Joe Biden and the staffers who ran his presidency took a lot of deserved flack for their foreign policy decisions from the Left, the antiestablishment right, and even the Washington establishment — for disregarding diplomacy, betraying US allies and partners in key instances, badly mismanaging Washington’s grand strategy, and generally allowing chaos to reign in the world. The latter was particularly true in the Middle East, where the world’s most powerful elected leader regularly supplicated himself to his country’s own client state, Israel. Many of these criticisms were made by Donald Trump and his team.
But after yesterday’s bombing in Qatar by Israel, it’s now incontrovertible that Trump and the people he has surrounded himself with are worse on all of this than even Biden was.
First, a short explanation of the facts: Yesterday, at Trump’s urging, Hamas officials were meeting in Doha to discuss what the US president called his final offer for a ceasefire deal in Gaza, with Qatar continuing to play the role it had throughout the war as a neutral mediator between Hamas and Israel. Then without warning, Israel bombed the residential complex they were gathered in, killing five members of the group, though apparently failing to assassinate any of its senior officials.
The level of US complicity is still not totally clear. The Israelis claimed that the whole attack had been coordinated with and approved by Washington, while other reports have it that Israel went rogue and told the White House about it after the fact. The White House has quickly leaked how supposedly furious and blindsided they were, and Qatari officials have bitterly complained about the United States only “informing” them about the attack effectively as it was happening. There is no reason yet to assume this is the truth. But even if it was, the enormous, unconditional military and political support Washington gives Israel would make the United States…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
