifying the U.N. inaction that allowed the resolution to pass, and fire a few parting shots at Israel and its prime minister over settlements, as well as trying and failing one more time to make a persuasive case for the Iran nuclear deal. The Obama team released money ($221 million) that had been held up by Congress to send to the Palestinian Authority.
Israel has been an afterthought in the early weeks of the Trump administration. This is not a bad thing. There have been many presidential executive orders, but none directing a move or directing planning for a move of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Iran nuclear agreement has not been torn up. The administration has been far less fixated on Israeli settlement activity, despite announcements by Israel of construction plans for 5,000 new units that in the Obama years would have caused the faces of the administration spokespeople to become purple with rage and scorn.
The administration, while releasing a short statement on settlements, allowed that policy changes would not come until after Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to Washington to meet with Trump next week. The administration also sharply reversed policy toward Iran, choosing to put the country on notice for its ballistic missile tests, which violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, the resolution that accompanied the nuclear deal. The Trump White House also initiated sanctions against a few dozen Iranian individuals and firms for the missile tests. Most dramatically, the Trump administration seemed anxious to communicate to the leaders in Tehran that the days of America serving as Iran’s lawyer and backstop — excusing away Iranian violations of one agreement or another — were over.
The national newspaper of record for the anti-Trump forces, The New York Times, chose to see in the release of the administration’s short statement on settlements an action that fit a pattern of continuity of Trump foreign policy with Obama foreign policy. They saw the same thing in the fact that Trump had neither disowned the Iran nuclear deal nor had gone to war yet with the mullahs. Sadly for the paper, the announcement condemning the ballistic missile tests and announcing sanctions came shortly thereafter. The New York Times may have been clutching at straws to suggest that it retained some semblance of balance in evaluating Trump (he is more like Obama, so he is not that bad on X and Y).
The Trump team statement that was released on settlements in fact represented a dramatic shift in policy from the Obama administration approach. Obama and his State Department were obsessed with settlements from the start. They wanted a total freeze on settlement growth, including natural growth. Every failed effort to get the Israelis and Palestinians together was blamed on Israeli settlement activity. Every announcement of a new housing tender or stage in the approval process for new units was greeted with harsh condemnation in Washington. The abstention at the U.N. Security Council on Resolution 2334 was only the predictable final step.
The Trump statement was viewed by those who actually read it and knew the background as a more favorable approach to settlement activity than that issued by any previous administration. Press secretary Sean Spicer said the administration does not have an official policy on settlement construction.
The statement that was released refuses to blame the absence of peace on the existence of settlements. It suggests that new settlements may not be helpful but the expansion of existing settlements within their current footprints is not problematic. At a minimum, it indicates that the Trump team accepted the parameters of the Bush-Sharon letters in 2004, which accompanied preparations for the withdrawal from Gaza, and acknowledged that the facts on the ground had changed, and there should be no expectation of Israeli withdrawal from major settlement blocs near the Green Line.
The obvious shift in the temperature of U.S.-Israel relations in a Trump administration is worrying to the Left, which cheered Obama’s success in minimizing the power of AIPAC and crushing it on the vote on the Iran nuclear deal. Obama and his team supported the growth of a dovish alternative to AIPAC — J Street — which, like the administration, saw every problem between Israel and the Palestinians as attributable to settlements. Obama wanted to create space between Israel and the U.S. and wanted to be freer to publicly criticize Israel. This reduced the confidence Israel had that America would be its protector at the U.N. and would treat Israel as the ally it had been for decades.
Trump has made clear that he will treat allies as allies and enemies as enemies. Obama seemed to shift America’s focus and allegiance from Israel to Iran. Trump has signaled that Israel is a great friend and that the administration shares Israel’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. The turn from Obama to Trump is so obvious on Israel that any partial move in the other direction (such as misreading the new settlement statement to imply criticism of Israeli policy) is latched onto as something very significant by Trump critics.
Over the last few years, it has been evident that an increasing number of Democrats, including members of Congress, have become more comfortable criticizing Israel. The door to do so was opened wide by Obama. That could change in the next two years, given the vulnerability of many Senate Democrats having to defend their seats in 2018. But the biggest change will be the renewal of a special relationship. At least as far as the new president is concerned, there will not be any nervous breakdown in Israel.
Richard Baehr is the co-founder and chief political correspondent for the American Thinker and a fellow at the Jewish Policy Center.
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