'Humiliation': Trump ripped as he endures another 'international embarrassment'
Israel’s war-provoking strikes on Iranian nuclear targets may have humiliated Iran, but the biggest "humiliation" was on President Donald Trump, says New European politics Editor James Ball.
“Donald Trump … made clear both privately and publicly that he did not want Israel – one of America’s closest allies in the world – to launch the attack,” Ball writes. “The U.S. had been due to hold talks with Iran on Sunday, a process now undermined, potentially fatally, by the actions of Israel.”
The U.S. normally contributes about $4 billion in military and financial aid to Israel every year, but since the 2023 Hamas attacks Ball says the U.S. has upped those payments between $12-18 billion. That’s roughly a quarter to a third of Israel’s defense spending. In addition, Israel relies on direct U.S. military and intelligence assistance.
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And yet, Israel felt confident enough to “publicly and spectacularly disregard the wishes of Trump, undermine his negotiations, and get away with it,” writes Ball. “As public displays of disrespect towards an ally go, there are few cases to match it.”
Israel’s latest disdainful move rolls in on top of other international embarrassments for the president, said Ball.
“Trump campaigned through 2024 telling Americans that they were being humiliated and disrespected on the world stage – and that he was the man who could correct that,” he writes. “Trump famously claimed on more than 50 occasions that he would be able to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on ‘day one’ of his presidency. He suggested that Hamas would not have dared to carry out [its 2023] atrocities … if he were in the presidency. He promised to achieve a lasting ceasefire in Gaza within days.”
Trump promised he could deliver unprecedented wins and slammed the performance of his predecessor, President Joe Biden. But now, “mere months into his presidency, all of this has fallen apart in front of him,” Ball writes.
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His hope of a Russian/Ukrainian peace deal has evaporated while Putin repeatedly embarrasses Trump by refusing to make even minor concessions or adhere to ceasefires. Trump’s tariffs are also coming “to nothing,” Ball writes. His ceasefire in Gaza “collapsed into a fresh occupation of Gaza, which has come closer to starvation in recent months”.
Ball says “[i]n his desperate search for something he could sell to the American people as a win,” Trump was even exploring Barack Obama’s old Iranian nuclear deal, which Trump killed in his first term—probably in hopes of repurposing it as his own creation. But Ball says even that hope now has crumbled because “Israel has essentially done what it wished and dared the President to do anything about it.”
All this is happening because Ball says Trump approaches “diplomacy as if it was reality TV deal-making, as if a tough show for the cameras will do most of the work and the details will sort themselves,” without regard to “the slow, agonizingly-detailed diplomacy” required to realistically delivers results. And Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is “an inevitable consequence of the president’s own empty bluster,” because Trump “truly believes himself to be the world’s greatest negotiator and has come back with nothing.”
“That must be quite the blow to the ego.”
Read the full New European report at this link.
