Editor: Stephens makes it easy to track his concluding paragraphs, political chatter via his underlining of what he thinks of as ‘key’ ? Though the final two paragraphs that enshrines Ronald Reagan as primay political actor! Yet in this political moment, what is compelling is the fact of Russian and Chinese ascendency, the utterly unexpected Iranian control of The Strait of Hormuz! Nor the ebbing nature , or better yet the decline of the cult of ‘Jean Monnet The First Statesman of Interdependence’ ?
To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe — morally, aesthetically, intellectually, politically. If the administration were a play or film script, it would be neither farce nor tragedy but instead a kind of absurdist travesty, “Waiting for Godot” meets “Pulp Fiction” meets “Dumb and Dumber.”
However much we may disdain him, the president has the rest of us on the hook, as the face and voice of a country that ought to know better. Trump’s angry visage draped between the exterior columns of the Department of Justice? That’s us. His gilded, meretricious redecoration of the White House? That’s us. His repeatedly avowed admiration for Vladimir Putin? That’s us. His laughable claim about having achieved regime change in Tehran? That’s us. His Mafia-like threats against NATO allies? That’s us. His indescribably vain (and pathetically fruitless) effort to affix his name to the Kennedy Center? That’s us. His venal family profiting off his presidency in ways both transparent and tacky? That’s us.
The same goes for his insult of Meloni, which may be far from the worst of his sins but is also the most emblematic for being at once so utterly unnecessary as well as dementedly self-defeating. That’s us. The same country that freed its slaves, welcomed immigrants, invented airplanes, liberated concentration camps, landed men on the moon and challenged the Soviet Union to tear down this wall now bids to be the global equivalent of the expensively dressed man soiling his pants at a cocktail party.
For 10 years, I’ve watched my former political party work overtime not to cringe; to pretend that the Vesuvius of verbal infamies erupting daily from Trump’s mouth is either unimportant, or hilarious, or calculating and shrewd. Republicans turned their tolerance for the president’s mental goo into a shot-drinking contest — the more you drank, the manlier you were supposed to be. John McCain and Mitt Romney refused to play, to their everlasting credit; other Republicans, less admirably, did so only after Trump had ended their political futures.
But for 10 years, too, I’ve also watched the president’s opponents fail to appreciate the necessity of cringing — by understanding their role in Trump’s rise. The Democrats and their media enablers who, until June of 2024, insisted Joe Biden was fit for a second term (surely knowing, somewhere in the dim recesses of their minds, that this could only help Trump) are complicit. So are the progressives who, on one cultural issueafter another, shoved the Democratic Party so far to the left that it became the very caricature of what MAGA-world said it was.
Here, then, is our American challenge: Let’s not be afraid to cringe. Ronald Reagan predicted, correctly, that the Soviet Union would end up on the ash heap of history; now it’s our turn to risk winding up on the ash heap of idiocy.
Solet’s not look away from the parts we played in bringing America to this moment. Let’s remember who we once were, because it’s what we may yet be again — if only we feel the sting of our present shame.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber (born Feb. 13, 1924, Paris, France—died Nov. 7, 2006, Fécamp) was a French journalist and politician.
Servan-Schreiber volunteered in the Free French Army forces of Charles de Gaulle as a fighter pilot in 1943 and received the Cross of Valor for his services. In 1947 he graduated from the École Polytechnique. After serving as foreign affairs editor of the Paris daily paper Le Monde (1948–53), he founded and managed (1953–70) L’Express, a moderately left-wing weekly newsmagazine modeled on Time. The publication of L’Express was halted temporarily in 1954 when the magazine printed a top-secret government report. In 1956 Servan-Schreiber was drafted into the army, and the experience formed the basis of his first book, Lieutenant en Algérie (1957; Lieutenant in Algeria), which exposed French atrocities in the Algerian War of Independence. The controversial book was later credited with helping turn French public opinion against the Algerian conflict. In Le Défi américain (1967; The American Challenge) he warned against Europe’s becoming merely an economic colony of the United States. An immediate best seller, the work was eventually translated into more than 20 languages.
