Upcoming Israeli elections give the U.S. president leverage he can use.
The U.S.-Israel relationship has never been less popular in America, but at the same time that support for Israel is cratering in American public opinion, Congress appears to be fast-tracking an effort to entrench the relationship and give Israel enduring access to both our most sensitive technologies and our most sensitive intelligence—in exchange for nothing more, it seems, than a thank you note from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At the same time, the U.S. is at war, stuck in an unpopular and unnecessary conflict whose political and economic impacts create mounting and unanticipated obstacles for the Trump administration’s agenda. While this week Trump has seemed intent on escalating the conflict, he’s also shown a desire to end it—and a recognition of one major roadblock to peace. The president’s frustration at Netanyahu—who played a key role in convincing him to enter the conflict, and who can now act as a spoiler to prevent him from exiting it—has become evident in recent weeks.
Given the challenges posed by the Israeli leader, a common complaint on both the right and the left of American politics is that Israel exerts far too much power in U.S. politics. But a closer look at the facts demonstrates that Netanyahu is actually in an incredibly weak position—or would be, if the administration was willing to assess and deal with the entire U.S.-Israel portfolio holistically.
Trump’s interests are relatively clear: to extract the U.S. from the war in Iran, reduce Israel’s dependency on American military support, and get Israel to make real progress towards Palestinian self-determination in order to have a chance of getting the Abraham Accords back on track. As Trump’s apparent frustration with Netanyahu entered the headlines in recent weeks, the president seemed to understand the ways in which Israel’s prime minister undermines these interests.
Netanyahu’s own objectives are not shaped as much by geopolitics, or even national interest, as much as they are by the growing urgency of presenting himself as a winner in time for Israel’s elections this fall. To do this, he has to leverage U.S. military power to deliver something resembling a win in Iran (which seems less and less likely), do the same in Lebanon (now a quagmire), and demonstrate that despite the collapse of U.S. public support and the foreseeable end of U.S. grant military assistance, he has guaranteed a means of enduring Israeli influence in Washington that doubles as a financial boon for Israel’s tech sector and broader economy.
In short, his back is against the wall. By October, he may be out of a job. And by January, after the 120th Congress is seated, the odds of the U.S. enacting laws that entrench Israel in our defense and intelligence systems may drop precipitously.
Netanyahu, as is typical for him, is projecting strength, to the point of hubris (which is also typical for him). His advantage to this point has rested on keeping the two negotiations (Iran and framework legislation) separate. In the Iran context he can exercise significant leverage as a spoiler, and in the legislative context he can exercise significant leverage through Republican congressional endorsement of a plan for which he has publicly taken credit. For as long as these lanes stay apart, he would seem to have the advantage.
But as a businessman, Trump knows the value of writing his own script and re-framing the situation in a way that benefits his—and America’s—interests. In this context, the way to do that is by combining all three tracks in the U.S.-Israel relationship—Iran, Palestinian self-determination, and the future of security cooperation—into one.
There are signs he may already have recognized this. Although the White House pushed back on recent reporting from NBC and the New York Times regarding Israeli espionage against the United States, those stories may have been a shot across the bow following an incredibly contentious call between the two leaders. Or in other words: “Play nice on Iran, or the intelligence cooperation under consideration by Congress gets pulled.”
There’s no reason for the White House not to lean into this further. Netanyahu has not shown himself to be a helpful partner for the U.S.—indeed, from Gaza to Iran he has undermined U.S. regional and global influence and interests. There’s no reason to think a future Israeli government under his leadership would be any more compliant, particularly once laws are passed by the U.S. guaranteeing Israel lasting influence over U.S. national security equities. In short, while Israel may be able to punch above its weight when it comes to shaping U.S. diplomacy (and warfare) on Iran, in the bigger picture Netanyahu needs Trump far more than Trump needs Netanyahu.
The administration should leverage this opportunity by linking all three tracks together. Specifically, it should signal to Israel that continued progress on the pending U.S. legislation is premised on Israeli compliance with U.S. efforts to wind down the regional conflict and with U.S. efforts to drive forward a real diplomatic pathway for Palestinian self-determination. To demonstrate he holds the upper hand, Trump should also work with Republican leadership in Congress to slow-roll the current legislative vehicles so that Netanyahu cannot present them as a “sure thing” prior to Israel’s elections.
Such an approach would not only incentivize Netanyahu to work more constructively with the administration, but could also inform the policies and campaign strategies of Israel’s opposition leaders, resulting in a more compliant Israelis after the fall elections.
