On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump shared a video on his social media platform Truth Social featuring renowned and contentious Columbia University economist, UN adviser and public intellectual Jeffrey Sachs. The Harvard-educated academic, speaking at the Cambridge Union in England, claimed that “Netanyahu has pursued a systematic strategy since 1995 to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah by targeting their supporting governments in Iraq, Iran and Syria.”
Fair enough. He then called Benjamin Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch,” something Trump probably wouldn’t take issue with. It is of course possible that Trump was shown the video by someone around him who gleefully chimed, “Mr. President, you gotta hear what he says about Obama and Syria. You’ll love it.”
Trump has liked Sachs ever since the professor supported his policy of getting out of Syria in 2018 and opposed U.S. aid to Ukraine. Trump went on to share the video of Sachs castigating presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for what he long believed were their failed and dangerous policies in Syria and Ukraine. But I would be remiss to conveniently assume that Trump didn’t notice Sachs’ remarks about Netanyahu.
Sachs’ characterization of the prime minister as “a deep, dark son of a bitch” may be the most quotable phrase, but his criticism may prove portentous when Trump and Netanyahu inevitably clash on U.S. policy in the Middle East. Sachs was essentially saying to the incoming president: Be careful, Netanyahu and Co. in Washington will try to manipulate you into a war with Iran. If you think it’s warranted, fine. But if you don’t, be very vigilant.
Sachs was merciless, even if a bit hyperbolic. Netanyahu has “gotten us into endless wars, and because of the power of all of this in U.S. politics, he’s gotten his way,” Sachs says in the video.
This wasn’t the first time the professor has harshly criticized Netanyahu and his purported outsized manipulation of, and influence on, U.S. foreign policy. In a podcast interview with Tucker Carlson last month, this one commended by co-President Elon Musk, Sachs said the United States goes to war “on his behalf,” referring to Netanyahu.
“Israel has driven so many American wars,” he continued, referring specifically to Iraq and Syria. “It was a phony war; where did it come from?” he asked, before rehashing an old trope about how Israel hijacked U.S. foreign policy: “The U.S. gave over Middle East foreign policy to Israel a long time ago, not to U.S. interests but to Israel’s interests. That is the Israel lobby and we don’t hear questioning of this at all.”
This argument isn’t new. In a 2006 essay in The London Review of Books that became a deeply reasoned but equally criticized 2007 book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago make this argument with force. They define the pro-Israel lobby as a loose coalition of organizations and individuals who actively work to steer U.S. policy in what they perceive to be a pro-Israel policy. Walt and Mearsheimer claim that the pro-Israel lobby essentially hijacked American policy and strives to control the debate in both politics and academia.
Sachs also claims that, in the end, these policies will gravely hurt Israel. In a March 2024 interview with Tzach Yoked in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, Sachs says he is “begging Israel not to mistakenly think that the United States will continue its support. You’ll end up alone.” He argues that sooner or later the United States will halt military aid to Israel for a variety of reasons linked to disillusioned and changing U.S. public opinion.
Responding to a query after the video went viral, Sachs told The Guardian that while he wasn’t advising Trump, he hoped that Trump’s election signaled a shift in American foreign policy. “I do not know Trump’s disposition on these issues, but I do very much hope that he frees U.S. foreign policy from the grip of the cruel, ineffective, illegal and destructive policies of Netanyahu,” Sachs said.
He’s both right and wrong. It’s true that in 1991, when Netanyahu was deputy foreign minister, he was designated persona non grata at the State Department by then-Secretary of State James Baker III after he claimed that U.S. policy in the Mideast was in disarray because it was based on false assumptions. It’s also true that in a September 2002 hearing at the House of Representatives, then-private citizen Netanyahu urged the Americans to invade Iraq because this would democratize the country, “reverberate” to Iran and topple the regime in Tehran.
It’s also true that for over two decades Netanyahu has urged the United States to threaten Iran militarily, and he crudely meddled in U.S. politics by going behind Obama’s back to lobby Congress against the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015. Trump surely remembers how Netanyahu pressured him to unilaterally withdraw from the deal in 2018, promising him that “maximum pressure” through crippling sanctions would weaken Iran and provide for a new and better deal.
That obviously didn’t happen, and now Trump is inheriting an Iran that’s as close as ever to developing a military nuclear capability in terms of both enriched uranium stockpiles and enrichment capabilities. Still, this doesn’t mean that Netanyahu dragged the United States into “endless wars,” as Sachs claims, or that a pro-Israel lobby has taken over U.S. foreign policy at Netanyahu’s behest. That’s a gross exaggeration, even if you think the “Israel debate” in Washington has been skewed by these groups.
But Sachs’ implicit warning that Netanyahu will probably try to manipulate Trump into attacking Iran is the issue more likely to grab the incoming president’s attention and ire. That pertains not just to a U.S. attack but to the Trump administration providing Israel, based on Netanyahu’s requests, with the military means to launch an independent strike.
Three Middle East issues await Trump; the first is a Gaza cease-fire and hostage deal, which he urged should be completed before he’s inaugurated. That may happen, but such a cease-fire wouldn’t last more than a few days, maybe less. Trump probably couldn’t care less about that.
Second, Saudi Arabia. The Saudis’ potential influence on Trump far exceeds that of Netanyahu by any metric that Trump values. From the “transactional” Trump’s point of view, the Saudis can reciprocate and reach deals with the United States, and Israel can’t.
This is the heart of Sachs’ argument: Netanyahu can try to drag America into a war, but Saudi Arabia wants vast economic, AI-based cooperation with Washington, would buy $50 billion to $60 billion in weapons, would join the Abraham Accords if Israel engages in a political process with the Palestinians, which it won’t, and would only ask for a new deal with a weakened Iran.
The third issue is Iran itself. Trump’s dilemma on Iran is interwoven with Sachs’ warning. The United States essentially has three options that could be sequential and not mutually exclusive: threaten Iran and impose coercive diplomacy to facilitate a new round of negotiations, green-light an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran but bear the consequences of being complicit by association, and attack Iran jointly with Israel.
Trump, if Jeffrey Sachs can help it, would choose option one, certainly given his self-proclaimed rejection of American entanglements in unnecessary wars abroad.
Sachs’ criticism and indirect warning is very pertinent to Trump. On the one hand, he has appointed end-of-days evangelical Christians to key positions relating to the Middle East. Their ally is Netanyahu. On the other hand, Trump is war-averse and amenable to Saudi influence, seeing no conceivable advantage in the United States launching a war on Iran. When U.S. and Israeli policy preferences clash, Trump may go back to Sachs’ advice.
First published in Haaretz, 10.01.2025