Servan-Schreiber was secretary general of the Radical Party (1969–71) and president (1971–75, 1977–79). His Ciel et terre: Manifeste radical (1970; The Radical Alternative, 1970) is a party manifesto. Elected as a deputy to the National Assembly in 1970, he served briefly as minister of reforms in the government of President Valèry Giscard d’Estaing but was ousted for opposing government policy on nuclear testing.
Servan-Schreiber founded the Mouvement Réformateur (“Reform Movement”) in 1972 with Jean Lecanuet and once again served briefly as minister of reforms in June 1974. He was president of the Regional Council of Lorraine from 1976 to 1978, and in 1979 he founded the Groupe de Paris (“Paris Group”), in conjunction with which he published Le Défi mondial (1980; The World Challenge, 1980). He also continued in the 1970s to be associated with the direction of L’Express. From 1988 to 1994 Servan-Schreiber was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.
Quick Facts
Born:
Feb. 13, 1924, Paris, France
Died:
Nov. 7, 2006, Fécamp (aged 82)
Other publications of Servan-Schreiber include Les Réveil de la France (1968; The Spirit of May, 1969), a collection of editorials examining causes of the student uprisings in France in 1968; Forcer le destin (1970; “Forcing Destiny’s Hand”); Le Pouvoir régional (1971; “Regional Power”); Appel à la reforme (1971; “A Call to Reform”); L’Arme de la confiance (1976; “The Weapon of Confidence”); and Le Manifeste (1977; “The Manifesto”).
Sir Keir Starmer is a prisoner of the politics he pledged to end
When rigmarole becomes reality
Of all the distortions and deceits that Sir Keir Starmer deployed in order to reach Downing Street, one stands out. It was not the promise of free tuition fees offered to left-wing Labour members, ditched after the leadership contest was over. It was not the solemn pledge to forgo tax rises on income, vat or national insurance made at the last election, which will be smashed in the budget on November 26th.
It was the promise of stability. Sir Keir pledged to “stop the chaos”. Britain, he argued, was a prisoner of Westminster rigmarole. After a decade of Conservative instability, featuring minority governments, a carousel of chancellors and Britain’s first six-week prime minister, a Labour government would bring serenity, he pledged. “We’re all stuck in their psychodrama,” said Sir Keir. “All being dragged down to their level.”
In a way, Sir Keir was more right than he knew. On November 12th officials in Downing Street accused Wes Streeting, the health secretary, of planning to oust the prime minister. Mr Streeting labelled his accusers conspiracy theorists who were trying to “kneecap” him. In the space of 16 months Sir Keir’s government has managed to accumulate a stench of death that it took his Conservative predecessors a good decade to build up. Rigmarole is ascendant once more.
A man who set out to slay rigmarole has seen his government swallowed by it. It starts in the place Sir Keir still, for now, calls home. Briefings against Mr Streeting stemmed from people Sir Keir appointed. Downing Street has been in disarray since Sir Keir entered office, with a constant stream of sackings, surprisingly short tenures and ill-tempered briefings about senior advisers and, increasingly, cabinet ministers. It is a bad record for a prime minister who prided himself on being a bureaucrat. A nasty office is one thing in the private sector; it is quite another when it is supposed to be running a g7 country.
Relationships at the top of government are not just a matter for gossip. After all, Sir Keir is merely first among equals in cabinet and must rely on persuasion rather than power. The problem is that the other people at the coffin-shaped table see the prime minister as more of a lesser. Cabinet ministers regard him with increasingly ill-disguised contempt. Discipline is close to breaking down. During a reshuffle in September Ed Miliband, both the closest thing Sir Keir has to a friend at the top of politics and a potential replacement, was asked to move jobs. He refused. It is not just Mr Streeting in cabinet who thinks they could do a better job than Sir Keir. And they might be right.
Keir Starmer should be Britain’s next prime minister
Why Labour must form the next government
Jun 27th 2024
YOU WOULD never know it from a low-wattage campaign but after 14 years of Conservative rule, Britain is on the threshold of a Labour victory so sweeping that it may break records. No party fully subscribes to the ideas that The Economist holds dear. The economic consensus in Britain has shifted away from liberal values—free trade, individual choice and limits to state intervention. But elections are about the best available choice and that is clear. If we had a vote on July 4th, we, too, would pick Labour, because it has the greatest chance of tackling the biggest problem that Britain faces: a chronic and debilitating lack of economic growth.
