The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to deteriorate, de facto annexation of Palestinian territory proceeds all the while the U.S. embrace of the agreement signals American endorsement of this negative status quo. Rather than advancing American interests by promoting peace in the region, the U.S. is helping cement conflict under the guise of forging reconciliation between three countries that never have been at war.
Yet things can get even worse. At a time when the U.S. should be reducing its military footprint in the region, the accord could bring America back into war in the Middle East by lowering the bar for Israeli military action against Iran. Any military confrontation between Israel and Iran will likely suck in the U.S. as well. As the Quincy Institute's Steven Simon wrote in his June brief on the subject, the risk of the accord playing this destabilizing role is particularly acute if talks to revive the Iran nuclear agreement collapse.
Moreover, the accord undermines prospects of finding true peace in the region between Israelis and Palestinians. Recognition of Israel was always a means to an end — not an end in and of itself. The accord flipped this on its head and offered recognition without any movement on the Israeli-Palestinian front, further reducing Israel's incentives to compromise with the Palestinians. Not surprisingly, all the countries who have signed onto the accord have either done this under duress or due to American — not Israeli — concessions on other matters.
Sudan was coerced into signing on lest it wouldn't get off the U.S. terror list. Morocco was offered a major shift on the U.S. position on West Sahara. The UAE was offered F35 fighter jets — advanced American weaponry the Emiratis want in order to bind Washington to the security of their authoritarian state. None of these trade-offs do anything to bring peace to the Middle East, nor do they, in the final analysis, advance U.S. national security.
Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Washington DC, USA - September 15, 2020: Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, and Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan attend the Abraham Accords ceremony in The White House. (noamgalai/shutterstock)
While pushing to negotiate with Russia on Ukraine, President Donald Trump simultaneously claims Europe should spend more on the war effort — and on defense, generally.
During his presidential campaign, Trump suggested he’d encourage Russia to "do whatever the hell they want" against NATO countries spending under 2% of their GDP on defense. And since winning the election, Trump has upped his suggested spending percentages, saying NATO countries should aim to spend 5%. He repeated this call on Thursday during his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“We’re talking to [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. We’re going to be talking with President [Vladimir] Putin very soon. And we’ll see how it all happens. We’re going to look at it very soon. One thing I do feel, the European Union should be paying a lot more than they’re paying,” Trump said in recent public comments about the Ukraine war.
In the wake of Trump’s return to the White House and uncertainty surrounding the Ukraine war, European officials increasingly fear being cut out over relevant war negotiations, or otherwise being abandoned by the U.S. Indeed, Zelensky even publicly questioned the U.S. commitment to Europe in a speech at Davos.
Rather than reconsider its stance toward the conflict, however — NATO head Mark Rutte explicitly warned against withdrawing Ukraine support at Davos — many European high officials instead want to bolster defense spending, in line with Trump’s calls.
"What will we do in Europe tomorrow if our American ally withdraws its warships from the Mediterranean? If they send their fighter jets from the Atlantic to the Pacific?" Macron asked French military members early this week in a call to reduce Europe’s security reliance on America.
"Do not play down [Trump’s appeal] to spend 5%," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a speech to the European parliament Wednesday, re-upping Trump’s comments.“Ask not of America what it can do for our security. Ask yourselves what we can do for our own security.”
“If Europe is to survive, it must be armed,” Tusk emphasized.
At the recent European Defense Agency annual conference, EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas also highlighted Russia’s higher defense spending levels: whereas 9% of Russia’s GDP goes toward its military budget, EU member states on average spend less than 2%.
“Europe’s failure to invest in military capabilities also sends a dangerous signal to the aggressor. Weakness invites them in,” Kallas said at the conference. "Russia poses an existential threat to our security today, tomorrow and for as long as we underinvest in our defence," she explained.
Kallas, working with EU defense commissioner Andrius Kubilius, plans to advance proposals to bolster the EU’s defense capacities in March.
"The storm clouds of war are gathering over Europe," Kubilius said at the European Defense Agency conference. "We can outspend, outproduce — and outgun Russia.
In other Ukraine war news this week:
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia attacked Ukraine with four missiles and 131 drones on Wednesday. Seventy-two of the drones were destroyed, another 59 disappeared without reaching their respective targets, Al Jazeera reported.
