BAD FEELINGS ALL AROUND AFTER IRAN DEAL. The U.S. and Israel are mad at each other. At home, supporters of President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war are mad at him over the peace deal. Trump’s critics are happy the war might be coming to an end but mad at Trump for starting it. As far as the general public is concerned, a new CBS News poll found that 78% of those surveyed want the war to end now, while just 22% said it should continue “until Iran gives up more.”
On the U.S. side, no amount of talking can get around the fact that what began as a military attack that top American officials said had four goals — prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, destroy its ballistic missiles, sink its navy, and end its ability to arm proxies — ended, despite making great progress toward those goals, as a desperate effort to re-open the Strait of Hormuz and limit damage to the global economy. In the end, the only really concrete parts of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran were about the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. blockade. That might explain the question in the CBS News poll, which found that 69% of those surveyed said the war was not worth the costs to the U.S., while just 31% said it was.
When things go wrong and frustration mounts, people start pointing fingers at each other, even if they are ostensibly on the same side. Bad feelings spread. That’s where things are now.
One example is Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance’s public reassessment of the role played by the United States’ ally in the war, Israel. The two allies went to war with some common goals but also some different goals. At first, the differences seemed subsumed in the shared mission. Now, when things haven’t gone as planned, the differences have come into sharper relief.
There have been a number of reports about Trump’s increasing irritation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who encouraged Trump to start the war. Trump was, of course, a willing audience for Netanyahu’s pitch, and as president, Trump made the decision to take the U.S. to war.
But things did not work out as Netanyahu suggested they would. As problems mounted, there were reports of Trump going off on Netanyahu in private conversations — “You’re f****** crazy!” Trump reportedly said in one talk. And now the president is, in gentler but still unmistakable terms, criticizing Netanyahu’s conduct on Israel’s side of the war. The Israeli PM is a “good man,” Trump said recently, but he “gets a little excited sometimes.”
Citing Israel’s war in Lebanon, Trump suggested Netanyahu was a bit trigger-happy. “I say you can do a little softer touch, Bibi,” Trump said. “You don’t have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it that’s from Hezbollah.” In an interview with Axios, Trump said American leadership has to make sure Netanyahu remains “a little bit sane.”
For his part, Netanyahu, according to an Axios report, was “fuming” over the Trump-Iran agreement, especially after the U.S. essentially cut him out of the negotiations. While Netanyahu remained diplomatically silent, some in the Israeli cabinet were not. One minister said that the U.S.-Iran deal “does not bind us in any way” and that “Israel is not a subordinate of the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign state.” Another called the memorandum of understanding “bad for Israel and for the entire free world.” Some pro-Netanyahu TV commentators in Israel went much farther, referring to Trump as a “loser” and Vance as “scum.”
At the White House, when a reporter brought up the Axios report, Vance responded with what was, at least so far, the administration’s definitive statement of frustration with Israel. First, he refrained from criticizing Netanyahu himself, saying he, Vance, had not heard any “fuming” from the Israeli PM. But then:
What I will say, and this does bother me, is that you have seen people within Bibi’s cabinet who have come out and attacked the deal and in some ways, very personally attacked the President of the United States. And I guess my message to them would be twofold. Number one: Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state of the world’s superpower. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the world. And the second message I would give to some of those cabinet members — Bibi, to his credit, has not gone down this path, but to some of these cabinet members in Israel who are attacking the President of the United States — the other thing that I would say is that over the last three months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars. The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump. And anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.
Whatever effect they had in Tel Aviv, Vance’s comments set off angry words among some American commentators who support the war. Commentary editor John Podhoretz posted, “Our vice president is about three minutes away from posting pictures of Pepe the anti-Semitic frog.” Fox News’ Mark Levin began his program on Saturday night with a warning: “I want to say to people in and out of the administration: Stop trashing, smearing, bullying the little state of Israel.”
And those were all people purportedly on the same side. As far as the opposition was concerned, Democrats kept up the attacks on Trump, although there was nothing new there. The story was the breakdown of comity on the pro-war side.
When Trump began the war, there was a lot of wishful thinking among his opponents to the effect that the president had divided his own MAGA coalition. That wasn’t the case; polls showed an overwhelming majority of MAGA supported Trump’s initial decision, even though he had promised not to start new wars. Now, though, the base appears to be dividing over the peace. In the CBS poll, 56% of self-identified MAGA voters wanted to end the conflict now, while 44% said the conflict should continue until Iran gives up more. That’s pretty divided, and the situation could well worsen as the troubled peace process goes forward and the U.S. moves more deeply into the bad feelings stage of the war.