With public concerns over the proper U.S. posture toward Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza rising daily, there’s naturally a lot of curiosity about what Joe Biden’s Republican opponent thinks the country should do about the subject. Even taking into account the strategic value of silence and incoherence on a controversy that has made life difficult for Biden, Donald Trump’s commentary on the Middle East lately has been unusually opaque — unless you recognize the pivotal role that his signature narcissism plays in how he thinks about global affairs.
An extensive new interview the 45th president granted to conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt is illustrative. Asked if he was being “critical of Israel” in comments he made to a conservative Israeli publication earlier this week, Trump immediately started talking about the baleful effect his very absence from the White House had exercised in the Middle East:
Look, Israel should have never happened. If I were president, it would not have happened. Iran was broke. They had no money. They had no nothing. And we would have worked, a deal with Iran would have been made already. In the meantime, they’re going to have a nuclear weapon within probably 45 or 60 days. And then, it’s going to be a little tougher to talk to them. But October 7 would have never happened.
This should have sounded familiar to Hewitt, since it’s precisely what Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner told him about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine back in 2022: It was a “totally avoidable” conflict that only occurred because of the change of administrations (Kushner also boasted vaguely that “we had [the Chinese] on their back foot the whole time”). Similarly, Trump himself has suggested without details that he would “settle” the war in Ukraine “in one day” if he returns to office.
The more we hear from him on both his past and purported future successes in keeping the world at peace, the clearer it becomes that Trump believes his presence in the White House calms global waters regardless of any specific policies he advances. He’s “strong,” Biden’s “weak,” and all of America’s adversaries know that. When Trump said in his 2016 presidential nomination acceptance speech, “I alone can fix it,” he was referring to the U.S. political system. But now that he can boast of his own presidency, which in his mind was an oasis of global stability between horrific bouts of national weakness and “forever wars,” his tendency to project himself as an all-purpose panacea increasingly extends to the whole world.
This is especially notable with respect to the current situation in the Middle East because Trump refuses to recognize there are systemic problems with respect to Israel’s relationship with its neighbors that his administration did nothing serious to address. In the Hewitt interview, he repeatedly talked about the need to “get back to normalcy and peace,” which is the context for his impatience that Israel “get it [the war] over with, and get it over with fast” and his characterization of the global protests over the damage being done to Gazans by the war as a “PR war” that Israel is losing by releasing photographs of bombs blowing up buildings.
It’s understandable politically that Team Trump very badly wants to promote amnesia about the condition of the world as well as the country when he left office. In an election that Biden is battling to make comparative as opposed to a simple referendum on his own job performance, the 45th president is deeply invested in the gravely false idea that he gave America the “greatest economy ever.” To the extent that foreign policy may be beginning to affect the 2024 elections, it’s natural that the former president is suggesting that he left the “greatest world ever,” which has now gone straight to hell. Only he can fix it.
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Trump’s Plan for Every Foreign-Policy Problem Is Himself
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05.04.2024
With public concerns over the proper U.S. posture toward Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza rising daily, there’s naturally a lot of curiosity about what Joe Biden’s Republican opponent thinks the country should do about the subject. Even taking into account the strategic value of silence and incoherence on a controversy that has made life difficult for Biden, Donald Trump’s commentary on the Middle East lately has been unusually opaque — unless you recognize the pivotal role that his signature narcissism plays in how he thinks about global affairs.
An extensive new interview the 45th president granted to conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt is illustrative. Asked if he was being “critical of Israel” in comments he made to a conservative Israeli publication earlier this week, Trump immediately started talking about the baleful effect his very absence from the White House had exercised in the Middle East:
Look, Israel should have never happened. If I were president, it........
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