Australia / Israel Review

US President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris is a rare event in American political history. Before Trump, only one president had been returned to the Oval Office after a failed re-election attempt.

Trump will go into his second term with an even stronger mandate than his first. Not only did he win the popular vote, but the Republican party retook the Senate and will retain control of the House of Representatives. 

No stranger to courting controversy, Trump said some troubling things during the campaign. Citing the fact that the majority of American Jews traditionally vote Democrat, in September, Trump said, “If I don’t win this election… the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that.” 

Trump also accepted the support of problematic groups and public figures like commentator Tucker Carlson, who recently gave a platform to a Holocaust-denying historian, and promoters of antisemitic conspiracies such as Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. Attorney-General nominee Matt Gaetz also has some very unsavoury associations. This inevitably raised questions about whether a second Trump presidency would fan already raging flames of antisemitism or douse them.

Similarly, isolationist sentiment espoused by Trump during the campaign and his choice of outspoken isolationist JD Vance as his running mate create some doubt as to whether the foreign policy of a second-term Trump Administration would follow the same path as his first administration – which led to some impressive achievements, especially in the Middle East.

In his first term, Trump withdrew from the fatally flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal and implemented a “maximum pressure” strategy towards stopping Iran’s advance towards nuclear weapons capability. Unfortunately, it was not given enough time to be fully effective before being suspended by the incoming Biden Administration – but it is notable that Iran did not start blatantly flouting its nuclear obligations until after Trump left office. 

The brokering of the Abraham Accords – which overturned decades of foreign policy establishment groupthink that said that normalisation with Israel’s regional neighbours could only come after the Palestinians make peace with Israel – was a truly historic achievement that any US administration would be proud to have as part of its record. 

A similar example of overturning stale conventional wisdom was the decision to finally fulfill a long-standing US law demanding the US Embassy in Israel be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 

Following the principle that US foreign policy should be based on both American interests and objective reality, Trump froze funding to the politicised (and increasingly terror-complicit) UN Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, and recognised Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights. He also promoted a peace plan that offered the Palestinians a state and the region a prosperous future, while not requiring Israel to displace families by removing existing settlements. Israel PM Netanyahu immediately accepted it, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rejected it out of hand.

Reassuringly, most of President-elect Trump’s appointments to key security and foreign policy roles thus far appear to suggest a return to the principles that led to these first term achievements is most likely. 

Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Senator Marco Rubio, has previously urged Israel to “destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on” and rightly blames the terror groups for all the regrettable civilian casualties in Gaza.

His choice for Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, has urged the US to support any Israeli effort to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program.

Trump’s new National Security Advisor-designate Mike Waltz is an outspoken friend of Israel, and had been urging the Biden Administration to increase the pressure on Iran on the nuclear weapons issue. 

Other welcome appointments include Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the United Nations, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as US Ambassador to Israel and Steven C Witkoff, a Jewish friend and business associate of Trump, as the Administration’s Middle East envoy.

Trump’s branding of his new Administration’s foreign policy agenda as “America First” has been interpreted by some as isolationist, but the team he is assembling largely suggests something entirely different. Trump’s quote that “I’m not going to start a war, I’ll stop wars,” taken together with his call for “Peace through Strength,” should mean increased support for US allies in the region, even as his Administration may look to draw down US forces.

It should mean bringing the indirect and direct warfare being waged by Iran and its proxies against Israel to a close by removing the obstacles the US has laid in front of the Israeli military campaigns, in the form of delayed weapons shipments, threats of sanctions and political pressure. This would give Israel the resources and support it needs to bring its wars to a successful and decisive conclusion in the near future.

Further, supporting Israel’s military objectives and reimposing maximum pressure on Iran would help stabilise world commerce by ending the Houthi effort to blockade the gateway to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, and strengthen the projection of US deterrence to its allies around the world. 

And let’s not forget that preserving and strengthening the ability of the US to project deterrence, and protect international commerce, is profoundly in Australia’s interests, especially in the face of the rise of the increasingly aggressive axis of rogue actors including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. We should therefore hope these elements of the Trump Administration’s approach will be accomplished.

Of course, Trump’s pro-tariff policies undoubtedly pose a risk to Australia. Mitigating that risk means looking for areas where we can emphasise the shared interests and values underlying US and Australian cooperation. AUKUS is one example – but the Australian Government should also be looking for others. 

What it absolutely should not be doing is continuing its current trend of moving further and further from the US with respect to the Middle East and Israel. Our recent UN voting and public statements regarding Israel and its war with Hamas, Hezbollah and their puppet-masters in Teheran are both inconsistent with Australia’s long-standing bipartisan Middle East stance and increasingly out of alignment with even the Biden Administration. These moves were never in Australia’s national interest, and they have now become deeply dangerous to those interests in the age of the second Trump Administration.