Consider first the alternatives. We can discard some immediately. The Scottish National Party wants to dismember Britain, not run it. The Greens make student politics look rigorous. Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s outfit, offers a fevered, nativist vision of Britain that would accelerate the very decline it says it is striving to prevent.
What of the Liberal Democrats? The logic that led us to endorse them in 2019 no longer holds. Against Boris Johnson’s Brexit-obsessed Tories and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left charisma vacuum, they were the only choice. Today the Lib Dems still have some good policies—letting asylum-seekers work, say, or a new land-value tax—but they have become more sceptical on trade and even more nimbyish on planning. The Lib Dems do not aspire to be a credible party of government; they are barely credible as liberals.
Trying to make the case for the Tories is like a teacher struggling to say something nice about the class troublemaker. They have done some good things: on educational standards, on regional devolution and on the tax regime for capital investment. Rishi Sunak is a better prime minister than Liz Truss, though if praise came any fainter it would be invisible. The pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine—where they also did well—vastly complicated their time in office.
…
That is the negative case for voting Labour, but there are positive arguments, too. The first is that the party has been transformed. Since the last election Sir Keir Starmer has expelled Mr Corbyn, rooted out many of his fellow travellers and dragged Labour away from radical socialism. The Economist disagrees with the party on many things, such as its plan to create a publicly owned energy provider. But elections are when voters mete out rewards as well as punishments, and Labour’s reinvention deserves credit.
Readers recall this defamation of Jeremy Corbyn of Sep 19th 2015 in the The Ecocomist?
Jeremy Corbyn is leading Britain’s left into a political timewarp. Some old ideological battles must be re-fought
Sep 19th 2015|5 min read
BEFORE he had finished belting out his first celebratory rendition of “The Red Flag”, a hymn to class struggle, some of Jeremy Corbyn’s colleagues in Labour’s shadow cabinet had already handed in their resignations. A 66-year-old socialist, Mr Corbyn has spent 32 years as one of the hardest of hardline left-wingers in the House of Commons and a serial rebel on the Labour backbenches. On September 12th he flattened three moderate rivals (see article) to become leader of Britain’s main opposition party. Labour MPs are stunned—and perhaps none more so than Mr Corbyn himself.
The second positive reason to back Labour is its focus on growth. The party is right in its diagnosis that nothing matters more than solving Britain’s stagnant productivity. Its young, aspiring, urban supporters will give it permission to act in ways that the Conservatives have avoided. The most obvious of these is building more houses and infrastructure, and forging closer relations with Europe. The party of public services may also have more latitude to reform them than the Tories would.
The question that hangs over Labour is how radical it will be in pursuit of growth. It has run a maddeningly cautious campaign, choosing to reassure voters rather than seek a mandate for bold change. It does not help that Sir Keir, having been in Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before ejecting him, seems to turn with the wind. Having strenuously avoided the subject in the campaign, a Labour government will need to raise taxes (as would a Conservative one if it was not to wreck public services). For all these reasons, having failed to set out a vision to steer by, prime minister Starmer could more easily be blown off course by events or sidetracked by growth-stifling left-wing preoccupations, such as beefing up workers’ rights, stamping out inequality and doling out industrial subsidies.
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood: (Editor: This is Pure Agitprop or a restatement of watered down Oswald Mosley? )
Sir Keir’s answer to this criticism of him as a campaigner should be his determination and competence in office. His method is to work relentlessly towards a goal, ratcheting up pressure as he goes. After years of post-Brexit Conservative ideological lurches, that in itself will be worth something. If Labour also succeeds in overhauling the planning regime, strengthening ties with Europe, giving fiscal power to cities, focusing the Treasury on growth and rationalising the tax system, the picture will brighten and Britain will be better off. Sir Keir and his party have earned the chance to try. ■
Editor: Mr. Snyder offers this in his first 1115 word diastribe, a cast of bad actors !
