Not for the first time, and likely not for the last, Vice President JD Vance has declared that the United States “cannot let our Middle Eastern foreign policy be subservient to the State of Israel.”
The use of the word “subservient” has an unpleasant smell in this context, redolent of the groyper conspiracy theories that would have us believe that the real controllers of policymaking are “the Zionists” and not the politicians we elect.
It is also a strawman argument. U.S. foreign policy has never been “subservient” to the State of Israel, if we understand that to mean that American leaders make decisions that go against our national interest in favor of Jerusalem.
According to Vance, his boss, U.S. President Donald Trump, has been the sole American leader ready to say “no” to the Israelis when saying “yes” would confound American imperatives. “I think that more than frankly any president in the last 40 years, he has shown a willingness to actually part ways with Bibi Netanyahu when he feels like the interests of the American people are different from the interests of the government of Israel,” Vance said.
This is an odd point, to say the least, to make about a man who has frequently described himself as “history’s most pro-Israel U.S. president.”
After all, it was Trump who recognized Israeli sovereignty over both the eastern half of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, when many Democratic Party politicians and European leaders warned that doing so would unleash the fearsome wrath of the entire Muslim world.
It was Trump who withdrew the U.S. from the fatally flawed 2015 nuclear deal with the Iranian regime, again drawing vocal criticism that he had acted against his own country’s interests solely to mollify Israel.
It was Trump who, in 2019, reversed his predecessor Barack Obama’s determination that settlements in Judea and Samaria were “inconsistent with international law.” The following year, he issued a peace plan that would have allowed Israel to retain the vast majority of those settlements. Again, those who criticized Trump depicted him as Israel’s patsy, making decisions that would harm America abroad for the sake of appeasing powerful Jews.
Last but not least, it was Trump who embarked on a joint military operation with Israel against Iran, once more ignoring warnings that doing so would threaten the stability of the “Abraham Accords” that he brokered between Israel and several Arab countries.
None of the apocalyptic scenarios envisaged by the alarmists ever came to fruition. And the reason is that, in all these cases, Trump’s calculations were based on U.S. interests, not Israeli ones. Critically, none of his decisions have prevented him from also clashing with the Israeli government, as he has done on several occasions.
In that sense, Vance would have been on firmer ground if he had argued that the main difference between Trump and past presidents was that his transactional approach to foreign policy yielded more successful outcomes, particularly in bringing Israel and the Arab states closer together. But there isn’t a lot of mileage in claiming that Trump has been readier to stand up to the Israelis than “any president in the last 40 years” because that simply isn’t true.
During Ronald Reagan’s tenure in the White House, bitter disputes erupted with Israel on a range of issues. After the Israeli Air Force bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, the United States responded by suspending deliveries of F-16s to Israel and then ignored Israeli protests by selling AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia. When Israel went to war against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982, the administration continually pressured Israel to end its siege of West Beirut. And when the American intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was unmasked as an Israeli spy in 1985, many inside and outside the administration wondered whether the American-Israeli strategic relationship would survive the blow (it did).
A similar pattern was observable in subsequent administrations.
George H.W. Bush withheld loan guarantees for Israel, fearing the funds would be used to expand settlements. Bill Clinton clashed with Netanyahu over the implementation of the Oslo peace process. George W. Bush clashed with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over settlement expansion. Obama—Trump’s bête noire—declared that his goal was to put more “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, going on to forge the nuclear deal with Iran and abstain on a U.N. Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal. Joe Biden paused shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel at the height of the Gaza war triggered by the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, drawing an angry rebuke from none other than Trump, who accused him of having “totally abandoned Israel.”
What this brief review of the historical record demonstrates is that neither Trump nor his predecessors have been “subservient” to Israel, merely that they have exhibited varying degrees of warmth toward the Jewish state, with Trump among the more enthusiastic. But with all of them, whenever they deemed that Israel’s actions did not serve American goals, they said so, and acted accordingly.
That has been the case since the dawn of the relationship with Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, in the midst of a war in which the Truman administration imposed an arms embargo against the nascent Jewish state as well as on the Arab aggressors.
Yet the fact remains that—whether under Trump or any other president—what brings the United States and Israel together is worth far more than the issues dividing them. There are several reasons for this, but I would highlight the most basic one of all: Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the United States can consider every government a strategic ally, whether led by the right or the left, and where the people are overwhelmingly favorable towards America. The same cannot be said about a single Muslim nation.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be disagreements with varying degrees of seriousness. What it does mean is that we need a more nuanced understanding of why a fundamentally positive relationship is punctuated by quarrels, which less informed pundits then seize on as evidence that America is finally breaking the supposed Israeli stranglehold on its policy formation.
