https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii151/articles/susan-watkins-baselines

Trump’s second election win was greeted with resigned forbearance by the Atlantic establishment last November. The pace was set by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, who turned on a dime from anathematising the Republican candidate to explaining in the friendliest terms why a great dealmaker like Trump should adopt Friedman’s plan for the Middle East. Yet within weeks of the January inauguration, feathers are flying on both sides of the Atlantic. The Economist fears the us may be lurching into an age of McKinleyite overseas land grabs. A former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party sees it retreating to a heavily fortified hemispheric bunker, from Greenland to Patagonia. An nyt reporter tentatively suggested that many of Trump’s tweets might be mere bluster, ‘myriad diversions to grab attention and aggravate Democrats’, as the President apparently assures his friends. A few days later, Trump had rung Putin to propose a deal on Ukraine and denounced the beatified figure of Zelensky as an election-avoiding dictator. His Vice President’s assault on European curbs of free speech and democracy reduced the head of the Munich Security Conference to tears.footnote1

Amid the clamour, it may be helpful to draw up a telegraphic aide-mémoire, looking back at what Trump actually did from 2017 to 2020 with the world bequeathed to him by Obama, and what Biden then did with the one he inherited from Trump. The aim would be to set some baselines in place—overseas, on the Middle East, Russia and China; at home, on borders and economic policy—as a way to measure which of the Administration’s interventions constitute an actual Trumpian rupture and which should be considered merely a cruder version of business as usual. The past is not necessarily a reliable guide to the future, but it is the only one we have.
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Entering office with the onset of the Great Recession, Obama inherited two Middle East wars from Bush and embroiled the us in several more. He began his first term by sending 30,000 extra troops into Afghanistan—‘this is a war we have to win’footnote2—and ended his second by ordering a new lunge in Iraq. In 2011 he helped steer the Arab Spring towards its deadly winter of restored dictatorships and civil-war devastation, aided by the Arab ruling classes and their military and intelligence chiefs, not to mention the haplessness of the Muslim Brotherhood. He launched the nato war on Libya, then stoked disparate anti-regime proxies in Syria, instructing the cia to coordinate the exchange of Gulf money, American arms and Turkish bases. His Administration kept the Saudi–uae assault on the Yemenis going with a steady flow of weapons and intelligence, while he pursued his personal drone war against unarmed targets in northern Pakistan. He backed the Israeli blockade of Gaza with arms, cash and diplomatic protection at the un Security Council as the idf fired on Palestinian fishermen and bombed civilian housing in 2012—thanked by Netanyahu for his ‘unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend itself’footnote3—and again in 2014, during the Israeli offensive that killed over 2,000 Palestinians and destroyed a quarter of Gaza City’s housing stock.

Two years later, Obama brokered a record us subsidy of $38 billion for Israel over the following decade. On Iran, he inflicted the toughest sanctions to date and threatened bombardment, to extract compliance with the jcpoa, under which Tehran would slash its nuclear-enrichment capacity and open its sites to 24-hour monitoring by the West, in return for eventual sanctions respite.footnote4 Foolishly backed by Beijing and Moscow as well as Paris, London and Berlin, the deal was assailed by Tel Aviv and the Israel Lobby in the us for failing to cut Iranian missiles and curb links with Hezbollah and Hamas.
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In 2016 Trump thus inherited from Obama a ring of devastated states surrounding a muscle-flexing Israel and a booming Gulf. In his first term Trump took little interest in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, handing decisions on troop deployment there to the Pentagon, in contrast to Obama’s obsessive micro-management. He was rhetorically vituperative with Iran, shelving the jcpoa in May 2018 after the Supreme Leader failed to agree to missile cuts.footnote5 But he had big hopes for Saudi Arabia and Israel, destinations for his first presidential visits in May 2017. A son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the yeshiva and Harvard-educated scion of New Jersey slumlords, also a personal friend of mbs and the Netanyahus, was appointed Senior Advisor in charge of the Israel–Palestine peace process.footnote6 Working with us Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and a major funder of the far-right Beit El settlement, Kushner came up with a blueprint: on the one hand, Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements; on the other, Palestinian disarmament and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, in return for a self-rule on 15 per cent of their homeland.footnote7 Kushner it was who mused last spring about the possibilities of the Gaza Strip as a glitzy waterfront development, its inhabitants decanted to reservations in the Negev Desert or camps in Jordan and Egypt.footnote8

