Louis René Beres, the son of Austrian Jewish refugees, a professor of Political Science at Purdue University, and a long time advocate of rightwing Jewish and Israeli causes, is afraid of a Donald Trump presidency. Writing in US News & World Report (Israel Wouldn’t Survive Trump), Beres defies the “conventional wisdom” that sees presidential candidate Donald Trump as better for Israel than Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton. For starters, the PoliSci professor is aghast at Trump’s lack of intellectual discipline, citing his August 15 foreign policy speech from which one could conclude that he would enthusiastically be willing to “work with” Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, and which couldn’t be a good thing for Israel.
Beres warns that “Trump’s proposals would go so far as to put Israel’s physical survival at a tangibly greater risk,” seeing as the candidate is prepared to collaborate with Hezbollah and support Russian military cooperation with Iran. “How else ought anyone interpret Trump’s stunningly naive call for combating the Islamic State group at all costs?” Beres asks, calling Trump’s ideas “a seemingly random patchwork of ready-made phrases.”
Beres has no illusions about a Hillary Clinton presidency when it comes to Israel’s interests, but he is deeply concerned by the Republican candidate’s foreign policy being little more than an “endless litany of barren clichés, emotional arguments and thoroughly empty witticisms.” Or as he puts it politely: “Donald Trump is manifestly and incontestably imperfect.”
Talk about the art of the understatement…
“For Israel,” Beres suggests, judging by Trump’s “enthusiastic words of support for Jerusalem’s chief enemies,” the conclusion must be that “a Trump presidency could be irremediably catastrophic.” This is because “crafting a nation’s foreign policy is never a job for narrowly educated political operatives,” as it “calls for a deep and genuine appreciation of strategic interdependencies and also of assorted and corresponding legal obligations” — which Trump, apparently, does not bring to the table.
“The ultimate irony of Trump’s disjointed preferences” regarding US foreign policy and his perceived threat of radical Islam—as opposed to all the other, bigger threats out there, Beres asserts, “is that they would actually work on behalf of the Islamic State group, while at the same time strengthening America’s most formidable enemies.” Indeed, when it comes to foreign policy, Beres says the only voters who should support a Trump presidency are Americans who “prefer Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah to Israel and America.”