U.S. presidents have always had the upper hand, in theory, when it comes to dealing with Israel. They can suspend arms transfers or soften their diplomatic support for Israel, opening it up to both sanctions risk and legal peril through the ongoing proceedings at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. Trump would be right to consider integrating these pressure points into his strategy as well, though he’s unlikely to take that path. But there’s a unique opportunity now between Netanyahu’s domestic political position as Israel enters election season, and Israel’s potential moment of crisis when it comes to transitioning U.S. security assistance into some form of enduring influence.
This is a winning hand for President Trump, should he choose to play it. There is no need to give away the game, as Congress now seems poised to do, just as the cards have been dealt. Trump can use Israel’s desperation for defense and intelligence integration as leverage to constrain Netanyahu on Iran. After Israel’s elections and the U.S. midterms, he will still have time to assess if the current legislative work to integrate Israel needs to proceed, or if further concessions are needed from Netanyahu or a new Israeli government, before signaling his assent to Congress.
New documents from government agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security show that Washington is preparing for widespread anti-A.I. riots, as the technology destroys communities and industries across the country. Ironically, the Trump administration is already using invasive A.I. technology to identify and suppress what it calls anti-A.I. “extremists,” in the process, sweeping the entire nation into its massive surveillance dragnet.
More than 1,000 pages of leaked documents reviewed by WIRED Magazine show that government agencies are anticipating a huge wave of domestic unrest in the coming years, as artificial intelligence upends American society. Automation-related job losses could shatter entire industries, while the building of gigantic data centers will remove water and electricity from public use, ramping up the price of what little remains.
As one report from the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau notes:
“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent A.I. technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City.”
An Environmental and Health Catastrophe
Last year, the tech industry collectively spent around half a trillion dollars on the construction of new data centers. These buildings consume near insatiable amounts of energy and water. By 2030, they are expected to represent around 12% of total U.S. electricity consumption. One large data center consumes up to five million gallons of water per day – as much as a small city. It has been calculated that a single 100-word A.I. prompt to a chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT uses over half a liter of water, equivalent to one bottle.
When a data center moves into town, utility prices skyrocket. In this situation, wholesale electricity, for example, jumps by up to 267%. Ordinary Americans cannot compete with the likes of Amazon or Microsoft, and can be priced out of even the most basic necessities of life, causing widespread resentment.
Living near a data center can also be hazardous to human health. Thanks to the low-frequency noises they produce, residents often report chronic symptoms such as insomnia, vertigo, and nausea. Worse still, to meet their enormous energy demands, data centers often rely on gas or diesel generators, which emit high levels of nitrogen oxides, fine particular matter, and so-called “forever chemicals” into the air, further complicating the situation.
A.I. will also have a profound effect on employment. Goldman Sachs predicts that, over the next decade, 300 million jobs could be lost to A.I.-based automation. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, has suggested that whole industries may be replaced by his product. “Entire classes of jobs will go away and not come back,” he confidently stated in 2019. Facing growing public anger, last month, he walked those statements back, assuring the public that there would be no “jobs apocalypse.”
But if these predictions are anything close to correct, it will cause massive economic disruption across America, and send towns and entire cities dependent on certain types of work into potentially permanent depressions. The latest news that Washington is preparing to treat this unrest as akin to terrorism should be of great concern to all Americans.
The Dark Side of A.I.
The public, as a whole, is highly skeptical of artificial intelligence. A recent poll found that only 5% trust A.I. a great deal, while 77% think it could pose a fundamental threat to humanity.
The U.S. national security state, however, has fully committed to A.I., and is using it to mass surveil the public and to identify those not sufficiently supportive of the new technology. In March, FBI director Kash Patel confirmed that the bureau is buying Americans’ personal online user data from brokers in order to track the public. The Department of Homeland Security has spent millions purchasing A.I. software that detects the sentiment and emotions of Americans’ online posts, and is using it to identify activists and other potential “threats.” It has also sent subpoenas to Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, and other large social media apps demanding they share the personal information and identities of anonymous users who have criticized the actions of the Trump administration. Government officials confirmed to The New York Times that platforms have often complied with their requests.
A.I. giant Anthropic publicly pulled out of a deal with the U.S. Department of War to develop A.I. systems in “classified environments,” stating that they feared the technology would immediately be used to carry out mass domestic surveillance in the United States. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” they said, explaining their decision. The company was immediately labeled a national security “supply chain risk” by the Trump administration, and the contract was fulfilled by OpenAI.
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is one of Trump’s most generous donors, having channeled $25 million to the president’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. He has also poured $50 million into Leading the Future, a bipartisan super PAC aimed at promoting pro-A.I. legislation in Washington, D.C., and defeating and silencing lawmakers who wish to curb the influence and power of the new industry.