The 2020 ‘Trump Peace Plan’ was dismissed out of hand by Palestinians, as by seasoned American negotiators, annoyed that it involved dumping the quisling leadership they had been nurturing for thirty years. But it was a Rorschach test for the Arab capitals. Bahrain thanked the us for its work and urged the two sides to start direct negotiations under us sponsorship. The uae thought the plan a serious initiative that offered an important starting point. Sisi’s Egypt called on Israelis and Palestinians to undertake a thorough consideration of the ‘us vision’ for peace. Morocco and Saudi Arabia both ‘appreciated’ Trump’s efforts.footnote9 These craven capitulations laid the ground for the so-called Abraham Accords eight months later—bilateral deals granting Israel over-flight rights and degrees of diplomatic recognition—rewarded by Trump with specially chosen gifts: for Morocco, American blessing of the annexation of the Western Sahara; for the uae, a fleet of F35s; for Sudan, a $1.2 billion loan and removal from the ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ list. Kushner’s investment firm for Israeli start-ups was awarded $2 billion by the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, of which $25 million a year was absorbed by Kushner’s ‘management fees’.footnote10
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Trump’s first term appeared to plumb the limits of us identification with Zionist expansionism, but Biden found ways to take it further. Enveloping Netanyahu in a long man-hug on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport after the Hamas attacks in October 2023, as the idf was massing for slaughter, Biden used emergency powers to command some $18 billion in extra funding for Israel and dispatched fleets of cargo planes bearing missiles, bombs and shells, used by the idf to bury Palestinian families alive under the rubble of their homes, while the occupiers bombed hospitals, blocked food supplies, left corpses for carrion, positioned snipers to aim for children’s heads and set up mass torture camps on Gaza’s borders. Secretary of State Blinken listlessly went through the motions of regret as the Israeli onslaught killed over 80,000, directly and indirectly, with hundreds of thousands wounded and millions traumatized and displaced.footnote11 In July 2024, the us Congress gave Netanyahu fifty standing ovations for all this.
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Meanwhile, Washington’s role in spinning out the Syrian civil war, in which over half a million were killed, ultimately helped to spring a trap for Hezbollah; once a highly disciplined movement, its Syrian arm grew bloated and corrupt. Operational fusion of us–Israeli intelligence there—with Russian communications seemingly an open book to the cia—allowed Mossad to penetrate Hezbollah’s network, pinpointing the location of leading cadres from Nasrallah down.footnote12 Blowing them up in September 2024, then bombing Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, Israel has given a political boost to hard-right Maronite and Sunni Lebanese elites, close to the Saudis and the Americans. In the same move, it stripped Assad of an effective ground force that had a material interest in his defence. The fall of the Baath regime in Syria is the major unintended consequence so far of Al-Aqsa Flood. As late as spring 2023, when Assad was welcomed back into the Arab League, his survival seemed assured. Hamas’s attack provided Israel with the moral and political impetus for a sustained all-out mobilization, within the permissive environment granted by Biden’s unstinting support. Mossad kicked away the Hezbollah struts supporting Assad’s regime just as Russian resources were running thin.

