Terms of Trade: Netanyahu has brought the US from Oslo Accords to Stockholm Syndrome | World News

The Economist, founded in 1843, is perhaps capitalism’s most influential and longest running chronicler. Its immense journalistic prestige and financial might has often drawn criticism from left leaning voices. British journalist Francis Wheen – among other things he wrote a biography of Marx, which The Economist reviewed extremely critically in 1999 – in a 1996 essay published in The Guardian, accused the magazine of having a “flip, narrow mind” where “editorials often read like essays by a particularly bumptious Oxford undergraduate, this -is because they are, more or less; many staff join straight from the varsity, untainted by exposure to life outside seminar rooms”.The Economist has often got things wrong. To be fair, any 200-year-old newsroom would. But there is one thing in the recent past about which it was remarkably prescient.On 12 September, 2023, a day before The Oslo accords – they laid down the framework and guardrails for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine – turned 30, it carried a piece titled The Oslo accords were always doomed to fail. “Diplomats invoke the accords like the catechism of a dying faith, as if one more trust-building exercise or round of negotiations will be the one that unlocks a real peace. Inertia will keep them around until new generations of Israelis and Palestinians are ready to try something new—for better or for worse”, it said.Less than a month later, on October 7, Hamas carried out its most barbaric terror attacks on Israel, killing hundreds and taking many Israelis hostage. West Asia changed forever, and for worse, on that day. Israel’s subsequent attack on Gaza has triggered one of the biggest humanitarian disasters in the recent past. Its blatant violations of rules of war have shattered all pretence as far as the existence of a rule-based international order is concerned.The US and the Israel attacked Iran on February 28 this year, two and a half years after Hamas’s attack. Anybody with common sense will agree that the two events are linked. Iran’s response and escalation after the attacks has inflicted the biggest ever energy shock in the history of global capitalism. Wednesday and Thursday’s attacks and counter-attacks on Iranian and other West Asian gas fields show that the shock is only becoming bigger by the day.Even a mental simulation of the higher order supply chain disruptions on account of the disruption to the global fuel and petrochemical production sends shudders down one’s spine and will probably break the back of the global economy unless the war ended day before yesterday. The war would not have happened had US President Donald Trump not joined it.Israel’s Wednesday attack on Iran’s South Pars Gas field was one of those few instances in the ongoing war when even Donald Trump sought to distance himself from Israeli action. “Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran…The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility. NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL”, Trump posted on Truth Social.To be sure, Trump is caught in a loop where even a criticism of Israeli actions is letting him do nothing which can prevent more such actions. His situation is best described as someone suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, where the captive has developed an affinity towards the captor and is failing to testify against it. More and more American allies, both in Europe and West Asia, are seeing through this reality.“One by one, Donald Trump’s European allies rejected the US president’s demand to join his war in the Middle East… This week’s collective refusal by Trump’s European partners of his demand to help him open the Strait of Hormuz by force — or risk a “bad” future for the Nato alliance — was remarkable for its force and unanimity. It was all the more striking after two weeks of chaotic division among the continent’s capitals over his war against Iran”, said a Financial Times story published on Thursday.Even more damning for the US, is the response of Oman, a country which is directly suffering from Iran’s military aggression right now. “Iran’s retaliation against what it claims are American targets on the territory of its neighbours was an inevitable, if deeply regrettable and completely unacceptable, result. Faced with what both Israel and America described as a war designed to terminate the Islamic Republic, this was probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership”, Badr Albusaidi, the foreign minister of Oman, wrote in The Economist on March 18. A country which is under attack but justifying its attacker’s actions is as unprecedented as it gets. Albusaidi played a critical role in the US-Iran talks before the war began and rightly feels betrayed by the US for launching the war. “The question for friends of America is simple. What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement? First of all, America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth. That begins with the fact that there are two parties to this war who have nothing to gain from it, and that the national interests of both Iran and America lie in the earliest possible end to hostilities. This is an uncomfortable truth to tell, because it involves indicating the extent to which America has lost control of its own foreign policy. But it must be told”, Albusaidi adds.What really explains the US’s helplessness vis-à-vis restraining Israel in West Asia? What has not changed in the equation what Israel wanted out of the US in the region. There is more than enough evidence to support this claim.“James Baker temporarily banned him (Netanyahu) from the State Department. Madeleine Albright described him as an Israeli Newt Gingrich (and it wasn’t a compliment). Bill Clinton emerged from his first meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 (then serving his first term as prime minister) more than a little annoyed by his brash self-confidence. “Who’s the f****** superpower here?” Clinton exclaimed to aides””, a 2012 Foreign Policy piece titled The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu by Aaron David Miller said. Netanyahu’s true intentions were well known even before 2012. A 1998 New Yorker profile of him by David Remnick said it in as many words. “Netanyahu’s over-all argument is that the left’s dream of a New Middle East, of peaceful relations and open markets in a region of Arab dictatorships, is fantasy”, it said. Netanyahu had accused his predecessor his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin – he was killed by an ultra-right Israeli after a rally in support of The Oslo accords – of betraying the Israeli and Jewish cause by his decision to give up Israeli land to Palestine.The world, and more importantly the US, did nothing to prevent the confrontationist turn in Israeli state’s approach to the Palestine-Israel question. The status quo was (as we know now) wrongly seen as the ability to keep kicking the can down the road infinitely. Protests against this approach and Israel’s growing belligerence have often been dismissed as anti-Semitic. Trump, when he assumed power in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks made it clear that he wanted to change the status quo for worse. His plans to develop war-ravaged Gaza into a real estate haven is a glaring example of that. Most of the US’s West Asian allies rightly saw this, and other developments in the run-up to the war, as a carte blanche to Israel’s expansionist ambitions too.To be sure, none of this is to say that Israel’s opponents, including Iran and its proxies, are entirely virtuous regimes. These players, both state and non-state actors, have a lot of blood on their hands. The entire history of West Asia is one of competing, more barbaric than other, variety of fundamentalisms which have unleashed disorder, chaos, violence and war on the world.However, what is also true is that the rest of the world, especially the US and its allies, have made or allowed interventions which have made things go from bad to worse in the region. Kim Ghattas’s book Black Wave is a gripping, unputdownable account of this history. This does not mean that the people in these nations do not have agency or treat their regimes and countries as the same. Ghattas was among the few people who went on record to say that Trump and his advisors had got Iran wrong in trying to understand why it was not bowing down to the US even before the attacks started. “These drivers — ideology, national pride, regime survival — appear to escape real estate negotiators like Trump and Witkoff”, she wrote in a piece in the Financial Times on February 26, two days before the war started.As of now, Trump’s US shows no signs of recognising what everybody else is able to see: it is Israel which is doing all it can to keep America engaged in a war from which both the world and the US stand to gain nothing and lose a whole lot. The real challenge for the world, especially the bigger countries, is to pull off what Karl Marx called “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be”. All major countries, India included, should work together to end US’s Stockholm Syndrome or be prepared to suffer immense pain.There are many self-styled realists, including in India, who would argue that letting the US and Israel finish the job might be the best way to secure peace. They ought to be read to these lines from Martin Luther King Junior’s famous 18 March, 1956 sermon. “Yes it is true that if the Negro accept his place, accepts exploitation, and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be an obnoxious peace”, King said. It is exactly this obnoxious peace about violation of The Oslo accords which has brought the world to its current predicament where is caught in a destructive war because the biggest super power in the world is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.