Vance’s Threat Is The Latest Sign US Could Be Breaking With Israel

The United States joining with Israel to launch a war in the Middle East was always a fraught situation for the longstanding US-Israeli alliance.

But things seemed to come to a head Thursday, when Vice President JD Vance had some blunt and harsh words for Israel — words that sounded a whole lot like a threat.

It was the culmination of days of warning signs from the Trump administration, which clearly fears Israel might scupper a US agreement with Iran that many view as way too favorable to the Iranians. Israel and Hezbollah agreed to renew a ceasefire on Friday, sources told CNN, after fighting between the Israeli military and the Iran-backed militant group again jeopardized US-Iran negotiations.

The break seemed inevitable, for several reasons:

Israel’s goals for the Iran war were substantially different from the United States’ goals, and it was far more invested.
Israel’s reputation in the US had already substantially declined in recent years.

Even the still-strongly pro-Israel Republican Party has recently seen many prominent influencers strongly criticize Israel and has reckoned with growing antisemitism in its base.

While President Donald Trump has aligned strongly with Israel, he’s also trafficked in numerous antisemitic tropes over the years.

And Trump tends to treat allies well only insofar as it benefits him.
Now, the administration is practically yelling: You guys should take what we’ve given you and be happy, or else.

Whether the US ever gets to the “or else” part remains to be seen. But it’s remarkable that even the Republican Party seems to be increasingly approaching a breaking point with Israel.

Vance’s remarks, in which he pointed to Israel’s worldwide unpopularity, were the most striking.

“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,” Vance said at a press briefing Thursday. “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 entire world.”

Vance then repeatedly returned to the idea that maybe Israel should tread carefully.

He cited how reliant Israel is on American weapons, as well as the need for some Israeli leaders “to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.”

That echoed a harsh line in an interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat published earlier Thursday, in which the vice president urged Israel to recognize that the US has been an “incredible partner” and cited how US missile systems have protected the Israelis.

He also suggested Israel should scale back its efforts in Lebanon, which have threatened the tenuous peace process.

“You’re a country of nine million people,” Vance said of Israel. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

That last comment echoes Trump, who has several times painted Israel’s conduct as way too heavy-handed.

The US president earlier this month acknowledged telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he was “crazy” over Israel’s conduct in Lebanon.

Trump also told Axios that he had flatly warned Netanyahu.

“I said, ‘Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon,’” Trump said.

By June 14, Trump took to social media to decry an Israeli attack on Beirut, saying it “should not have happened” and that the Hezbollah attack it was responding to was “very small and meaningless.”

Then Trump got even more critical of Israel in comments alongside Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani on Tuesday at the G7 in France.

“You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah — that I can tell you,” Trump said.

He called a recent retaliatory attack from Israel “too much.”

Trump then concluded that, “if it weren’t for the United States of America … Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, 100%. And every smart person in Israel knows that.”

While Vance’s comments have gotten all the attention, Trump was barking up a very similar tree.

None of it means Trump and Israel are in for an imminent break. There is likely some posturing going on here, in hopes of keeping a clearly unhappy Israel in line amid peace talks.

And perhaps it will work. Sources said Friday that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to renew their ceasefire after a deadly clash.

But Israel and Netanyahu also have a major interest in extracting the most they can out of this war, given how rare an opportunity it is for other countries to join their efforts in trying to bring Iran to heel.

They’re simply in a very — foreseeably — different place than the Trump administration, which seems to just want this to be over. So it’s predictable that Israel will try to make it harder for the US to let go.

But even setting all that aside, the mere fact that Trump and Vance are talking in these terms is remarkable.

One of the biggest criticisms of Israel right now is that their conduct in the war in Gaza has simply gone too far — some, including an independent United Nations commission, have even called it genocide — an accusation Israel denies. If Trump says Israel goes way too far, that’s going to help cement that perception.

It’s also just a highly unusual way for the administration to treat Israel.

It’s true that Trump often treats allies poorly and in very transactional ways. (Look at what’s happening right now with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.) But the alliance with Israel has been different. Trump has seemed to view it as more beneficial and almost sacred, even when Netanyahu was personally frustrating him.

Yet the way Vance spoke about Israel on Thursday sounded a lot like his and Trump’s browbeating of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — remember “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?” — in the Oval Office last year.

In both cases, Trump and Vance were looking to put an ally in its place over reluctance to accept certain terms to end a war.

But in this case, the situation is threatening to upend decades of American foreign policy: a close alliance with Israel.

SOURCE: CNN