Assad’s removal on 8 December 2024 may have been anticipated, for his family had left for Russia two weeks earlier.footnote13 Whether Syria will escape Libya’s fate is another matter. The capture of Damascus by the hts, formerly Al-Qaeda jihadis, is by no means a clean sweep for the West. The country is already divided between five fractious sets of militias, none more than 30,000 strong, with three external powers trying to steer them in different directions.footnote14 Tel Aviv is wary of al-Sharaa—nom de guerre, al-Julani: the Golani—whom it views as a wolf in sheep’s clothing; it has no wish to see Syria united as a Turkish protectorate. Tying Turkish-backed forces down against the Syrian Kurds is the best way to prevent that; but the us wants to protect its Kurdish assets and is trying to get Erdoğan and the Europeans to press the hts to ally with them, while Ankara must be hoping it will join with the sna, Turkey’s proxy, against the us-backed sda. Meanwhile Israeli expansion into Syria may risk provoking popular resistance. The idf has pushed beyond the Golan Heights to occupy the Al-Wehda Dam on the Yarmouk River, crucial for Jordan’s water supply and Syria’s hydroelectricity, launching hundreds of airstrikes against military and infrastructural assets that the hts might use. The socio-economic crisis that helped fuel the 2011 uprising has only deepened.
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Netanyahu has boasted that Iran is next in line.footnote15 Here again, the Biden Administration largely followed Trump’s first-term lead in demanding further concessions, including limits to Iran’s ballistic missile programme, although un oil sanctions were allowed to expire.footnote16 In October 2024, Biden gave his blessing for Israel’s attacks on Iran’s air defences. He handed Trump the question of how to deal with Israeli pressure to strike against its nuclear programme while Tehran was on the ropes. At the time of writing, Trump seems to be sticking to Biden’s tactic of pressing for major concessions, backed by the threat of greenlighting further Israeli strikes—Netanyahu wants a Gaddafi-style surrender of all nuclear capability—rather than the overthrow of the regime. Iran’s Gorbachevs had hopes of a respectful deal that would bring the Islamic Republic in from the cold, positioning it as an oil-rich country with a highly educated population that could help in ‘countering China’s ambitions’.footnote17 The Supreme Leader seemed ready for a nuclear deal. But Trump’s demand that Iran scale back conventional weaponry too caused Khamenei to pull back, deeming it ‘neither wise, nor prudent, nor dignified’ to negotiate on such terms.footnote18 Trump and Netanyahu are said to be discussing levels of us support for an Israeli attack on the Fordow enrichment plant near Qom: from political backing for a coercive Israeli ultimatum, to active military assistance with refuelling, intelligence and so forth.footnote19 Surrounded by such sharks, Iran now looks foolish for having paused its enrichment programme in the first place.

The Middle East that Biden hands back to Trump is in some respects closer to the Zionist–Gulf hubris of Kushner’s ‘plan’ than it was in 2020—and farther away than ever from any general rise in living standards, political accountability and cultural freedom. American policy puts an enormous strain on Saudi Arabia, where the national pride of a rising, youthful country is painfully undercut by the humiliation and suffering of its Palestinian neighbours.footnote20 The 39-year-old Crown Prince mbs is being touted as an American satrap for the whole region, summoning would-be rulers of Syria and Lebanon to his court. The bleak balance sheet of eighty years of American hegemony over the Arab world—destruction of secular republics, promotion of plutocrat princelings—is set to continue.footnote21
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For American rulers, however, the Middle East is supposed to be yesterday’s problem. Today’s chief headache is the discomfiting reality of China’s rise. Obama launched his campaign for ‘the assertion of American primacy in China’s own backyard’ in 2010 with large-scale naval exercises in the Yellow Sea. Claiming that the us–Japan Security Treaty covered the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, he insisted that ‘freedom of navigation’ should include us naval manoeuvres in the South China Sea and set up the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to exclude China. Beijing was taken aback by Washington’s turn, which may have helped Xi Jinping to clinch the succession.footnote22 In 2016, Trump’s election campaign shifted the narrative from geopolitics to deindustrialization: China was stealing American manufacturing jobs, ‘ripping us off’. His Administration imposed a host of trade tariffs in 2018, leading to a general worsening of atmospherics—ratcheted up by Secretary of State Pompeo’s 2020 ‘China threat’ speech: ‘the free world must triumph over this new tyranny’—but little drop in global trade.

Biden kept Trump’s tariffs in place, toughened export controls on high-tech goods and escalated diplomatic tensions: pressing nato and Asian allies to take a harder stance on China and securing Australia’s backing for an arms race in the Malacca Straits. Biden’s ideological centre-piece was the announcement of a world struggle between democracies and autocracies, a suaver version of Pompeo’s ‘new tyranny’ talk. The Inflation Reduction Act was promoted as a forceful response to Chinese competition. Though it posed as more professional than its predecessor, the Administration’s diplomacy was characterized by moves of Trumpian crudeness—Pelosi’s visit to Taipei; Biden’s off-the-cuff break with America’s longstanding One China policy to declare that the us would fight for Taiwan—both semi-walked back by officials. Biden swallowed a hawkish admiral’s prophecy that Xi planned to invade Taiwan by 2027 and took this as grounds to step up arms sales to the island.

