T. Belman. The problem is that the State Department has been consistantly pro Arab and anti-Israel for 100 years. Gil-White is focused on the fact that Trump can’t change that. The best he can do is to ignore them and do what he can to help Israel, just as he did when he was President.
Peloni: The one point which I disagree with Gil-White is on Trump, who he shades as being part of the same anti-Israel power bosses in the US. By his own standard of following the facts on the ground, this has little support. The only part of Trump’s foreign policy which might support such a premise was the continued funding for Lebanon despite the violations of UNSC 1701 and 1559, funding which was quietly agreed to after significant deliberation. This was a serious setback, which strongly contrasted with all of Trump’s other policies in the region, but I would argue that this was clearly the exception to Trump’s regional policy in the Middle East rather than demonstrative of them, and the attempt to push it through without any fanfare or explanation would seem to support this fact all the more.
@EvRe
Great comment. As usual you are so right
Gil-White’s analysis, that US foreign policy in the Middle East has been pro-Iranian since 1979 makes sense and is supported by the evidence.
However, that he does not see any difference between Trump’s Middle East policy and all prior Presidents (including Biden), does not fit with the facts.
Trump made an effort to re-align US ME policy with a goal to preserve and protect the national sovereignty of Israel. To that end he worked with Bibi on the Abraham Accords, he ended the Iranian nuclear “deal,” (which was simply a US capitulation to the mullahs), he moved the US Consulate to Jerusalem, he sanctioned Iran financially so the country was weakened greatly, he developed a positive relationship with MBS that was likely to lead to a Saudi addition to the Abraham Accords, potentially paving the way for it in the coming few years. No other American president supported Israel as Trump did.
Gil-White appears to have a blind spot re: Trump’s efforts to support Israel in a way that was completely different from the way the US foreign policy blob had always treated Israel.
On the other hand, Gil-White has discussed the issue of the illusion of choice in democracies. This is based upon the work of Maurice Joly who wrote in the mid 1800s.
“Joly believed that a basic design defect plagued the institutional organization—the structure—of modern democracy. That structural defect was this: the executive had been allowed to create a secret service. The existence of this monster, argued Joly, would allow antidemocratic power elites, working clandestinely in the shadows, to corrupt and gut the very foundation of democracy even as they pretended in public to honor and defend it.” https://franciscogilwhite.substack.com/p/maurice-joly-simulated-or-counterfeit-democracy
Once any democracy developed a clandestine agency such as the CIA in the US and similar agencies around the world, the agency that worked in secrecy could infiltrate the government and ultimately destroy the democracy from within.
In the USA the breakdown of constitutional norms began in earnest with the Progressive era, from Wilson and FDR to our current era, in which government was seen as the “solution” to the country’s problems instead of the problem itself.
Add to this bloated federal government which was delegated rule making ability by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, the secrecy of the CIA-State Department “blob” and you have the makings of the totalitarian state we are experiencing in the US today.
Thus Gil-White sees the US on a course of having an illusion of “democracy” and an illusion of US support for Israel when in reality the constitutional republic is on life support if it exists at all, and the US actually supports the radical Islamists of the world in attempting to destroy Israel, behind the backs of the American taxpayer.
I think Gil-White believes that even if Trump were to be elected, there would be little he could do to change the course of the ship of state, which employs 2.8 million Americans and is on a course headed for a totalitarian police state, in which patriots are deemed terrorists who are thrown into a gulag without due process, and terrorists and criminals are invited into the country and let loose to prey on law abiding children and adults so they can vote for the power elites and keep them in power. In addition, they work for far less pay than Americans, so the power elites get richer and more powerful the less they need pay for labor. This is not free market enterprise, it is crony capitalism on its way to either Maoist Communism or fascism.
I might be wrong, but I think this is what Gil-White is seeing, this overarching view, and I think he believes Trump winning or losing is a distraction from the underlying power dynamics at work in the western democracies.