The real reason Trump went to war wasn't about helping Israel: NYT editorial

12.07.2018. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM. Press conference of Donald Trump, President of United States of America, during NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) SUMMIT 2018 (Shutterstock).

President Donald Trump was not manipulated into the Iran war by Israel, a prominent columnist explained on Wednesday — but it will be difficult to avoid an upsurge in anti-Semitism because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did indeed play a critical role in persuading Trump.

“For those who suspect that Israel manipulated America into war, the resignation of Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, surely seems like confirmation,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote on Wednesday. Yet because Kent’s narrative “taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control,” it is bound to become potent in American politics.

Of course, Trump’s own bungling of the war effort has not helped matters much.

“This conflict, whose timing and purpose Trump barely bothered to explain to the American people, was probably always going to increase anti-Jewish animosity among Americans, especially when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gloats that he’s ‘yearned’ for such a war for 40 years,” Goldberg wrote. “But the more it drags on, the more I worry about a full-blown American ‘dolchstoßlegende,’ a modern version of the stab-in-the-back myth that German nationalists used to blame Jews for their humiliation in World War I.”

Goldberg pointed out that this myth will be harder to dispel in the case of the Iran war because officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have bragged about working closely with Netanyahu to persuade Trump.

“Given Israel’s deep involvement in almost every aspect of this war, it takes care and subtlety — both in short supply in our politics — to tease out the difference between reality and conspiracy theory,” Goldberg wrote. Yet she said perhaps the key detail is that Trump was not uniquely influenced by Israel in terms of his warmongering. Trump was just as bellicose during his first term and always seems susceptible to persuasion by strong-willed people around him, not just when it comes to Israel and Iran.

“A major distortion in Kent’s letter is that it presents Trump as a naïve victim of the Israelis rather than an eager collaborator,” Goldberg wrote. “Trump has always been more hawkish than the isolationists in his orbit admit; he ordered more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Barack Obama launched in eight. It wasn’t Netanyahu who made Trump abduct the president of Venezuela, an operation that seems to have both whetted his appetite for foreign adventure and convinced him that war can be easy.”

She added, “This week he boasted that he can ‘take’ Cuba and ‘do anything I want with it.’ Long obsessed with military might and displays of masculine aggression, Trump was enamored of the idea that he could rid the world of the anti-American regimes that bedeviled his predecessors. He went to war in Iran for his ego, not for Israel.”

Nevertheless, Goldberg ominously warned that the anti-Semitism problem in the Republican Party will only get worse from here.

“Kent is slated to appear on [Tucker] Carlson’s show this evening, and then at a gala alongside Candace Owens, one of the most nakedly antisemitic figures in American public life, tomorrow,” Goldberg wrote. “We can expect him to tell them that based on his view from the heights of American power, they were right all along.”

Writing in a piece for The i Paper published Wednesday, U.S. commentator Simon Marks pointed out that the recent resignation of Joe Kent as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center reveals on a deeper level that Trump cannot continue to hold together his MAGA coalition.

"The White House must now regret expending significant political capital last year to drag his nomination across the finishing line," Marks wrote. "On Tuesday, Kent became the most senior figure in Trump’s inner circle to betray the President. In doing so, he spoke for the substantial number of core 'Make America Great Again' and 'America First' supporters who believe that by waging war alongside Israel against Iran, Trump has lost the plot, if not his mind."

Similarly acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder commented that Trump’s inability to hold together his MAGA base on the Iran war jeopardizes his seeming attempts to seize power illegitimately during the 2026 midterm elections.

“Kent never should have been the director of the national counterterrorism center” in the first place, Snyder observed, writing that “he had no qualifications for this position” and indeed had “anti-qualifications,” including his sympathies for Russia and overt hate for Jews. Yet he was chosen because of his staunch MAGA loyalty, and his resignation “signals a certain clash within the pro-Trump elite between people who are out and out antisemites and people who are so-called Christian Zionists.” While the former simply hate Jews and Israel, treating the two as interchangeable, Christian Zionists “think that a war in the Middle East might be a good thing” because it could usher in a Biblical apocalypse.

“If Mr. Trump is going to succeed in breaking the November election in order to stay in power, he’ll have to have around him a tight, cohesive elite that really sincerely believes – for whatever set of bad reasons – that it’s worth sacrificing the republic for this person,” Snyder argued. The schism over the Iran war will make it harder to do.

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