Trump’s present China policy is unclear. On the one hand, he is set to retain Biden’s confrontational policy in the South China Sea, as well as threatening on more tariffs and ending most-favoured-nation status for the prc. On the other, he muses about re-starting his 2020 trade deal with Xi on a bigger and better, more pro-American basis. In the past he has taken an idiosyncratic view of Taiwan, claiming it should pay more for the cost of its protection; but the logic of a confrontational posture more or less demands treating the island as a forward base, bringing his position into line with his predecessors: a further ‘assertion of primacy’ as specified in 2010. Beijing’s response—to boost domestic demand, step up high-tech research, stockpile critical resources, reduce ‘excessive’ economic reliance on the us and prepare the renminbi for financial sanctions—indicates it takes ‘decoupling’ seriously.footnote23
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In Europe, Trump’s dramatic push for a ceasefire in Ukraine, with top us and Russian officials meeting in Riyadh within weeks of his 2025 inauguration, represents not only a rupture with Bidenism but a break from his own first term, when he maintained Obama’s sanctions, rode roughshod over the Minsk accords, beefed up military support for Kiev by supplying lethal weapons and oversaw nato’s expansion into Montenegro. The American volte face over Russia is the most consequential change Trump has introduced to date. What has shocked liberal Europe is not so much the call for a ceasefire—that has been on the cards for a year or more—but Trump’s de-demonization of Putin himself. Germany, above all, was put under enormous pressure by Biden’s Russia policy and the high energy and defence costs it imposed, undergoing desperate ideological contortions in order to deny its own geo-economic and geopolitical interests. Hence the explosions of rage from Scholz’s lame-duck government, crucified on its own Zeitenwende.footnote24

It remains to be seen whether the ceasefire offer is a quick tactical fix to free Washington’s hands for business elsewhere, or whether there are plans afoot for some grander realignment or new security architecture. The negotiated settlement that Putin has been seeking would not only be a break with Biden’s hawkishness but a rupture with the continuum of us strategy since 1993, when the Clinton Administration opted to make nato’s expansion and out-of-area deployment central planks. In doing so, it was not just advancing us military-territorial emplacements across the map but establishing a friend-enemy divide that embodied a key tenet of American policy as an offshore hegemon over the Eurasian landmass: to prevent the rise of a rival for continental leadership, such as an independent Franco-German-Russian partnership might create.

The tough line taken towards nato enlargement by Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden also spoke to a pettier assertion of us primacy: no other power gets to tell Washington what it may or may not do. ‘Ukraine and Georgia will join nato’, Bush proclaimed in 2008. Trump’s second term could test whether Washington is capable of more creative diplomacy, as a substantial strand in American foreign-policy thinking, including the later Kennan, always hoped. But for such a transformation, the Waltz–Rubio–Hegseth team seem unlikely vessels.
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At home, the image of Musk’s men running amok at the Federal agencies has captured more attention, with the summary firing of staff at the epa and Department of Veterans Affairs, including Schedule-A workers with severe disabilities, many veterans themselves. No doubt doge will do some real damage before its programmed self-destruction on 4 July 2026, but its targets have the unreal ring of Gosplan quotas: eliminate 1.5 million jobs, save $2 trillion. Will doge even exceed Clinton’s record of 420,000 Federal redundancies?footnote25 The most damaging restrictions on public employment remain embedded at state level, through Proposition 13-style ‘taxpayer revolts’.