It remains to be seen to what extent A.I. will actually become a revolutionary technology, but what is clear is that the U.S. government is preparing for major economic and social disruption in its wake. Instead of creating economic bailout plans and social welfare programs to help those negatively affected, however, it is preparing an authoritarian response, looking to crush dissent. What makes this future even more ironically dystopian is that, to do so, it is using the very A.I. that is triggering the problem in the first place.
Brazil’s elites have long treated drug violence as inevitable – like 19th-century slavery. But with banks and gas stations now feeling the pinch, will national pride finally force action where moral outrage never could?
In Um rio chamado Atlântico [A River Called Atlantic], the Brazilian diplomat and Africanist Alberto da Costa e Silva (1931 – 1923) addresses the history of the end of the slave trafficking in Brazil in a very interesting way. As is known, England in the 19th century positioned herself as the moral bulwark of the world, and this included a true crusade against the transatlantic slave trade. On the other hand, Brazil, according to our Africanist, was dependent on the forced immigration of Africans to populate this vast territory, given the small size of Portugal and the precarious technical condition of the Amerindians.
That English humanitarianism was merely a pretext, no one serious can doubt. After all, one only needs to see how inhumane the British chartered company’s dominion over India was, or consider the fact that English sympathies leaned towards the South during the American Civil War. From an economic standpoint, there is the issue of the competitiveness of Brazilian sugar produced by slave labor, but the most important thing, according to Costa e Silva, was this: the financial suffocation of the free African kingdoms.
Since the African kingdoms capitalized in the 19th century by selling slaves to the Americas, closing the Atlantic would cause these kingdoms to collapse, and thus, English merchants could try to replicate there the model of domination implemented in India. And, in fact, after the closing of the Atlantic, some African leaders began to imitate the Anglo-American plantation model to sell palm oil to the English, who used it for purposes as diverse as soap making and public lighting. The slave trade to the Americas ended and was replaced by African domestic slavery.
According to Alberto da Costa e Silva, the slave trafficking ended in Brazil because Brazil wanted it to. Even today, in the 21st century, we use in Brazil the expression “so that the English can see it”. The origin of this expression is the Feijó Law of 1831, a law of the Empire of Brazil that prohibited the transatlantic slave trade, imitating the English law of 1807. Brazil had been pressured by England to pass such a law since its Independence (1822). However, since the Brazilian authorities did not want to end this slave trade, the law was simply not applied: it was made so that the English can see it. To this day, Brazilians say that such a thing is “so that the English can see it” when they want to say that it is an empty formality. The slave trafficking in Brazil ended when Brazil wanted it to end. This occurred in 1850, when Brazil approved the Eusébio de Queiroz Law. From this, Alberto da Costa e Silva concludes: the trade ended because Brazil wanted it to end, and not because England wanted it to.
I have doubts. What would have happened if England had not pressured Brazil to end the slave trade? It’s impossible to answer historical counterfactual questions with certainty, but it seems to me that English arrogance, pointing the finger at us, may very well have driven our ancestors to action. After all, Brazilian society is both proud and conformist: we can spend decades complaining about the same problems as if for sport, but if a foreigner points the finger at us, then we become truly outraged.
Slavery was never a beautiful thing in Brazil. In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell contrasted the reaction of the Ottoman and Brazilian peoples to the end of slavery: there, with revolt and protest; here, with public celebrations. In the 19th century, there were even those who imported scientific racism from Protestant countries to justify slavery – but, as Costa e Silva showed, both the pro- and anti-slavery sides had arguments for and against Negroes. Just as there were those who defended the end of slavery because they believed that Negroes did not deserve such a fate, there were those who wanted to end slavery hoping to purge Brazil of Negroes (in the same way that Anglophones created Sierra Leone and Liberia to “return” them to Africa). On the other hand, there were those who justified slavery based on white superiority, but also those who thought that the influence of Negroes in Brazil was too beneficial for slavery, however bad, to have an immediate end.
Given that most of Brazil was illiterate and had no reason to adhere to the racist fashions of the educated, and given that the Brazilian population actually celebrated Abolition (1888) en masse after a large public campaign against the interests of a slave-owning minority, we can assume that the latter position – simultaneously anti-racist and resigned to slavery – reflected Brazilian common sense. I believe that, without external pressure to offend our pride, we could still be lamenting the wickedness of slavery while saying that it was necessary. Furthermore, just 5 years before the Eusébio de Queiroz Law, England passed the Aberdeen Act, which authorized their navy to seize Brazilian ships suspected of slave trafficking. It was an offense, and it was also a cause of losses, since it made the cost of imported slaves unsustainable.
