Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Like Biden’s But Far Worse
In just eight months, Trump has overseen a more bloody, dangerous, and dumb version of what he had accurately called Biden’s 'historically horrible' foreign policy.
This article was first published in Jacobin, a daily online and quarterly print magazine. Zeteo is republishing it with its permission.
Joe Biden and the staffers who ran his presidency took a lot of deserved flack for their foreign policy decisions from the left, the anti-establishment right, and even the Washington establishment – for disregarding diplomacy, betraying US allies and partners in key instances, badly mismanaging Washington’s grand strategy, and generally allowing chaos to reign in the world. The latter was particularly true in the Middle East, where the world’s most powerful elected leader regularly supplicated himself to his country’s own client state, Israel. Many of these criticisms were made by Donald Trump and his team.
But after last week’s bombing in Qatar by Israel, it’s now incontrovertible that Trump and the people he has surrounded himself with are worse on all of this than even Biden was.
First, a short explanation of the facts: Last week, at Trump’s urging, Hamas officials were meeting in Doha to discuss what the US president called his final offer for a ceasefire deal in Gaza, with Qatar continuing to play the role it had throughout the war as a neutral mediator between Hamas and Israel. Then, Israel bombed the residential complex where they were gathered, killing a Qatari security official and five members of Hamas, though apparently failing to assassinate any of its senior officials.
The level of US complicity is still not totally clear. While the White House has insisted that Israel acted alone and only told Trump about the attack after the fact, even quickly leaking how supposedly furious and blindsided they were, Israeli officials have repeatedly told the press that it had been coordinated and effectively greenlit by Washington. That includes this week in Axios, which reported three Israeli officials’ claims that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself called Trump nearly an hour before the strike, told him about the planned attack, and received no pushback. “The Americans are putting on a show” with their denials, one Israeli official said. Whatever the exact truth, it’s undeniable that the enormous, unconditional military and political support Washington gives Israel would make the United States deeply complicit in this, no matter what.
In any case, what this amounts to is an even worse, more bloody version of what Trump had accurately called Biden’s “historically horrible” foreign policy. Biden was rightly pilloried for being averse to diplomacy, repeatedly refusing negotiated resolutions to the bloody war in Ukraine, and failing to pressure Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza.
But this looks like a diplomatic master class next to what Trump has accomplished in just eight months.
Not only has Trump serially allowed Israel to sabotage his own ceasefire efforts, but the bombing in Doha marks at least the second time that the Trump-Israel team has used peace talks as a ruse to launch a surprise attack on the government they were negotiating with – the first time being just three months ago, when Trump supplied and green-lit Israel’s war on Iran in the middle of talks to revive the Iran nuclear deal.
As bad as Biden was, nothing he did comes close to being as damaging to US diplomacy as this. Any country that the United States tries to negotiate with from here on will have to assume US diplomatic outreach is just a trick to start a war with it or kill its leaders. Meanwhile, the Qatari government has reportedly already told the Trump White House that the Israeli attack makes it impossible for it to keep serving as a mediator on Gaza, while its prime minister told the press that continued talks were no longer “valid” and that there was very little room left for diplomacy.
So much for Trump’s pretensions to being a “peacemaker.”
Even if we accept Trump’s dog-ate-my-homework excuse that Israel acted without telling him, this is dire. This proud admission of apparent Washington fecklessness would mean that, once again, the most powerful government on the planet is loudly advertising that it’s incapable of saying no to its own client state and stood by wringing its hands as a tiny country that can hardly blow its own nose without Washington supplying it with tissues sabotaged something the US president repeatedly made clear was a personal priority. Trump has managed to demean himself, the presidency, and the country he fooled into electing him all at once.
At the same time, Trump, like Biden, has put a premium on keeping the United States the world’s top dog and making sure that China doesn’t surpass it. And like Biden, who made much of the world even more distrustful of US leadership and took steps that wound up hurting his own closest allies, Trump has done everything possible to undermine that goal.
