Trump’s Israel policy offers promise and peril
President-elect Trump will likely transform U.S.-Israeli relations — and U.S. relations across the Middle East — by providing more military and diplomatic support for Israel, working to weaken Israel’s adversaries and pursuing more Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
His efforts will be buttressed by GOP control of Congress. With the Jewish State increasingly a flashpoint in American politics, Republicans will promote their party as a better ally of Israel than a Democratic Party which has grown more critical of Israeli behavior in recent years.
Warming ties between Washington and Jerusalem, and coming changes in U.S. policy, however, carry risks for both sides. For Washington, they could complicate the Western support needed to advance other U.S. goals around the world. For Jerusalem, they could tempt the hard-right governing coalition to misinterpret, and thus jeopardize, American support by, for instance, annexing the West Bank.
The coming changes will play out on at least four fronts:
First, more support for Israel in the global arena. Trump is assembling an ardently pro-Israel foreign policy team, perhaps best exemplified by his choice for ambassador to the United Nations, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
An outspoken critic of the U.N. over its anti-Israeli tilt since Hamas’s slaughter of Oct. 7, Stefanik spoke in front of Israel’s Knesset in May,........
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