“ It is not clear how Trump will guarantee that Netanyahu will not resume the war in future.” William Hague.
Here William Hague gets closest to examining why there is a war and why America is involved, and to a significant extent why it’s increasingly impotent. It isn’t America’s war but Israel’s and especially Benjamin Netanyahu’s.
That Israel wants to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah is perfectly understandable. These irregular forces have done great damage to Israel and are, incidentally, a severe restraint on the possibility of a peace process achieving anything. But so is Israel itself under Netanyahu, the most bellicose leader the country has ever had.
Removing non state military forces is not easy – the Vietcong and the Taliban showed that. Fighting terrorism isn’t easy either. The response to the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1968 didn’t eliminate Islamic terrorism. Nor did the response to 9/11.
It’s not America’s war – far less, for example, than the eventually botched post 9/11 attack on the Taliban because of their harbouring of Al-Qaeda. There is no moral imperative to Trump’s actions – he doesn’t do moral imperatives. Nor is there any military defence logic. America is not directly threatened (unlike Israel).
Netanyahu told Trump what he wanted and he complied – for reasons that will no doubt emerge in time. But the American public doesn’t like body bags and if ground troops do get involved there’ll be plenty of them.
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