The Administration’s spectacular sadism on immigration—shackled farm workers, deportation of prisoners to El Salvador’s jails—may also subside into more banal forms of official cruelty, as in Trump’s first term. The basic parameters of us immigration policy—visa regulation, family reunion, deportation of some undocumented arrivals, amnesty for others—have been in place since Reagan, friend of Californian citrus farmers, signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, legalizing nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, Nixon’s idea of a fence along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico was reactivated by Clinton in the 1990s, against bitter opposition from Native Americans, environmentalists and local border communities like Laredo; by 2009, 580 miles of fencing were in place. Obama largely followed his predecessors’ plans for amnesties (blocked by Congress), border reinforcement—another 70 miles built—and deportations: a record 3 million between 2009 and 2016.

Trump vaulted into office with the slogan, ‘Build the Wall’, but added only 50 miles of new fence in his first term, rowing with Congress over funds. Spewing anti-immigrant rhetoric, he issued a flood of executive orders—banning entry from Muslim countries, separating children from their families—that were largely stymied by the courts. In the end, Trump deported 1.9 million in his first term, below Obama—and well below Biden, who used emergency pandemic powers to expel over 4 million border crossers and in June 2024, as a pre-election measure, limited entry for all noncitizens.footnote26 Trump returns in 2025 with another torrent of executive orders, but they have already been met by a barrage of lawsuits from civil-liberties groups and churches. With only 6,000 ice Enforcement and Removal officers to cover the whole country, deporting ‘every single undocumented immigrant’ is an empty claim.footnote27
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More important to Americans is the state of the economy. Trump’s win against Clinton in 2016 was the first major working-class protest against the Democrats’ collusion with the bailed-out bankers and disregard for popular distress.footnote28 Shocked by that loss, the Biden Administration ingested a soft-left layer to help address it through the Biden–Sanders Unity Task-Force. But for working-class Americans, Bidenomics left little mark. Genuinely radical and imaginative proposals for changing pay and conditions in the care economy were predictably eliminated by care-company lobbies in Congress. Beyond short-term construction work, Biden’s Infrastructure, ira and Chips Acts yielded few new jobs; a solar plant doesn’t require more than a handful of staff—and even the green sheen was belied by increased fossil-fuel extraction. From 2020–24, us wealth surged by 44 per cent, or $52 trillion, thanks to the massive monetary and fiscal stimulus of the pandemic, but labour’s share continued to fall; Biden presided over deepening class divergence. Commentators took a Marie-Antoinettish line towards reports of popular discontent, yet this was the chief reason why Democrat voters stayed home in November 2024, along with disbelief in Harris.footnote29

The overheated economy that Trump now inherits could soon be cooling. The stock market is still on a high from the historically unprecedented amounts of liquidity injected during the pandemic—some $5 trillion—but the Fed is now drawing that down. Equally unprecedented is the $1.83 trillion government deficit, which has funded a good part of recent growth.footnote30 Stocks have been priced for interest-rate cuts, so if tariffs or Persian Gulf oil shocks cause any uptick in inflation it could lead to a shakedown, as well as depressing demand in the global economy, where overcapacity in ai development may be catching up with the glut in electric vehicles and solar panels. Tax cuts for the rich notwithstanding, Trump’s Achilles heel may turn out to be the living standards of the American working class.footnote31
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Liberal commentary has made much of the contrast between Trump’s first term, when he was firmly policed by permanent-state minders, and his second, where he brings his own team. The difference in savoir-faire is notable, as is the overt support of the tech barons who once called Obama their silicon president.footnote32 Nevertheless, across most of the policy spectrum there are few signs as yet of programmatic rupture with the line of march established under successive administrations since 2008. In most areas, Trump’s specificity may still have more to do with raucous, jarring mood music than major policy shifts. In the Middle East, the chilling reality lies in the continuity of White House power.

The exception to date is Russia. How should this be explained? White House talk suggests a coming era of Kantian peace, floating on a rising tide of wealth and trade. Trump will end the murderous stalemate in Ukraine and get the eu to rebuild and protect it. He will back Israel as top dog in the Middle East, get Gulf wealth to buy off the Palestinians and squeeze Iran till it disarms. Xi will agree to a stupendous new trade deal which will re-dynamize the American economy, with a global role for Tesla and Musk. One obvious problem, however, is the persistence of the world economic malaise that underlay Trump’s initial rise—and helped to fuel the protests of 2011 and after in the Arab world, Ukraine and much of the West. The deepening glut of manufacturing over-capacity and speculative towers of uninvestable capital and debt are more likely to produce a global downturn.

