What’s perplexing about Donald Trump is that he continues to shower strongmen enemies in Putin, Xi and Kim Jong-un with platitudes and deference, yet openly humiliates our closest allies.
The latest atrocious public admonition was that of Trump lashing out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for retaliating after his countrymen were being bombarded by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
All Trump seems to care about is placating the Iranians to get them to sign off on his deal to end the war in the Strait. But how can a president of the United States dictate to another country that they should not be allowed to retaliate when they are attacked?
Imagine the Israelis, or any other country, telling America that we couldn’t respond after being attacked on 9/11. More recently, the Iranians attacked one of our helicopters. Did Trump sit back and say he won’t retaliate because he doesn’t want to blow up the Iranian deal? No. He sent out bombers to retaliate. Yet he’s telling Netanyahu that he can’t retaliate when Israelis are attacked.
What’s worse is that it makes the Iranians look like winners.
Anyone but a fool knows that Hezbollah is controlled by the Iranians. When they fire rockets at Israel, it’s at the behest of Iran. So here is Iran claiming that they want a peace deal with America, yet simultaneously fire rockets into Israel and expect the U.S. to do nothing about it, or to even allow the Israelis to respond. That’s putting Iran in the driver’s seat and humiliating our biggest allies while putting them at grave risk.
What’s worse is that it’s obvious that the Trump team leaked his profanity-laced tirade against Netanyahu to tell the world that he’s the alpha male. Nothing disturbed Trump more than the false allegation that he was prompted to go into this Iranian war because he was led by the nose by Netanyahu. Trump needed to dispel this myth, but is doing so in an atrocious manner.
Message to the president: Don’t abandon your greatest ally. And stop picking unnecessary fights with our friends in Canada by telling them you want to annex them, or with our friends in Denmark by claiming that you’ll militarily take over Greenland.
There are plenty of reasons to hold our allies’ feet to the fire. They have been extraordinarily weak and unwilling to spend on their defenses to create an adequate deterrent. Indeed, they’ve been depending on our blood and treasure to defend them while they created welfare states. Trump did a marvelous charm job, embarrassing them into increasing their defense spending.
But to tell our friends in Israel that they cannot respond when attacked is simply an outrage.