Trump's Israel art of the deal: Repair Bibi-Putin relationship to neutralize Iran threat
Last week, the Trump administration reportedly pressured Israel to vote against Ukraine on the Europe-backed U.N. General Assembly resolution, which condemned Russia for the invasion and affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity. As a result, Israel sided with Russia, North Korea and the United States, and against Ukraine.
On Friday, Trump booted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House, accusing him of "gambling with World War III."
Is Trump trying to make Russia great again, cozying up to Putin? Hold your fire.
Here's the rationale for Trump's outside-the-box thinking.
The "Deal-Maker-in-Chief" is almost certainly brokering a rapprochement between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in order to break up the unholy Russia-Iran alliance, which poses a grave security risk to the U.S. and which former President Joe Biden had strengthened by his misguided foreign policy course.
Until Biden caused a rift between Moscow and Tel Aviv by compelling Israel to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, Putin and Netanyahu had a positive transactional relationship. It was based on the personal rapport and the shared belief that Islamic extremism is a common enemy, with which there cannot be a compromise. In the past, Israel did not criticize Russia for its wars in Muslim Chechnya, nor did it express any negative reaction to Putin's annexation of Crimea.
Israel studiously maintained a neutral posture during the initial stages of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, having refrained from condemning Putin for the invasion, refused to join the U.S. and EU sanctions against Moscow, and opted to provide only humanitarian aid to Ukraine rather than military hardware.
Both realpolitik-minded and pragmatic, Putin and Netanyahu viewed their undeclared alliance as strategically valuable for the stability and security in the region.
Since becoming president in 2000, Putin has drastically improved the Russian-Israeli relationship, following decades of hostile relations between the USSR and Israel.
Putin became the first Kremlin leader to visit Israel in 2005 and pursued a largely pro-Israel policy as the Jewish state became home to the world's largest population of Jews from the former Soviet Union.
With 1.2 million Russian and former Soviet émigrés living in Israel and 15%-17% of the Israeli population being Russian-speaking, Putin was never in favor of Iran, who regularly threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, having an operational nuclear capability.
In 2010, the Kremlin, complying with U.N. sanctions, banned by a presidential decree the sale to Iran of S-300 air defense missile system, which would have augmented the defenses of Iranian nuclear sites from airstrikes. Additionally, in 2019, amid rising tensions in the Persian Gulf, Putin declined Iran's request to buy the advanced S-400 missile defense system. This was probably in response to concerns shared by Israel and Saudi Arabia and because he sought to maintain a positive working relationship with the two.
Netanyahu reciprocated, having even attended a Russian military parade in 2018, standing alongside Putin. For Bibi, Israel's security trumps optics. The Israel Defense Forces were critically reliant on security coordination with the Russian military in Syria, where Russia controls the skies and has tacitly allowed Israeli fighter jets to conduct strikes on Iranian proxies.
As a result of the rift, however, Putin strengthened his ties with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, hailing the "very close" relationship between Russia and Iran.
With the Biden administration trying to choke the Russian economy with draconian sanctions, Putin started to actively cooperate with Iran, including likely supplying Tehran with sensitive nuclear and space launch technologies. "We are actively working together in the international arena, and our assessments of events taking place in the world are often very close," Putin said in October.
Last year, in April and September, around the time of Iran's direct attacks on Israel, Reuters reported that Russian weapons experts visited Iranian missile production facilities, a sign of deepening military cooperation between Moscow and Tehran, which is undoubtedly a cause for alarm in Washington and Jerusalem.
Trump is a pragmatist who places America's security first and Israel's a close second. He likely understands that Moscow and Tehran, who share a tumultuous history, aren't natural allies as they are trying to portray. They've been pushed together by the unwise and incompetent Washington policies that, until Trump, have been driven by ideologies and wishful thinking rather than realism and U.S. security.