Just consider what has happened in the past month alone. In August, Trump inexplicably decided to alienate India, a key US partner in Washington’s anti-China strategy, before complaining earlier this month that the previously pro-American country had gone into the arms of his chief rival as a result. Last week, he sent waves of outrage through South Korea – a treaty ally that is legally bound to fight for the United States if it’s attacked and vice versa – after an immigration raid on a Hyundai plant that saw hundreds of Korean nationals (many of whom lawyers say were in the country legally, because the US government had desperately wanted them there to fuel the same revival of US manufacturing Trump claims he wants to see) arrested, thrown into putrid detention centers, and scheduled to be kicked out of the country.
And now, Trump has, at minimum, limply stood by and allowed an attack on another US security partner, the host of the largest US base in the Middle East and nearly 11,000 American troops, and which had been designated a “major non-NATO ally” just three years ago. Naturally the foreign governments that the United States relies on for its grand strategy to win the future against China are now starting to ask themselves: What exactly is the point of allying oneself or entering into a security partnership with Washington, if you’ll still get bombed, tariffed up to the gills, or have your citizens rounded up and mistreated by the US government? Already, this has translated into one earth-shattering development for the region: a mutual defense pact signed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on Wednesday, further undermining US plans for regional integration under the US security umbrella, and indirectly drawing a key US partner closer to its chief rival, China.
Meanwhile, Qatar is now at least the seventh country Israel has attacked in the last two years, pushing the Middle East further toward the edge of destabilization it’s been teetering on. Biden was criticized for underwriting what was in effect a regionwide rampage by Israel that trampled international law and norms in never-before-seen ways and made regional war more likely: not just its genocide in Gaza and an intensified ethnic cleansing campaign in the West Bank but its indiscriminate murder campaign in Lebanon, bombing of and occupation of territory in Syria, sporadic attacks on Yemen, and repeated attempts to start a war with Iran, which involved bombing one of its overseas consulates, considered a grave violation that’s normally off-limits even between unfriendly states.
Under Trump, this has escalated to a new level, as Israel is not just deliberately starving Gazans to death and using aid distribution sites as an extermination tool, but is also ramping up these violations of national sovereignty. Two weeks ago, it killed Yemen’s prime minister, and now this attack on Qatar, a friendly state acting as a mediator in its own negotiations.
If it turns out that Israel was also responsible for the two drone bombings of a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid boat in Tunisia last week – and it would be extremely surprising if it wasn’t – that would mean Israel will have attacked an eighth country and a second nonhostile one (this one without even the pretense of a connection to Hamas, not that that has stopped them from claiming one after the fact), all with the slavish, tacit backing of Trump. Not bad from a guy who had once complained that his opponents “want[ed] to go to war with every Muslim country known to mankind.”
Israeli officials are very clear about what all this means: that “the days are over that terrorist leaders will have immunity anywhere,” as Netanyahu put it, and that Israel “will act against its enemies everywhere,” as its defense minister, Israel Katz, warned. Together with its ambassador to the United States threatening to “get them the next time,” Israel is making explicitly clear that there is no country that it will not potentially bomb or otherwise attack, including US allies and states with which it has peaceful relations.
This should be ominous news for Turkey, a NATO member, and Egypt, which has a more-than-40-year-old peace treaty with Israel. For a normal country, these factors would make it untouchable. But Israel stopped being a normal country a long time ago, and the fact that both of these countries are places that Hamas’s leadership spends physical time in means they will now apparently be fair game for Israeli attacks – attacks it will have full US backing to carry out, if and when they decide to go through with them.
Trump bitterly attacked Biden for an incompetent foreign policy that would mean “the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to war, maybe even a Third World War.” That once sounded like a warning. Now it reads like a promise of what Trump would do as president: continue everything that made the addled Biden’s final year feel so out of control and dangerous, only dumber and more violent.
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
This piece was republished with permission from Jacobin magazine.
Check out more from Zeteo:
Biden or Trump makes no difference; the Zionist Jews control all Americans policies . Genocide of Palestinians and to make way for Mediterranean resort has been in their agenda ever since the Zionist Jews invaded Palestine.
America has gone to hell! And the longer trump remains in power/alive, we will be on the fast-track. Just despicable!