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 2006, 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.
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