Trump’s capitulation before to Iran leads us back to what Trump really cares about: not losing any of his power in the congressional elections of this November.
He had to surrender for the basic reason known to all serious students of war: the Iranians were able to affect his political situationmore than he was able to affect theirs. Now, the “deal” is a mess, and the “process” is a mess, and the war in some way might continue. But the terms to which Trump has already agreed are a capitulation; and as time passes he will, if anything, have to settle for something even worse. He might be irritated by this or that, or disrupted by yet another Israeli attack in Lebanon (or Gaza), or delayed by all the money made by his friends. But he will surrender as quickly as he can (as he has now shown) because the clock to the November elections is ticking.
As an aspiring tyrant in a flawed democracy, he has to be concerned about the economy in general and gasoline prices in particular. The Iranians knew this and exploited it. But the fact that Trump capitulates to Iranians does not mean that he will abandon the utopia of violence as such. He has never really had a problem with subordinating himself to foreign dictators; lacking any sense of personal shame or any notion of American patriotism, he can shrug off defeat to Iran, just as he accepts everyday obedience to Russia. What matters to him is the convenience and comfort that comes from the presidency, and that logic leads directly to another use for the American armed forces: to intervene in the midterm elections this November or the presidential elections two years from now.
Such a move would be in keeping with Hegseth’s career and thought. Like Trump, Hegseth lacks any sense of what the interests of the United States as such might be. His ideological purge of the top officer ranks is inconsistent with battlefield success; it is consistent with the aim of creating a Trumpian praetorian guard whose only mission is to intimidate Americans. Indeed, the natural trajectory of the Department of Defense under a complete incompetent such as Hegseth (whether he explicitly wishes this or not) is to render the armed forces capable of little more than civil war against fellow citizens.
Hegseth is concerned only with the general idea of enemies, and for him the main enemies are Americans. He does not believe in the Constitution: for him, any rights come from God, and he decides whom God protects. “Sometimes,” he writes, “the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies.Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.” He tells us that “the Left” plans “utter annihilation” for everyone else, which of course would justify annihilating Americans defined as “the Left” first. Hegseth makes it quite clear that the violence he wants is directed against other Americans: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”
Reasonable people can draw a reasonable lesson from defeat in Iran: even putting ethical questions aside, violence will not lead where you think. History, however, instructs us fairly clearly about how utopians of violence interpret defeat in foreign war: they blame an “enemy “at home for their own poor judgements and failures, and then claim that this enemy must now be defeated. The poor performance of the armed forces cannot be explained by their own ideological folly or their own manifest incompetence; it must be the fault of someone else. It will be quite easy for Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) to shift from their current (and risible) claim that we won the war to the claim that we would have won it if not for the stab in the back at home. And that way of seeing things then becomes the justification for putting soldiers (and ICE) on the streets during an election, or claiming that a terrorist attack (most likely a fake one) means that we have to have a state of emergency instead of an election, or something else along those lines.
That is where the minds of Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are likely to go. Vance, too, is a utopian of violence; he believed that invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying troops in Minnesota would have crushed protests and brought stability. This is unlikely; the use of violence, at home even more than abroad, opens new avenues of unpredictability, and almost never goes where you think it will go. But Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.
And so the rest of us have a simple duty: to recognize the utopias of violence, to note the risk to the republic. The fact that Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are thinking about using violence at home does not mean that it will actually happen. Seeing a utopia of violence for what it is makes it far less likely to be realized. Indeed, the only way we get to soldiers at voting booths is by determinedly looking away and pretending that this isn’t what Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) wish for.
Utopian thinking can be a sign of weakness rather than strength, as it is in this case. Trump is extremely unpopular, as was his war, as are his policies generally. His charisma depends on a televisual projection of strength, but he just lost his whimsy war and looks terrible. The men who stand behind him are still less popular. Their utopianism is unappealing; and their desire for personal power is naked. It should not be hard to recognize all of this and to agree, recognizing that we will disagree about other matters, that there is no place for American military action at home, and that our elections should be held in peace.