But the explanation for the Russia turn may lie further east. Though the new Administration has not yet said very much about China, it remains aligned with the us security state’s hardening position since 2010. Trump’s aim could be to cut the Gordian knot created over Ukraine by us–Russia tensions—that is, nato expansionism and Kremlin pushback—by pulling Moscow swiftly onside, getting it to help pressure Iran into a disarmament deal, then re-aligning both against China. This would be marching on down the path laid out by Obama’s pivot, before the Middle East erupted in 2011, followed by Ukraine in 2013–14, and the us got ‘bogged down’ in less essential wars. Today, however, ideological mobilization is at a higher pitch. Previous American administrations tended to play down the second ‘c’ in the ccp, referring to an ideologically neutral ‘party-state’ and skimming over official references to Marx as strictly for the birds. For now, such suavity is out. In their anti-communism, many of Trump’s appointees resemble throwbacks to the era of Truman and McCarthy. The logical endpoint of that rhetoric is regime change.
1 Respectively: ‘America Has an Imperial Presidency’, Economist, 23 January 2025; Michael Ignatieff, ‘Canada, Trump and the New World Order’, ft, 18 January 2025; Maggie Haberman, ‘Trump Muses About a Third Term, Over and Over Again’, New York Times, 10 February 2025; Channel 4 News, ‘Munich Summit Chairman Tears Up During Emotional Closing Speech’, YouTube, 18 February 2025.
2 Barack Obama, ‘Obama’s Remarks on Iraq and Afghanistan’, nyt, 15 July 2008.
3 ‘pm: Ceasefire Will Allow Israelis to Get Back to Routine’, Jerusalem Post, 12 November 2012.
4 Rick Gladstone, ‘us Adds to Its List of Sanctions Against Iran’, nyt, 3 June 2013.
5 ‘Mike Pompeo Speech: What Are the 12 Demands Given to Iran?’, Al Jazeera, 21 May 2018.
6 Peter Beinart, ‘How Could Modern Orthodox Judaism Produce Jared Kushner?’, Forward, 31 January 2017.
7 Jonathan Cook, ‘The Trump Plan Is Just a Cover for Israel’s Final Land Grab’, Middle East Eye, 4 February 2020. On Friedman, see Judy Maltz, ‘Fund Headed by Trump’s Israel Ambassador Pumped Tens of Millions into West Bank Settlement’, Haaretz, 16 December 2016.
8 Patrick Wintour, ‘Jared Kushner Says Gaza’s “Waterfront Property Could Be Very Valuable”’, Guardian, 19 March 2024; Kushner was being interviewed at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 15 February 2024.
9 ‘Bahrain, Kuwait Says Supports All Efforts Towards Solution for Palestine Issue’, Arab News/Reuters, 29 January 2020; ‘Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba Statement on Peace Plan’, uae Embassy, Washington dc, 28 January 2020; ‘Egypt Calls for Dialogue over us Mideast Peace Plan’, Reuters, 28 January 2020; ‘Morocco “Appreciates” Mideast Peace Plan, Says Needs Acceptance by Parties’, Reuters, 29 January 2020; ‘Iran, Turkey Slam Trump Peace Plan as uae, Saudi Arabia Urge Negotiations’, Times of Israel, 29 January 2020.
10 David Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly, ‘Before Giving Billions to Jared Kushner, Saudi Investment Fund Had Big Doubts’, nyt, 10 April 2022.
11 Feroze Sidhwa, ‘65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza’, nyt, 9 October 2024; Zeina Jamaluddine et al., ‘Traumatic Injury Mortality in the Gaza Strip, from October 7, 2023 to June 30, 2024: a Capture-Recapture Analysis’, The Lancet, vol. 405, no. 10,477, 8 February 2025.
12 John Paul Rathbone, Max Seddon and James Kynge, ‘How Israel’s “Operation Grim Bleeper” Rattled Global Spy Chiefs’, ft, 28 December 2024.
13 Summer Said, ‘Where Is Ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?’, Wall Street Journal, 8 December 2024.