Trump likely believes, correctly, that strategically, it is in the U.S. interest to repair our relations with Russia, foster a Putin-Netanyahu rapprochement, and break up the Moscow-Tehran axis, in order to neutralize the deadly threat from Iran as it draws nearer in its capabilities to being a fully nuclear-armed state.
Like Putin and Netanyahu, the bombastic and strategically minded commander in chief doesn't fear the "wrong" optics or being called, yet again, a Putin apologist. Trump wants to get done what must be done to ensure America's security and the world's stability.
Netanyahu is almost certainly on board with Trump's grand plan as Israel is seeking to exert its own influence on U.S. policy. Jerusalem is advocating the U.S. to allow Russia to keep its military bases in Syria, which is now ruled by a terrorist regime, following the Turkey-backed coup.
To reduce the threat to its borders, Israel views Russia as an ally in Syria and a counterweight to Turkey, with whom Jerusalem has had tense relations, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan aims to shift the balance of power in the Middle East in Turkey's favor.
The Trump effect is already felt. Russia has invited Israel to attend the May 9th Victory parade in Moscow, commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Moscow, which is cautiously optimistic about Trump's strategic realignment, offering Putin a seat at the table with the big boys, stated that "unfriendly states," including Ukraine, Germany, France and others are not invited. On Saturday, Netanyahu's military secretary, Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman, was en route to Moscow to discuss "strengthening of cooperation in the interests of security."
Iran was on the agenda during the U.S.-Russia high-level meeting in Riyadh, kicking off the peace talks on Ukraine, according to Putin's presidential aide Yuriy Ushakov. Putin reportedly may also serve as a broker between Washington and Tehran on a new nuclear deal.
Trump has inherited from the Biden administration global chaos and a world on fire, which he is trying to put out. Look more deeply into his game plan before launching criticisms at him.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fox News
21 minutes ago
- Fox News
'You can't serve on Facebook': Military spouse calls Americans to act on Flag Day
All times eastern Special Report with Bret Baier FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage WATCH LIVE: Trump attends 'Les Misérables' premiere at Kennedy Center
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Stephen Miller Threatened ICE Leaders With a Furious Ultimatum Over Arrest Targets
An irate Stephen Miller threatened senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials with termination unless their offices upped their game and started detaining at least 3,000 migrants a day. The White House deputy chief of staff also warned that leaders of field offices ranking in the bottom 10 percent for migrant arrests were at risk of being fired, NBC News reports, citing unnamed sources. The outbursts from Miller, viewed as the architect behind many of President Donald Trump's most hardline immigration policies, came during a mid-May meeting with ICE officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was also present, though was reportedly in a calmer mood. Soon after Miller issued his threat, ICE began ramping up its efforts to detain undocumented migrants across the U.S. The plan, dubbed 'Operation At Large,' involved thousands of federal law enforcement officers and special forces, many of whom don't typically assist with immigration, being pulled in to help ICE round up migrants accused of being in the country illegally. The operation has also called for the deployment of about 21,000 National Guard troops, as well as 250 IRS agents who could use tax data to track down immigrants. Trump's push to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history is reportedly sparking friction among federal agencies. FBI agents, who normally steer clear of immigration enforcement and administrative removal orders, are increasingly being tasked with helping ICE arrest undocumented migrants. Teams within the Justice Department working on unrelated matters have also been disbanded and reassigned to focus on immigration-related cases. Federal agencies' intense preoccupation with detaining migrants that is now influencing whether a case is prosecuted at all. In one instance, a U.S. attorney's office dropped a potential federal prosecution involving a dangerous suspect simply because there wasn't a clear immigration angle. The office passed the case to state prosecutors instead. 'Immigration status is now question No. 1 in terms of charging decisions,' an assistant U.S. attorney told NBC News. 'Is this person a documented immigrant? Is this person an undocumented immigrant? Is this person a citizen? Are they somehow deportable? What is their immigration status? And the answer to that question is now largely driving our charging decisions.' In response to reports of Miller's outburst, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: 'Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump's and the American people's mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe.' The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from the Daily Beast.
