Trump Could Be Catastrophic for Israel by Louis René Beres ( Guest). Published with permission of the Author and US Today where the article first appeared on August 30th ,2016
Conventional wisdom suggests that Donald Trump would be better for Israel than his opponent. But without getting into any systematic comparison of concrete foreign policy proposals, it is nonetheless plain that the Republican candidate's crudely cobbled together ideas on world affairs hold substantially little real promise for Israel. Indeed, no meaningfully capable analysis of Trump's Aug. 15, 2016 speech could ever avoid the conclusion that his enthusiastically expressed willingness to "work with" Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah would in fact be injurious to the Jewish State.Senior advisers of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu have however indicated that they would prefer to deal with Hillary Clinton who they know very well rather the unpredictable and unstable Donald Trump.
From the standpoint of Israel's existential security, this is actually a charitable assessment. After all, Trump's proposals would go so far as to put Israel's physical survival at a tangibly greater risk. What else can be said for a seemingly random patchwork of ready-made phrases that call implicitly or explicitly for accelerating Russian military basing in Iran? How else ought anyone interpret Trump's stunningly naive call for combating the Islamic State group at all costs, even if that effort should correspondingly strengthen the Shiite militia Hezbollah? And how should a tiny Jewish state in the region that is inextricably consecrated to a sacred posture of "Never Again" simultaneously countenance or effectively support the continuing mass murder of Syrian children by the Damascus regime?
For Israel, these should not be difficult questions.
For Israel's allies in the United States, moreover, it's finally time to separate out purposeful and refined strategic analyses of the "Trump foreign policy" from the endless litany of barren clichés, emotional arguments and thoroughly empty witticisms. It's not that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are in any way perfect on Israel, but rather that Donald Trump is manifestly and incontestably imperfect.
For Israel, judging at least by the Republican candidate's own steadily enthusiastic words of support for Jerusalem's chief enemies, a Trump presidency could be irremediably catastrophic.
Ultimately, Israel's core survival will not be about Hillary's emails, or Benghazi, or her speaking fees or the Clinton Foundation. It will be about each identifiable enemy's particular "order of battle" and about certain ratios and correlations of raw power in the Middle East, including various and bewilderingly complex intersections between state and substate adversaries. In this vital regard, Israel will not be helped in any way by Trump's ill-conceived and persistently inexpert recommendations.
That, again, is actually a charitable assessment of Trump's proposed foreign policy.
Crafting a nation's foreign policy is never a job for narrowly educated political operatives. It is, rather, an inherently nuanced intellectual task, one that calls for a deep and genuine appreciation of strategic interdependencies and also of assorted and corresponding legal obligations. It should not be "forgotten" by Trump that international law remains an integral part of the law of the United States, largely by way of the Constitution's Article VI "Supremacy Clause" and of associated Supreme Court decisions, especially the Paquete Habana (1900).
During my almost half-century of teaching international relations and international law at Princeton and Purdue, I instructed my students that there are multiple and sometimes indecipherable axes of conflict in world politics. Understood in terms of Trump's August 15 foreign policy speech and Israel, this point means, inter alia, that we ought never to assume that inflicting harms upon any one selected enemy is automatically in our own overall national interest. Instead, our American president must always bear in mind that what is appropriately harmful to one adversary or set of adversaries (e.g., the Islamic State group) may at the same time be altogether helpful to other principal enemies.
Trump remains so singularly focused on the perceived threat from the Islamic State group that he is also willing to tolerate deepening military cooperation between Iran and Russia. Already, Tehran is allowing Russian military aircraft to operate against Syrian rebels from an Iranian air base in Hamadan Province. From the particular standpoint of Israeli national security, further encouraging any such allowance would make it increasingly difficult or perhaps operationally impossible to mount any residually indispensable preemptions against Iran. From the starkly amateurish perspective of candidate Trump's expressed foreign policy preferences, it must be judged reasonable or "cost-effective" to sacrifice Israel's most critical security requirements for the presumed benefit of defeating a single substate Jihadist foe.
The ultimate irony of Trump's disjointed preferences is that they would actually work on behalf of the Islamic State group, while at the same time strengthening America's most formidable enemies. Although still unrecognized by Trump, or by his well-hidden "advisers," the prospective existential threat to the United States from Russia remains immeasurably greater than any conceivable threat from the Islamic State. It follows, among many other recognizable flaws in Trump's proposed foreign policy, that the Republican candidate's prescriptions would be calculably injurious to both Israel and the United States.
In the matter of Donald Trump's proposed foreign policy, the conventional wisdom is markedly unwise. This is true, of course, unless one should somehow prefer Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah to Israel and America.
Louis René Beres
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war. His latest academic articles have been published in the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” “Harvard National Security Journal” (Harvard Law School), “International Security” (Harvard), “Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College” (Department of Defense), “International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence,” “Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs,” “Brown Journal of World Affairs” and Oxford University Press. Dr. Beres' 12thbook, “Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy,” was published earlier this year, by Rowman & Littlefield.
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