So the former president tells the BBC that Benjamin Netanyahu did not defy him, and the British commentariat promptly chokes on its own smugness. They see a breach in US-Israel coherence, a rift in the special relationship, the first crack in the Western alliance. I see something far more disquieting: the odour of late-imperial decadence wafting from both sides of the Atlantic.
Let us first dispense with the fiction that there was ever a coherent US-Israel policy. The American approach to the Jewish state has always been a teetering stack of contradictions: a strategic asset, a moral burden, a domestic political football, a source of endless UN vetoes. Coherence implies a plan, a central nervous system of statecraft. What we have instead is a chaotic symposium of lobbies, think-tanks, and tweet-storms, with the occasional drone strike thrown in for gravitas.
Trump’s remark, then, is not a denial of defiance but a confession of confusion. It is the noise of a man who cannot distinguish between loyalty and sycophancy, between an ally and a vassal. Netanyahu, that wily Talleyrand of Tel Aviv, has played Washington like a Stradivarius for decades. He defies not by shouting insults but by quietly continuing his settlement projects while American presidents issue limp condemnations. The real defiance is structural. It is built into the architecture of the relationship.
And what of the British brokers who question this coherence? They inhabit a Westminster village that still dreams of empire, where foreign policy debates are conducted in the vocabulary of a vanished world. They fret about Anglo-American specialness while their own navy has fewer hulls than a Cornish fishing fleet. To question US-Israel coherence from London is like a bankrupt quizzing the solvency of his neighbour. It is theatre, not statecraft.
Consider the historical parallels. The late Roman Republic was similarly obsessed with client kings. Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus each had their own pet potentates, their Herod the Greats and Juba the Seconds. The senate kept trying to impose coherence, drafting protocols and sending commissions, but the centre would not hold. Personal loyalties trumped institutional ones, and the republic bled out in a series of civil wars. Sound familiar? Trump and Netanyahu are not a president and a prime minister. They are two strongmen who recognise each other’s vulnerabilities. The coherence they share is not one of policy but of personality. It is the bond of the outsider king.
Let us also note the peculiar intellectual decadence of today’s chattering classes. They treat a Trump interview as a seismic event. They parse his every word for hidden meanings, as if he were Augustine writing the City of God. But Trump is a weathervane, not a philosopher. His opinions shift with the prevailing winds of his own ego. The BBC and the UK brokers who clutch their pearls over his Netanyahu comment are indulging in a form of intellectual LARPing. They pretend that facts still matter, that alliances are made of treaties and shared values, when in reality they are made of threats and bribes.
National identity, too, comes into play. The British fascination with American politics is a symptom of a deeper malaise: the inability to forge a post-imperial role. We gaze across the Atlantic because we cannot bear to look in the mirror. Our own foreign policy is a shambles, our defence spending a joke, our diplomatic service a shadow. Yet we insist on being the wise uncle to America’s impulsive nephew. It is pathetic. It is also dangerous. It distracts us from the real challenges: the rise of China, the decay of our own institutions, the yawning gap between our elite and our people.
So let Trump say whatever he likes about Netanyahu. It changes nothing. The US-Israel relationship will continue its slow lurch from strategic partnership to transactional bickering. The British brokers will continue to write op-eds and hold seminars. And the republics of the West will continue their slow-motion decline, held together by the memory of greatness rather than the substance of power. I, for one, find it strangely exhilarating. There is a certain beauty in watching an empire crumble, especially when it is not your own. But then, I am a contrarian. Perhaps I am just annoyed that the end of this particular story is so tedious.
