In periods of structural change, the media and the public that consumes it tend to grope in the dark. Anyone who has examined historical documentation and compared it with contemporaneous media coverage knows this well, and that is precisely our situation today when it comes to the possible plans of the Trump-Netanyahu alliance. The two have already misled the world on the eve of the “Rising Lion” and “Midnight Hammer” attacks. It is hard to know what they cooked up at Mar-a-Lago. A childish way of “coping” with this uncertainty is to speculate about their personal relationship or to track alleged intrigues in the White House. It is essential to wean ourselves off this kind of shoddy journalism, which slides into blatant manipulation and outright deception.
To try to decipher where the alliance is headed and what its political and military plans may be, one must analyze the interests of Israel and the US and how the leaderships in both countries perceive those interests.
We are indeed feeling our way in the dark, but we do know that Trump has so far cooperated optimally with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in striking the Iranian axis. America attacked Iran in coordination with Israel, an unprecedented development that greatly strengthened Israel. The US under Trump enabled Israel to strike three foreign legions of Iran, in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. In Lebanon, Washington imposed a ceasefire agreement that at first seemed to constrain Israel, but whose terms allow Israel to resume strikes on Hezbollah and place the terrorist army under an international demand to disarm and withdraw completely from southern Lebanon. Never before has the US supported Israel’s wars so decisively, to the point of fighting alongside Israel.
A similar dynamic unfolded on the Gaza front. Trump’s America stopped restraining Israel there, as Democrats traditionally have. Ultimately, it forced the release of all the hostages and a ceasefire, alongside a general international demand that Hamas disarm, a demand to which Turkey, Qatar and Egypt, the countries under whose auspices Hamas operates, have also committed themselves. Israel controls more than half of the Gaza Strip and is threatening to return to strike the terrorist army’s underground fortress on the basis of international legitimacy.
To be sure, we do not know whether the US will stand by its word and lend a hand to dismantling the terrorist armies along Israel’s borders and eliminating the Iranian threat. Nor do we know whether it will back an uprising in Iran, in the spirit of Trump’s warning to the ayatollahs not to fire on demonstrators. Still, we do not need gossip about personal relations to see that Trump and Netanyahu are fighting as part of a tight alliance against the Iranian axis.
The fog thickens when one examines the trends of the Trump-Netanyahu alliance toward the Sunni states and the India–Europe strategic corridor, which is meant to pass through them and block China’s global ambitions. This axis fuels competition between Israel and Turkey, a rivalry that threatens to erupt in Syria, the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
There is potential for a rift between America and Israel when it comes to Turkey, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all US allies and rivals of Israel, as well as the United Arab Emirates. The picture grows more complex when one factors in that these states are at odds with one another, chiefly over the issue of Islamism. Islamist Qatar threatens its Gulf neighbors. Qatar and Turkey, which is also Islamist, support Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood against the military regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi. The UAE clashes with Turkey in Libya and Sudan and with Saudi Arabia in southern Yemen, and it also differs from both in its approach to the “Palestinian question” and to recognizing Somaliland.
Against this backdrop of Sunni turmoil, divergent interest calculations could lead to disputes within Trump-Netanyahu alliance. For example, whether and how to rein in Turkey and Qatar; whether a pro-Palestinian stance will be promoted in order to bring Saudi Arabia into the India–Europe corridor; and how to encourage emigration from Gaza. We are facing a riddle with many variables and secondary fronts. The Trump-Netanyahu alliance does exist, and it has already fundamentally reshaped the region. But we do not know whether it will succeed in finishing the job against Iran, or how it will navigate the Sunni sphere.