14 Among the factions: hts: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an alliance of jihadi paramilitaries; sdf: Syrian Democratic Forces, us-backed Kurdish coalition; sna: Syrian National Army, formerly Free Syrian Army, a Turkish-backed force initially formed around former Syrian officers; the militias that Obama tried to group into the Southern Front largely deserted him. See ‘Israel Takes Control of Vital Water Source in Syria’, Middle East Monitor, 19 December 2024; Rob Geist Pinfold, ‘The Coming Fight for Syria’, rusi, 7 January 2025; Murat Guneylioglu, ‘Reconsidering Turkey’s Influence on the Syrian Conflict, rusi, 31 January 2025.
15 Csongor Körömi, ‘Netanyahu: Iran Regime Change Will Come “a Lot Sooner than People Think”’, Politico, 30 September 2024.
16 Sina Toossi, ‘Biden Had a Chance to Undo Trump’s Mistakes. He Dropped the Ball’, Responsible Statecraft, 7 May 2024.
17 Bernard Hourcade, ‘Iran. De la stratégie révolutionnaire au repli nationaliste’, Orient xxi, 9 January 2025.
18 Najmeh Bozorgmehr, ‘Iran’s Supreme Leader Rules out Talks with Donald Trump’, ft, 7 February 2025.
19 Trump: ‘I think Iran is very nervous. I think they’re scared. I think Iran would love to make a deal, and I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them’—‘their air defence is largely gone.’ See David Ignatius, ‘Trump Wants to Play Peacemaker. Israel May Have Other Plans’, Washington Post, 13 February 2025.
20 mbs squirms with embarrassment every time Trump or Netanyahu broadcast his private assurances to them, complaining ‘it makes us sound two-faced’: Ahmed Al Omran, ‘Saudi Arabia Launches Ferocious State Media Attack on Benjamin Netanyahu’, ft, 12 February 2025.
21 As for vp Vance, while describing American foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon as disaster after disaster, he has explained that Americans should nevertheless care about Israel because this ‘narrow little strip of territory’ is where Jesus lived: J. D. Vance, Keynote Address, ‘What a Foreign Policy for the Middle Class Looks Like: Realism and Restraint Amid Global Conflict’, Quincy Institute, 23 May 2024.
22 Kenneth Lieberthal, ‘The American Pivot to Asia’, Foreign Policy, 21 December 2011.
23 Kwan Chi Hung, ‘Outlook for China Policy in the Trump Administration’s Second Term: Concerns over Accelerating us–China Decoupling’, rieti, Tokyo, 7 February 2025.
24 Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, Laura Pitel and Henry Foy, ‘End of an Era? Germany in Disarray as us Scolds Staunchest European Ally’, ft, 16 February 2025.
25 Madeleine Ngo et al., ‘Trump Officials Escalate Layoffs, Targeting Most of 200,000 Workers on Probation’, nyt, 13 February 2025; Leader, ‘Donald Trump: the would-be king’, Economist, 22 February 2025.
26 Albert Sun, ‘Why Deportations Were Higher Under Biden Than in Trump’s First Term’, nyt, 22 January 2025; Department of Homeland Security, ‘Fact Sheet: Joint dhs–doj Final Rule Issued to Restrict Asylum Eligibility for Those Who Enter During High Encounters at the Southern Border’, 30 September 2024.
27 Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, ‘Four Years in a Day’, ProPublica, 7 February 2025; ‘Your Immigration Questions Answered: What Has Changed under Trump, What Hasn’t and What’s Next’, ap, 14 February 2025.
28 See Matthew Karp, ‘Party and Class in American Politics’, nlr 139, Jan–Feb 2023.
29 Paul Krugman, ‘All the Good Economic News Vindicates Bidenomics’, nyt, 7 October 2024. For wealth figures, see Richard Duncan, ‘Is the Everything Bubble About to Pop?’, Macro Watch, First Quarter 2025.
30 Duncan, ‘Is the Everything Bubble About to Pop?’.
31 Marco D’Eramo, ‘American Decline?’, nlr 135, May–June 2022.
32 Mike Davis, ‘Obama at Manassas’, nlr 56, March–April 2009, pp. 35–40.