…
Editor: Timothy Snyder as Public Moralist failes to look in a mirror, any mirrow, as to his own War Mongring in Ukraine! The psychological inability to recognize one’s own prejudice or biases is most commonly referred to as implicit bias!
Newspaper Reader wonders about Oxbridger snobbery, but also about the rise of Vance via Peter Thiel political manipulation, and the manuscript of Hillbilly Elegy by many hands!
Editor: I will just highlight some of the almost ‘literary crticism’, or more acurately that dependable Oxbridger condescension, as the preferred critical methodology. Though the reader and or listener of Vance’s self-serving chatter is echoed by his critical reviewer. Though the reader is pulled into the vortex of the mendacity, of both the author and the critic!
“Communion”, his latest book, shows how the vice-president fails to notice his own vices
Photograph: AP
Jun 19th 2026
Communion. By J.D. Vance. Harper; 304 pages; $35. William Collins; £20
J.D. Vance is a very godly man, as his very godly new book makes very clear. He goes to church; he is polite to priests; and he has read the Bible (twice, even the dull bits). He tries to be a very godly man in his life, too. He prays to God in intense italics to make him a “good dad”; stars out naughty words like “p***y”; and he ends his book with the word “Amen”. For him, actions matter because, as he says, quoting the Gospel of Matthew in yet more italics, “By their fruits ye shall know them”.
However if ye shall read “Communion”, the vice-president’s religious memoir, ye shall probably also feel a little confused. For which of the fruits of Mr Vance shall ye know him by? Shall ye know him as the man who prissily stars out words like p***y? Or as deputy for Donald Trump, a man who once boasted that he could “grab [women] by the pussy”? Shall ye know him as the person who predicted Mr Trump might be “America’s Hitler”? Or as the man who—as he does here—calls Mr Trump’s words “moral”? It is hard to tell.
Mr Vance used to be far simpler. This is his second literary coming; his first, published in 2016, was “Hillbilly Elegy”. Its title nodded at romantic poetry, but there was little romance here. For page after page, he chronicled the lives of the left-behind in America’s rust belt: people without jobs and with opioid habits. Its heroine, for him, was his grandmother, who he called “Mamaw”—but do not imagine her as a granny in the apron-and-apple-pie vein. When her husband irritated her, she poured gasoline over him, “lit a match, and dropped it on his chest”.
For Americans, the book’s hero was Mr Vance. Just as medieval readers were inspired by stories of saints who did battle with demons and then won eternal life, so modern ones were heartened by how Mr Vance had done battle with his own demons and drug-addicted relatives to ascend to secular sainthood—or, at any rate, a place at Yale Law School. After Mr Trump was elected in 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy” became a sensation—selling over 5m copies worldwide—and it made his name.
Mr Vance’s second coming was always going to be harder. This is not wholly his fault. Virtue, as Milton and Dante discovered, is much less fun than vice: everyone reads “Paradise Lost”; no one bothers with “Paradise Regained”. Everyone knows Dante’s “Inferno”; his “Paradiso” is an also-ran. St Augustine managed a good conversion memoir, “Confessions”, in the fourth century, but he seasoned it with ample sin, having prayed for God to make him good “but not yet”.
God made J.D. Vance good a bit too soon for “Communion” to be much fun. “Hillbilly Elegy” is filled with family tragedy, violence and uncles who do invigorating things like attacking their enemies with electric saws. By its end, however, Mr Vance is ensconced among the elite where his greatest discomfort is attending drinks events with lawyers. At these, he is first baffled by butter knives (surely that’s what index fingers are for?) then starts to doubt the meaning of life. (Lawyers can do that to a man.)
For a time, this is fine: he fills his days with work, ambition, atheism and friends. Then, as he marries and settles down, the God-shaped hole (or, arguably, given Mr Vance’s ambition, the political poll) attracts him to religion. God was not utterly alien to him: his relatives had bashed Bibles as well as each other—but he had never been devout.
Initially he is unsure on denominational differences, except that “Catholics kneeled more and the Pentecostals had better music”. At first his faith feels so anodyne it is almost Anglican: he calls Christianity “my new interest”, as if it were chess or yoga; reads a lot of C.S. Lewis; and is inspired by that great theological thinker, Aslan the lion. St Augustine this is not.
