The Saudi nuclear trap is a sign of the failure of Trump’s military and political campaign

The rift between the United States and Israel risks becoming the focal point of a major Middle Eastern crisis, with dramatic repercussions for the whole world. Now, following Iran and Lebanon – not to mention the failure to disarm the remaining Hamas fighters in Gaza after nearly three gruelling years of conflict – the rift is extending to Saudi Arabia’s nuclear programme. And the guerrilla warfare in the Straits, which is spreading with the Houthis at Bab el-Mandeb, confirms the deadlock of a military and political campaign on the brink of failure. Trump makes no distinction between allies and clients; he is overwhelmed by his own psychology and business interests, and fails to grasp the significance of his intelligence reports on the reasons for the regime’s resilience in Tehran; and an empire whose leader seeks to save face through a series of ploys, linking one of the greatest strategic confrontations of our era to electoral expediency, behaves worse than a reluctant superpower – as in the case of Obama – and a hundred times worse than a ruling class that knew how to address the consequences of 11 September 2001 through concrete action and tremendous commitment – as in the case of Bush and Cheney in Afghanistan and Iraq. Failing to understand that Iran is an Islamist revolution – a half-century-old exemplar and symbol of the clash of civilisations, not a revolt in an imperial province – is fatal; it leads to the strengthening rather than the weakening and overthrow of the regime. It is fatal not to understand that the framework agreement with the major Sunni states and the Gulf petro-monarchies – the famous Abraham Accords – is contingent upon the defeat of the Ayatollahs’ regime and the severing of the tentacles of the theocratic octopus, from Lebanon to Yemen to Gaza.

Nothing is worse than hesitating, wavering, contradicting oneself, appearing at once threatening, boastful and weak; nothing is worse than appearing to be toxically dependent on the price of petrol per gallon; nothing is worse than linking the campaign against Iran to the ambiguous diplomacy of partial capitulation on Ukraine and intermittent appeasement of Russia and China – a policy rewarded by Putin and Xi Jinping by aiding their enemy in the counter-attack against US bases in the Gulf and in Jordan. This is not a matter of Netanyahu; the same problem would arise again with his successors, if there are any, at the helm of the government in Jerusalem. It is no coincidence that the devastating initial attack that decapitated the regime was carried out by Israel. Israel, whether under Netanyahu, Eisenkot or anyone else, is a great secular national revolution, rife with fanaticism and fundamentalist impulses yet faithful, for many decades, to the procedures and profound meaning of democracy, despite the price the system has paid due to its state of perpetual belligerence and fierce encirclement. That country and its people know exactly who they are dealing with, for there is a symmetry between revolutions. They take pride in being a garrison state and a democracy armed to the teeth, driven first and foremost by an iron will to defend itself and strike back. Their wealth of information is vast; their ability to penetrate and infiltrate the regime that threatens them, right down to its nerve centres, is astounding. If they remain at odds with Israel, Trump’s America – and, for that matter, the defeated Democratic establishment, overwhelmed by the consequences of the Gaza war – will get nowhere.

The alliance with the Saudis is obviously not in question; it has endured for decades amidst contradictions and radical ambiguities, and has intensified with the Abraham Accords, extending to the Persian Gulf. What is in question is the claim to lead Israel as if it were a scale model of the sort used as ornaments in the Oval Office of the White House. The Saudi nuclear programme is a new trap, all the more intolerable for Israel given that the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities has, for the time being, either failed or succeeded only in delaying and causing damage, without destroying the facilities and sites against which Jerusalem has been fighting for decades.