Trump Meets the Unconquerable World

 

By David K. Shipler 

            One of the most enlightening summations of Donald Trump came from his longtime associate and now chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He has an “alcoholic’s personality,” she said in an interview with Vanity Fair, which means he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” She should know. Although Trump claims not to drink alcohol, Wiles grew up with an alcoholic father, the football player and sportscaster Pat Summerall.

            Trump’s fantasy of omnipotence helps explain why he swaggers across parts of the globe and tramples his own country’s democratic norms. But his illusion of boundless power is now running into the reality of Iran. So is Israel’s imagined ability to manipulate the politics of its enemies, a practice it has pursued for decades with absolutely zero success.

Trump has been riding an intoxicating high of adventurism since he found little resistance from earlier targets, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, blowing up speedboats in the Caribbean, capturing President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela in January, and now cutting off Cuba’s oil supplies. He said of Cuba, “I can do anything I want with it.” On Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf states, Trump declared, “Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

 An educable president who took advice from experts would have anticipated the ruthless resilience of Iran’s odious regime. That is not the president Americans elected. Instead, he has rid government of specialists who know Iran. He has made the White House into an echo chamber of zealots and sycophants. He has let his incompetent “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, purge the senior officer corps of many seasoned professionals essential to complex combat.

Furthermore, Trump carries the flaw of every dictator. He thinks policy is personified in a single figure, as in his own administration: hence his misplaced belief that decapitating a government will bring it down, as in the seizure of Maduro and the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

Taking a still picture of a war in progress can be misleading, for the final judgment usually rests on its outcome. So far, the Israel-American onslaught from the air has killed much of the leadership, including potentially moderate figures, and obliterated much of Iran’s military.

The regime remains, however, fighting for its life using asymmetrical warfare against massive Israeli and American air power: mostly drones and rockets aimed at the pressure points of the global oil economy. The US is burning through its arsenal of expensive defensive missiles, which it’s using to down the relative cheap Iranian drones. That limits Ukraine’s ability to get them to hold off Russia, which poses a much graver threat than Iran.

Nor is there any sign yet of the power vacuum that both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu anticipated could somehow be filled by an unarmed and unorganized opposition. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump told Iranians on February 28, the day he began the war. “Stay sheltered, don’t leave your home….When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take.”

Perhaps Trump had been persuaded by Netanyahu, the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders who have tried and failed to realign Arab and Muslim politics.

            In the early 1980s, to dilute the Palestine Liberation Organization’s influence in the occupied West Bank, Israel appointed Menachem Milson, a professor of Arabic literature at Hebrew University, as architect of a set of rural “village leagues” composed of moderate, compliant Palestinians. They were seen by the PLO as Israeli collaborators, Jordan threatened to prosecute them for treason, moderate Palestinian mayors denounced their complicity, one member was shot and wounded when his son was killed, and others resigned. Milson impressed Arabs as arrogant and ignorant of their culture, I was told at the time, breaking promises and wielding crude political patronage to no avail.

            Similarly in that period, Israel’s army in occupied Gaza was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, a precursor of Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmed to me in 1981 by Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor for Gaza, who explained that he was instructed to build the Brotherhood as a counterpoint to the PLO and the Communists, whose goal of Palestinian statehood was seen as more threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.

            The Brotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfare services for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemed benign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood the Byzantium of Gaza’s politics.

A year later, Israelis made the same mistake in Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLO but fail dramatically at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction. Their favored leader, Bashir Gemayel, a Maronite Christian who had led fighters on Israel’s behalf, was assassinated by a pro-Syrian operative shortly after being elected president.

More recently, Netanyahu governments bolstered Hamas to divide Palestinians and cripple their movement for statehood. Years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Israel allowed Qatar to send suitcases full of cash for Hamas through checkpoints into Gaza.

Devoted to Israel’s ultimate destruction, Hamas seemed useful to Netanyahu, because it undermined the Palestinian Authority, which descended from the PLO, favored a two-state solution, and governed parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords. The self-destructive result of this bumbling attempt at manipulation came on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters caught Israeli intelligence and armed forces off-guard, breached the defenses around Gaza, slaughtered some 1,200 people, took 251 hostages, and triggered Israel’s massive bombing of the territory. In its brutal vengeance during that war, Israel forfeited its moral authority.

Under Trump, the United States is also forfeiting its moral authority. That is an unmeasurable commodity. It cannot be quantified in numbers of missiles, dollars per barrel, or the balance of trade. But its depletion, with allies and adversaries alike, leaves America handicapped in the real world, which even Trump’s megalomania cannot tame.   

Israel and Iran: The Extraordinary History of Mutual Support

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            In the spring of 1982, just over three years after Iran’s Islamic Revolution, I was invited by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to his sheep ranch in the Negev Desert to hear his surprising arguments about Iran. As we sat in his spacious house, he made a strong case that Washington should work to repair relations with Tehran—in the strategic interests of both the United States and Israel.

            This was not a complete break from decades of Israeli policy toward Iran, which had traded oil for weapons. Yet at that moment, Sharon was voicing a bold and counterintuitive position for his country, which was the target of anti-Zionist hatred from the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And the timing was off, for it came when American emotions remained high, little more than a year after the release of American diplomatic personnel who had been held for 444 days after the US Embassy was overrun.

Sharon wanted his controversial idea in The New York Times, but only “on background,” not with his name attached. This is a trade-off journalists accept to give the public significant information that would not be available otherwise. So, in a broad piece about American, Israeli, and Soviet stakes in Iran, I called him “a well-placed Israeli official,” a disguise unnecessary now, a dozen years after his death.

A former general infamous for ruthlessness toward Arabs, Sharon was more opportunist than ideologue. His lens was military, not religious. He saw Iran—Muslim but not Arab—as a counterweight against the well-armed Arab countries. At the time, only Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel. Iraq, Syria, and—to a lesser extent, Jordan—remained in the Arab order of battle.

Sharon worried about Moscow’s gains. He began his pitch by assessing Iran as the region’s most critical Muslim country, which deserved cultivation by Washington. “In spite of all Iran has done to the United States,” he insisted, “the United States cannot afford to permit Iran to be totally and unreservedly anti-American and leave the field open to Soviet penetration.”

Furthermore, he noted that about 40,000 Jews lived in Iran. “Under a regime like this one, you can consider them as hostages,” he said, making Israel responsive to Iranian requests for military equipment and spare parts for weapons.

In fact, Israel continued to provide military supplies to Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (250 tires for F-4 fighter jets in 1980, for example, ammunition and parts for tanks); it suspended the sales under US pressure until the hostages were released in 1981, then resumed shipments for awhile. “No matter how intense their zeal against Zionism,” Sharon told me, “we don't have to fuel this fire.”