In the end it is Catholicism, with its offer of bells, smells and Satan, that most appeals. Soon he is going to confession (“like therapy, but with less whining and more guilt”), befriending priests and reading Thomas Aquinas. He was baptised in August 2019; today he evangelises with the zeal of the convert.
He quotes the archaic King James version, at length, deplores “false idols” and champions traditional motherhood. Most startlingly, he wants to weaken the traditional American separation of church and state.
But for all the fervour, his faith feels very erratic. At one point he states that Christianity demands “a constant evaluation of trade-offs”, as if Jesus were an ecclesiastical economist rather than, as Catholics believe, the son of God. When covid-19 breaks out, he realises that food might run short, so he buys “enormous bags of rice and flour” and “one thousand rounds of ammunition”. It is almost like reading about the loaves and the fishes.
Editor: The final paragraphs of this Economist Reader’ evaluations are as unimpressive as is J. D Vance political rise to power: via a well placed political actor like Peter Thiel! The cutivation of powerful political actors is indespensable!
Mr Vance is a good writer, but “Communion” is a confusing book. Which Mr Vance is he? The one who bangs on about God’s grace? Or the one who treats people like Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky—a man in need if ever there was one—with a deplorable lack of grace? He keeps repeating, “By their fruits ye shall know them”. Yet by the end of this book, ye shall probably not be much the wiser as to who J.D. Vance is, or was.
Or, most worrying of all, who he shall next become. Though even if he does ascend to the presidency, he may find that fruit is bitter, too. For, as his beloved Matthew says, “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Mr. Janan Ganesh celebrates the inevitable decline of The Welfare State and it’s misbegotten, indeed mendacious origins, and it’s political/ethical defeat in terms of ideas and practice, a bit too soon. He invokes History as a political actor in a way that some, even he, might find uncomfortably Hegelian, even enlisting the geological ‘tectonic movements’ and Hobbes’ Leviathan in his arguments. His essay is cock-a-block with usable historical metaphors. The usual stance of Neo-Liberal apologists is to attack the proven failure of ‘Socialism’ and ‘Social Democracy’, while utterly and quite rightly ignoring, all in the name of self-serving political myth-making, the rather egregious failure of ‘Free Market Economics’ in 2008.
The empirical evidence of American and European economies still floundering after the collapse of the ignoble fantasy, of that self-correcting Market, are everywhere, except to ideologues. Five years of waiting for the mirage of recovery to manifest itself, aided by an enlightened Austerity is not long enough?
But Mr. Ganesh, true to form,chatters on about welfare and pension spongers and celebrates the Queen Bee of that collapsed mythology, Mrs. Thatcher, and her collection of Political Romantics masquerading as Economists. And in the process celebrates the inevitable victory of the Austerians as Mr. Krugman calls them. The victory of the Neo-Liberals in the politics/economics of America and Europe has been disastrous and it just continues to worsen. No answers from Mr. Ganesh, except a kind of loathsome political fatalism.
Similarly, some researchers have found that foreign-born Americans are slightly more likely native-born ones to express cold feelings toward Jews, though the same researchers stress that the difference is very minor and does not establish a causal link between foreign birth and antisemitic sentiment. Perhaps more significantly, Vance’s attempt to pin rising antisemitism to immigration conspicuously overlooks the role played by openly antisemitic figures on the right — people the white-nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes, who recently sat down for a friendly interview Vance’s close ally Tucker Carlson — in boosting anti-Jewish views.
But it’s fair to assume that Vance isn’t making these comments in the spirit of actually identifying the multivalent causes of these problems. Instead, they’re best understood as Vance’s attempts to manage an increasingly fractious coalition. And as windows into Vance’s own understanding of the primary fault lines dividing the Republican Party, his recent comments are actually quite illuminating.
