Trump and Netanyahu Steer Toward an Ugly World, Together

There was a time when a meeting between the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel brought only pride to both Israeli and American Jews, who saw two democratic leaders working together. Well, I know that I am not alone when I say that pride is not the emotion that welled up in me on seeing the chummy picture of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu meeting in the Oval Office on Monday. It was disgust and depression.

Each is a wannabe autocrat, each is working to undermine the rule of law and so-called elites in his respective country, each is seeking to crush what he calls a “deep state” of government professionals. Each is steering his nation away from its once universal aspiration to be a “light unto the nations” toward a narrow, brutish might-equals-right ethnonationalism that is ready to mainstream ethnic cleansing. Each treats his political opposition not as legitimate but as enemies within, and each has filled his cabinet with incompetent hacks, deliberately chosen for loyalty to him instead of the laws of their lands.

Each is driving his country away from its democratic traditional allies. Each asserts territorial expansion as a divine right — “From the Gulf of America to Greenland” and “From the West Bank to Gaza.”

In 2008, Fareed Zakaria published a prescient book titled “The Post-American World.” He argued that while the United States would continue to be the dominant world power, the “rise of the rest” — nations like China and India — meant that America’s relative dominance would shrink as the Cold War era receded.

Trump and Netanyahu are engaged, each in his own country, in creating a “post-America” and a “post-Israel” world. By “post-America,” though, I don’t mean an America that is losing relative power but an America that is deliberately shedding its core identity as a country, on its best days, committed to the rule of law at home and the betterment of all humanity abroad. By “post-Israel,” I mean an Israel that is deliberately shedding its core identity — that of a proudly proclaimed rule-of-law democracy in a region of strongmen that will always prioritize a permanent peace with Palestinians (if its security can be assured) over “a permanent piece’’ of the West Bank and Gaza.

One simply cannot imagine Trump or Vice President JD Vance aspiring to build the America that Ronald Reagan described in his Jan. 11, 1989, farewell address. Reagan spoke of the need to reinforce in our children “what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world.” That America was a moral and political beacon, “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”