It seems unlikely, then, that just five years later, and with the increased cost of imported slaves, Brazil would have decided on its own to end the trade. It does not follow, however, that England is a saint and that the Aberdeen Act did not harm Brazil in a dishonest way. As Alberto da Costa e Silva reports, Brazil had already developed legitimate trade with the free African kingdoms (which sold us palm oil and fabrics), but England ended up closing the Atlantic.
I think this situation is similar to that of present-day Brazil with drug trafficking and Donald Trump pointing the finger at us. Almost every Brazilian agrees that urban violence caused by drug trafficking is a major problem, and that the territorial control exercised by factions is a very wrong thing. (I say almost every, because there is always the delusional leftist.) However, the elites treat the problem as if it were a phenomenon as natural as rain: Brazilians complain and have no prospect of solving the problem. In Brazil, Marxism ended up translating into a kind of scientific conformism, in which the sociologist looks at the ills and explains why everything is the way it is – in the same way that an English social Darwinist proceeded in the face of the ills of the poor.
Like 19th-century England, Donald Trump is far from being a saint. He has already shown that he feels entitled to invade countries under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, and the U.S. experience in Colombia, Ecuador, and Afghanistan gives no rational reason for Brazilians to root for armed intervention thinking that this will put an end to drug trafficking. The United States also does not seem committed to ending drug trafficking on its own soil, since it has a colossal surveillance capacity and continues to be the largest consumer of cocaine on the planet. (It is true that U.S. population is large, but it doesn’t compare to China’s. It’s noteworthy that two English-speaking countries – Australia and New Zealand – are the largest per capita consumers according to the UN.)
Just like the Aberdeen Act, the classification by the United States of the two largest Brazilian transnational drug trafficking organizations – the PCC of São Paulo and the Red Commando of Rio de Janeiro – as terrorist organizations certainly stirs the pride of Brazilians. Only a delusional middle-class leftist will claim that this classification is inappropriate. Even so, Brazil has an idiotic anti-terrorism law, made with the purpose of considering terrorism only actions motivated by politically incorrect ideas (see here). By this law, it is impossible to consider PCC and Red Commando terrorist organizations – even though PCC already caused panic in the state of São Paulo in 2006, and there are no nice explanations for the attacks having ceased. Just as Brazil did not end the slave trade in 1830 because it did not want to, Brazil does not end the drug traffickers’ empire today because it does not want to.
Brazil has never considered the PCC a terrorist organization, but the new classification has already prompted Lula to publish an “Administration Note” on his official Twitter profile alluding to the PCC and Red Commando as entities that “practice terrorism in the territories where millions of families live.” I have no record of a note from a PT (Workers’ Party) federal administration alluding to drug traffickers in these terms. The government is then in a complicated position to say that the PCC and Red Commando are organizations that practice terrorism that intimidates millions of families but are not terrorist organizations. And even more: that Brazil is a sovereign country in which non-terrorist organizations practice terrorism against millions of families, because this sovereign country does not have sovereignty over large portions of its own territory! After all, the government’s rhetoric is that Trump’s attack against these organizations is an attack on Brazilian sovereignty orchestrated by Bolsonaristas who betrayed the homeland, since the announcement of the measure occurred shortly after Flávio Bolsonaro’s visit to the White House.
But there is a great dissimilarity between the slave trafficking and the drug trafficking empire: slavery in general is a millennial institution, and the transatlantic trade in particular was as old as Brazil itself. It was reasonable for Brazilians to think that slavery was inevitable, because its end contradicted all previous experience. The drug trafficking empire, on the other hand, is only about 20 years old for most of Brazil. I am only 36 years old and I remember a time when there were no crack addicts: a completely different reality, which seems like a utopia to today’s teenagers. Furthermore, slavery in 19th-century urban Brazil allowed for social ascension, and slaves could realistically dream of freedom and enrichment. The drug trafficking empire, however, haunts Brazilians as long as they are in a Brazilian large city: even if they become rich and leave the slums, they could lose their lives at any moment to a stray bullet, or to a crack addict who stabs them in the street for no reason.
Therefore, the role of the mystifying sociologist is important among us. The rhetoric of Open Society and Ford Foundation – the racist rhetoric that insists on blackness as essentially linked to crime and drug addiction – presents the drug trafficking empire as natural and inevitable. One good thing about Trump’s classification is that now the sectors of the Brazilian economy that were bothered are starting to show their faces: banks, fintechs, and gas stations.
Hopefully, these sectors will now feel ashamed, and Brazil will finally decide to end the drug trafficking empire in its national territory.
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