Vance, who has readily stepped into the role of mediator between MAGA’s various competing factions, seems to have identified the cost-of-living crisis and the rise of antisemitism as two of the major issues splitting Trump’s coalition — with good reason. On the cost-of-living issue, the administration is increasingly coming under fire from populist conservatives who claim that Trump has focused on foreign policy issues at the expense of addressing the affordability crisis at home. Trump has struggled to come up with a compelling rejoinder to this line of critique, instead waffling between assuring voters that he’s taking the cost-of-living crisis seriously and dismissing “affordability” as a “Democrat scam.”
Similarly, the administration has struggled to address the growing divide on the right between stalwart supporters of Israel and “America First” critics of the U.S-Israel alliance — a group that also includes out-and-out antisemites like Fuentes. Trump’s response to this fissure has been to float ambiguously above the fray, publicly doubling down on his support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government while also reaffirming his backing of Israel critics like Tucker Carlson — a posture has left both camps feeling unsatisfied. Vance, meanwhile, has stayed mostly quiet on the controversy.
At the same time, Vance seems to be betting that opposition to immigration remains the one stance that can unite a movement that is otherwise divided over economics, foreign policy, tech and AI policy, healthcare, the Epstein disclosures and more. Linking these more divisive issues back to immigration offers one strategy for smoothing over the fault lines. It also allows the administration to claim progress on issues where the GOP lacks consensus: If immigrants are causing the housing crisis, then what does it matter if Republicans don’t have a plan for building more housing so long as Trump ramps up his mass deportation efforts?
The risk for Vance is that voters will see through this maneuver and demand more direct plans to address issues like housing costs and stagnating wages, beyond whatever benefits are provided by the administration’s immigration crackdown. But if Vance’s recent appearance in Pennsylvania offers any indication, that’s a danger he’s willing to two-step around. “Why did housing get so expensive, double in price during the Biden administration?,” he asked. “It’s because Joe Biden let in 20 million illegal immigrants who took homes that ought by right go to American citizens.”
It would seem that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accomplished what his predecessors could only have dreamed of: U.S. and Israeli fighter jets flying tandem over Tehran, Israeli officers ensconced in U.S. Central Command’s Florida headquarters. Since the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s leaders have sought backing from the world’s preeminent superpower, which they hoped would guarantee their state’s survival into perpetuity. None could have imagined the level of cooperation currently on display. If one were to wake up the Old Man, as Ben-Gurion was known, from his otherworldly slumber in the sands of Sde Boker, he would surely delight in the news.
Appearances, however, can be deceiving. In one sense, the U.S.-Israel relationship is at its apogee. Viewed from another angle, it has already entered a period of terminal decline. The political, ideological, and sociological pillars on which the so-called special alliance rested for most of the last half-century have begun to collapse. The Israel-advocacy complex—the network of lobbying groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Jewish communal organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, and Christian Zionist groups such as Christians United for Israel—was once a juggernaut on Capitol Hill. In today’s climate of hyperpolarization, it has started to falter, challenged first by the progressive flank of the Democratic Party and now increasingly by the neoisolationist faction of the MAGA coalition.
Public opinion has shifted dramatically. Less than half of Americans now say U.S. support for Israel is in the national interest; for the first time, Americans also view Palestinians more sympathetically than they do Israelis. Nor is it any longer a given that Americans and Israelis hold a common set of cultural and religious values. As the United States has become less Christian and more diverse, Israeli society has become more traditionalist, its public culture more insular. On both the U.S. right and left, antisemitism has also begun to seep from the margins into the political mainstream, seen by growing numbers of people, especially among the young and disaffected, as a marker of anti-establishment bona fides in populist times.
These shifts were well underway before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. But Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, its blockade and starvation of the devastated territory, and spiraling settler violence in the occupied West Bank—all livestreamed over social media for more than two years—greatly accelerated them, generating an anti-Israel backlash that has become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary U.S. politics. If indeed the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran constitutes the apex of the special alliance, what follows will be the fall…
Vance’s stark warning to Israeli leaders: ‘Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel’
By sharply criticizing Israel, accusing it of blocking the agreement signed between Washington and Tehran on June 17, the US vice president exposed a lasting rift between the two countries.
The break was spectacular, sudden and deep. During a press conference on Thursday, June 18, US Vice President JD Vance delivered a harsh and almost threatening message to Israel, a longtime ally. “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 I have left,” Vance warned. He was referring to criticism from Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two far-right ministers, regarding the memorandum of understanding signed with Iran on June 17.
