We’re kicking off a short new series on the Middle East. Of course, we must begin with the country on everyone’s mind – Israel.
The Israeli government is a fragile conglomerate of coalitions that have been led (and weakened) by Benjamin Netanyahu over the past decades. Netanyahu has managed to piss off Trump in recent times as well, with his requests for freedom to operate in Gaza, removal of US tariffs, and US strikes on Iran; Trump was quick to reject all three. But Netanyahu did get something from Trump – a nice seat at the top of his s**t list.
The situation in Gaza remains unsolved and is as complicated as ever. The US is disengaging from the Middle East, which means Israel is going to have to find someone else who carries a big stick and can help ensure its strategic future. Given Israeli reliance on imports food, energy, and tech, Turkey is the best option…despite the hoops and hurdles they’ll need to jump through and around to make it happen.
Hey, all Peter Zeihan here come to you from Zion National Park. We’re launching off a week in the Middle East today. And, as seems appropriate, when I. You’re in Zion, we’ll start by talking about what some people call the Zionist state, Israel. Israel is a multi-party democracy, that hasn’t had a majority government in years.
This is not an electoral system like the United States, where if you get one more vote than the other guy, you get the seat. And and you knew if you get a certain percentage of the votes, you get a certain percentage of the seats. So we’ve got like 11 parties in the Israeli, parliament right now. And as a result, for the last 30 years, their governments have been, very weak because they have to, make all of their coalition partners happy.
Because if a coalition partner leaves odds are you’re going to have a fresh election and you get started all over again. So, it’s a lot like how Italy used to be in the 60s, 70s and 80s and 90s and 90s. Now, in Israel, where governments very, very rarely last out their whole term. The guy in charge is Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been near or at the top of the Israeli political heap now for pushing almost 30 years, almost 40, not a long time, anyway.
He is a populist conservative who has no problem throwing other people under the bus or sacrificing some of his, political, preferences in order to maintain power. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a condescending or condemning way. When you’ve got multiple parties in Parliament and multiple parties in your government, you have to make a lot of horse trades on a tactical basis day by day.
And that means that a lot of the things you do care about get pushed to the side. And that’s part of his problem right now. Donald Trump, entertained Netanyahu at the white House a few weeks ago, and it went horrible, really. The only world leader who’s been to the white House since Trump has been in that had a worse time was Zelenskyy of Ukraine.
If you remember, that ambush. Anyway, Netanyahu came asking for three things. Number one, he wanted a completely a free hand in Gaza to do whatever he wanted. Reminder that Gaza is that little strip of territory, that until recently was ruled by a militant political group called Hamas, kidnaped hundreds of Israelis still are holding a couple hundred of them.
And the Israelis have now been spending about a year and a half trying to beat that and into some sort of shape that they actually think they can deal with in the long run. The second thing that Israel wanted was an end to tariffs. Trump put tariffs on pretty much everybody who wasn’t Russia And the Israeli project in many ways has been American subsidized since the beginning, back in 1948. And so the idea that the United States is now going to charge a pretty hefty, tariff, you can see Israeli’s really caught everyone of all political stripes and Israel off guard because they thought that Trump, being a populist conservative, was one of theirs.
Apparently not to the degree that they thought. And then third, Netanyahu really wanted to get, Trump to bomb Iran into the Stone age and do Israel’s work for it. It didn’t go well. He basically got a firm, loud Trumpian no. One, all three. And, you know, there’s a lot of speculation on a lot of sides as to how this is going to shake out.
But what it feels like to me is that, Trump has just done, what, the entire alliance structure. It’s not just the Germans or the Brits or the Australians. It’s everybody. And that includes Israel. And so the Israelis are learning that even when they have the most populist conservative government in decades, and the Americans have the most populist conservative government in literally centuries, they do not see eye to eye.
And from Trump’s point of view, the problem appears to be Netanyahu. The way Trump sees the world, which is through a very specific lens that I would argue needs to be replaced, Netanyahu represents everything that Trump looks down on, came to the white House and he asked for things. That’s not what winners do. That’s what losers do.
He hasn’t been able to clean up Gaza. And it’s been a year and a half. Why is this still going on? It’s entirely unfair. You’ve got over 2 million people basically living on a postage stamp. The idea that’s going to be anything other than a breeding ground for insurgency is silly, and there is no good solution for Gaza.
You want to ship the Gazans somewhere else where apparently people are starting to talk about sending them into the middle of the desert in Libya. Now, whatever. There’s no infrastructure to move them. There’s no place that can take 2 million people in the Middle East anywhere, even including in the rich places. But Israel wants them gone.
And Trump wonders why this hasn’t been settled on the tariff situation. You know, the Trump view that the world has been ripping off the United States economically. I have no respect for that. That’s just flat out wrong. We basically paid people to be on our sides for the Cold War. So we got something in return. We got security control.
Israel, Israel’s different, Israel has basically occupied a soft spot in the American strategic formula. Since foundation. And when they say come after our IP, like the Chinese or the French do, we really don’t do a lot about it because we’re trying to make sure that Israel can exist as an island of democracy in a sea of problems.
Anyway, so there was no change on the tariff situation. Third up is Iran. And while the Trump administration and Trump personally talks a big talk on Iran, Trump has made it very clear over and over and over again in both this administration in his first one, that he has no intention of getting involved in a meaningful war.
I mean, he picked a fight with the Yemeni recently and then stopped after 30 days. And now the idea that the United States is going to get involved in a knock them out fight with a country that can influence militants across the entire region seems a bit of a stretch to me. Also, the Israelis very clearly have been pushing for the United States to do this long before Trump going back, five presidents.
And it hasn’t really gone the way that the Israelis would like. And so when Netanyahu made his direct, almost arrogant plea to Trump, he was turned down flat. That doesn’t mean that the Americans and the Iranians are about to, like, kiss and make up. But Trump really does want a nominal deal that would allow him to say that he made a deal.
And so those talks are continuing to grind forward. The bottom line is that Netanyahu can’t give Trump anything that he wants. Number one, there’s not a lot in the Middle East that the United States does want, especially now that the withdrawal after Iraq has been completed. And then second, anything that might produce movement of, for example, peace in Gaza, which is one of the things that, Trump campaigned on can only happen by rupturing Netanyahu, whose domestic political coalition because by the tenor of the right wing in Israel, Donald Trump is a hippie
commie. And there’s just no version of any deal, in Gaza that would work. For who? This is nice. Let’s take a look at that. That would work for all of the factions. In fact, there are some members of Netanyahu’s coalition who are wondering why they haven’t kicked up the crematoria and just gotten rid of the Gazans directly.
Anyway, so that’s where Israel is. That’s where Netanyahu is. He’s kind of stuck in a lurch. There’s no real good move for him. And Trump is tuning out. And that means the Israelis are going to have to figure out how to function in a world where the United States just really doesn’t care about the Middle East.
So, obviously this has happened under Team Trump, but I would have argued that we’ve been edging this direction for a good 15 years already, and we’re always going to get to some version of this where the Israelis have to figure out that they can’t look after the security themselves. They’re too small, they’re too dependent on energy imports, the two independent food imports, the two dependent on technology imports.
But there are partners out there that might work. They just have to figure out which one they can stomach. And the one that is most obvious, the one that is closest to one that could be a threat if it wasn’t a partner would be Turkey. And we’ll talk about them tomorrow.
