The Washington insider crowd was absolutely outraged and appalled by Donald Trump鈥檚 performance at Helsinki, Juan Cole notes, as he violated all the principles of American hawkishness.
Trump sat next to Vladimir Putin, leader of a rival power, signaling that Russia is a peer. He sided with Putin over the assessments of the CIA, the National Security Agency and other US intelligence organizations.
He denied Russian attempts to influence the 2016 elections. He declined to press Russian president Vladimir Putin on his annexation of the Crimea or border clashes with Ukraine, or the alleged poisoning of his critics while they were in Britain, or Putin鈥檚 crackdown on the press and on his political opponents.
Putin鈥檚 behaviour has been objectionable, but there is something profoundly hypocritical about the US elite pretending that the US does not embrace people like Putin all the time.
Take Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is guilty of most of the same infractions held against Putin. Netanyahu openly campaigned for the Republican candidates in 2012 and 2016. He openly interfered in US politics by insisting on addressing Congress to derail the Iran nuclear deal (a quest in which he ultimately succeeded, putting the US closer to war footing with Iran).
In fact, Netanyahu was one of those foreign influencers聽. The Israeli leader allegedly pushed for lifting of US sanctions on Putin and his circle in return for Putin pushing Iran out of Syria.
狈别迟补苍测补丑耻听聽far more aggressive and extensive than those of European countries, the seriousness of which Congressional staffers have found 鈥渟obering鈥.
Netanyahu is in the process of annexing the Palestinian West Bank, to which he has much less claim in international law than Putin does to the Crimea. Netanyahu is presiding over an apartheid state in which 4.5 million of the 12.5 million people controlled by the Israeli government are stateless and besieged or patrolled by the Israeli military.
Netanyahu has聽
So in Trump鈥檚 fanboy performance with Putin in Helsinki, Trump waxed lyrical about how close the US is to Israel, and did opine that Iran needed to leave Syria. Nobody in DC is complaining about that piece of sycophancy.
In Washington, it is all right to slam Trump for treason (it isn鈥檛 really treason since the US isn鈥檛 at war with the Russian Federation) or for making nice with Putin despite the latter鈥檚 various misdeeds. But it is political death to criticise Israel.
[Abridged from .]