As if that warning were not enough, Vance went even further, criticizing Israel beyond just its government, using words that will resonate for a long time: “The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump. And anyone 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,” Vance emphasized. In other words, Israel has been able to wage a war of annihilation in Gaza for two years, killing more than 73,000 Palestinians (according to Gaza’s health ministry), without provoking any US reaction. But criticizing or threatening a deal signed by Donald Trump is off limits.
This episode will leave its mark. The reality check is especially harsh for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has built his strategy around his personal relationship with the current US president, using it as leverage for military power and as a political asset in the upcoming fall elections. His close relationship with Trump allowed him to push hard to convince the United States to launch a large-scale strike on Iran at the end of February, a goal he had long hoped to achieve from an American president.
But Trump, more unpredictable than ever, changed course several times on Iran before ultimately signing the memorandum of understanding that is widely seen as extremely favorable to the Islamic Republic, a regime he had previously predicted and wished would collapse when launching the offensive.
Aggressive outbursts
As a result, facing the risk that Netanyahu might try to derail the process – as he has done in the past, notably in Gaza – Trump issued a series of aggressive (”You’re fucking crazy”) and threatening (”Without the US, there would be no Israel”) statements. But in the medium term and at the strategic level, the break is most significant and concerning for Israel.
Support for Israel has been a constant in US foreign policy for decades, regardless of the president’s political affiliation, and even more so after the attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023. “There is no greater friendship than the one between Israel and the United States,” Netanyahu has repeatedly said.
Militarily, except for a period when Joe Biden temporarily suspended the delivery of offensive munitions intended for use in Gaza, cooperation has never been smoother.
After the launch of the joint military operation against Iran on February 28, military experts competed in superlatives to praise the bond between the two militaries. Operationally, they shared Iranian airspace to bomb as many targets as possible. In response to Tehran’s retaliation, which involved more than 600 missiles fired at Israel, the US activated its air defense systems. Israelis saw this as integration; Vance sharply reminded them on Thursday that it was, first and foremost, dependence: “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.”
Difficult situation
Iran suffered considerable damage but did not yield. Its strategy worked, especially in recent weeks: by pushing Israel to respond to Hezbollah’s attacks by bombing Beirut, and thus jeopardizing ongoing negotiations, Iran drove a wedge into the historic alliance between Americans and Israelis. As a result, Netanyahu faces a difficult situation on the Lebanese front, where his army occupies a zone about 10 kilometers deep along the entire border.
The deal signed between the US and Iran, from which Netanyahu was completely excluded, calls for a halt to hostilities and respect for Lebanon’s territorial integrity. For now, this remains wishful thinking: the ceasefire has never been implemented. Thursday night saw particularly violent clashes, with four Israelis killed and at least 25 people killed by bombings in Lebanon, which led to the cancellation of talks scheduled for Friday in Switzerland between Iran and the US.
Netanyahu said he refused to withdraw his army from southern Lebanon “because this zone is the barrier between Hezbollah terrorists and our citizens and communities,” he explained. His electorate, whipped up for years by promises of “total victory,” would not forgive him. He’s meanwhile tried to calm tensions with US leaders, avoiding any public criticism. “The fight is not over, and other challenges await us. They require discernment, a determined defense of Israel’s security interests and, at the same time, preserving our vital relationship with our American friends, who have stood by us in this fight, a partnership we deeply appreciate,” Netanyahu said on Thursday, while inaugurating a highway segment in the West Bank designed to accelerate settlement expansion.
Vance’s words are illuminating to Israelis who refused to acknowledge the strategic dead end of all-out war. Israel has continued to isolate itself over the past two years, implicitly or explicitly dismissing criticism as a form of antisemitism. It lost the support of many political leaders who had expressed their outrage after the October 7 attacks. More seriously and lastingly, it lost public opinion, especially in Europe and the US. “Israel just met the America that comes after Trump,” summed up Zvika Klein, editor-in-chief of the English-language daily Jerusalem Post, on Friday morning.
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