OPINION:
Donald Trump’s recent foreign policy speech identified Israel as “America’s greatest ally,” yet his expressed proposals for dealing with the Islamic State (ISIS) suggest otherwise. By agreeing to side with any nation that would join us in the fight against ISIS — Mr. Trump’s openly-stated intention — the United States would simultaneously strengthen Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. For Jerusalem, this simplistic sort of American calculation would inevitably represent an injurious tradeoff.
Indeed, to the extent that it would sometime allow Iran to arm the Shiite militia Hezbollah with certain mass destruction weapons, it could even prove to be unambiguously catastrophic.
Crafting a nation’s foreign policy is never a job for marketing specialists or public relations experts. It is, rather, an inherently complex task, one that calls for a deep and genuine appreciation of nuanced strategic interdependencies, and of corresponding legal obligations. In specific regard to pertinent expectations of law, it should also be kept in mind that international law remains an integral part of U.S. law.
Nonetheless, it has been obvious that candidate Donald Trump is unaware of the U.S. Constitution’s Article VI “Supremacy Clause,” which incorporates ratified treaties of the United States into American domestic law, and also of associated Supreme Court decisions, especially the Paquete Habana (1900). It follows, with his periodic suggestion that this country intentionally disregard long-codified rules of engagement, or the law of war (e.g., “let’s kill the families of terrorists”), that Mr. Trump has been advocating notably egregious violations of U.S. law.
Mr. Trump has a unique take on American alliances. Among other planned realignments, he is willing to work closely with Vladimir Putin on seemingly common issues of fighting ISIS. In principle, this cooperative spirit would appear to make sense, especially as the two superpowers are already at the margins of a “Cold War II.” But in this declared willingness, Mr. Trump has willfully ignored Moscow’s deliberate bombing of civilian targets in Syria, and its undiminished interest in strengthening anti-Israel Hezbollah.
For Israel, this Shiite militia is now more dangerous than most state adversaries, and vastly more insidious than ISIS.
Also pushed aside by Mr. Trump have been recent Russian overtures to Turkey. Should the United States, in order to curry favor with Mr. Putin, turn a blind eye to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s significant tilt toward a more Islamicist state — precisely the posture that Mr. Trump now suggests — Israel could then have to bear the brunt of rapidly expanding security threats from the north. In this case, almost by definition, a weakened Israel would have correspondingly negative security implications for the United States.
For some reason, these staggering implications are nowhere considered by Mr. Trump, even where they might include a potentially growing vulnerability of U.S. nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik Air Base in southeastern Turkey.
In view of these critically neglected issues, can it really make any sense for Mr. Trump to advocate a victory over ISIS at all costs, even if it should include both American complicity in egregious crimes of war, and a corollary undermining of our most critical regional ally? ISIS, it should not be forgotten, is only the particularly visible symptom of a much wider and more seriously underlying disease; America and Israel will ultimately need to confront this common enemy or pathology at far broader civilizational levels. This means that even if a tactical victory could ever be scored against ISIS, Washington and Jerusalem would still have to deal with steadily growing jihadi elements in more than 50 additional countries worldwide.
In the end, this civilizational war will have to be won at the intellectual or analytical level, before it can ever be won on the literal battlefield. The ancient Greeks and Macedonians, writing about warfare in their own time, always spoke of a titanic struggle of “mind over mind,” and never of “mind over matter.” Accordingly, before the United States can be genuinely helpful to “its greatest ally,” the next American president will have to refrain from any further substitutions of glib marketing copy or shallow insights for challenging strategic thought. In this connection, among many other factors, more explicit American attention will need to be directed toward Israel’s nuclear strategy, even if it should remain deliberately “ambiguous,” or hidden “in the basement.”
Oddly, nowhere in Mr. Trump’s foreign policy speech was this uniquely important strategic factor even mentioned.
During my almost 50 years of teaching international relations at Princeton and Purdue, I routinely reminded my students that there exist multiple and intersecting axes of conflict in world politics. Understood in terms of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy speech and Israel, this point means, among other things, we ought not to assume that inflicting selected harms upon any one particular enemy is necessarily in our overall best interests. Rather, in carefully calculating optimal steps to take in fashioning or refashioning American foreign policy, our next president must insistently bear in mind that what is appropriately harmful to one adversary or set of adversaries (e.g., ISIS) may at the same time actually be helpful to our other enemies.
Reciprocally, of course, such well-intentioned but narrowly focused American harms could be starkly injurious to certain allies.
With this thinking in mind, it should be apparent that Donald Trump’s advice on dealing in isolation with just one conspicuous expression of a much wider terrorist threat is meaningfully off the mark. To be sure, it would be much easier for an American president to steer clear of all bewildering complexities in world politics, especially in the Middle East, but that course would invariably take us in a completely wrong direction.
• Louis Rene Beres is emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University.
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