According to The Guardian, prominent financier Bill Browder suggested UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer push for Ukraine to receive about $300 billion worth of foreign currency, gold, and bonds belonging to the Russian central bank, all frozen at the start of the Ukraine war, to spend on weapons to keep fighting.
According to Reuters, Trump threatened Russia with sanctions if it does not meaningfully negotiate to end the Ukraine war. “I’m going to do Russia, whose economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE,” Trump said on Truth Social.
As per Sky News, Russian officials quickly responded to Trump’s threat. As Russia’s deputy UN ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy emphasized, negotiations depend on whether given proposals work to address the Ukraine conflict’s underlying origins. "It's not merely the question of ending the war…It's first and foremost the question of addressing the root causes of [the] Ukrainian crisis."
"We have to see what…the 'deal' mean[s] in President Trump's understanding. He is not responsible for what the US has been doing in Ukraine since 2014, making it 'anti-Russia' and preparing for the war with us, but it is in his power now to stop this malicious policy,” Polyanskiy explained.
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Top image credit: Palestinians walk next to heavy machinery and an armored vehicle on a damaged street as they leave Jenin camp during an Israeli raid, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, January 22, 2025. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta
Most attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past 15 months has focused on the Gaza Strip, given the devastating Israeli assault that has reduced most of that territory to rubble.
But the larger occupied Palestinian territory — the West Bank, along with what Israel has defined as East Jerusalem — never ceased to be on the front line of the conflict. During those same 15 months, more than 800 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by either the Israeli military or Jewish settlers, according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The Israeli violence against West Bank Palestinians has increased since the start of the recent ceasefire in Gaza. The latest in a series of raids by the Israeli military has centered on the city of Jenin and was described by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “extensive and significant.” The Palestinian Health ministry reported that eight people were killed and at least 35 injured in just the first few hours of the operation.
Meanwhile, violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian villagers and their property has risen sharply. In the year following October 2023, the U.N. office recorded more than 1,400 incidents of such violence in the West Bank.
The latest escalation of Israeli violence in the West Bank is connected to the Gaza ceasefire in multiple ways. Netanyahu has been walking a political tightrope in agreeing to the ceasefire while placating right-wing elements in his coalition who want a continued war. Stepping up military operations in the West Bank is one way to keep those elements satisfied while they await a resumption of the destruction in the Gaza Strip.
Increased military action in the West Bank also helps Netanyahu to divert attention from the failure to achieve his declared objective of destroying Hamas.
The availability of military resources is another connection. The Israeli military has been stretched by more than a year of intense operations against Gaza, not to mention Israeli offensives during the past year in Lebanon and Syria. The pause in Gaza enables some of those resources to be redeployed to the West Bank. It is worth remembering that Israeli vulnerability to Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, was possibly related to an earlier redeployment of some security forces from southern Israel to the West Bank.
The West Bank always has been—certainly from the Israeli government’s point of view—more important than the Gaza Strip. Gaza has been the open-air prison where much of the Palestinian population could be confined, but the West Bank is a central and prized part of Israeli expansionism. More than 600,000 Jewish Israeli settlers are now living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, embodying both the expansionism itself and an Israeli determination to make establishment of a Palestinian state unfeasible.
During his first term, Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy by stating that Israeli settlements in the West Bank did not violate international law. With his appointments as well as his rhetoric, Trump has indicated that his second administration will be at least as deferential to the Israeli government on these matters as his first one was.
One of his earliest post-election nominations was former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a Baptist minister and self-declared Zionist, has said that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” He has repeatedly stated that the West Bank — a descriptor he avoids in favor of the biblical “Judea and Samaria” — belongs to Israel and that “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.”
Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, New York Representative Elise Stefanik, refused to say at her confirmation hearing whether the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination. Stefanik said she agrees with the view that “Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank.”
As with many of Trump’s early provocative actions, there is little or no sign of pushback from members of his own party in Congress. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, now chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, last month introduced legislation requiring official U.S. documents to refer to “Judea and Samaria” instead of the West Bank, with Cotton saying that “the Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes [sic] back thousands of years.”
Trump has most directly promoted violence in the West Bank by removing — as one of his Day One rescissions of dozens of Biden administration actions — sanctions on Israeli settlers who have committed violence against Palestinian residents of the West Bank. Possibly for Trump, this was just another reflexive action to undo whatever his Democratic predecessor did, as well as to do anything that he or his followers could bill as “pro-Israel.” But the practical effect is to give a green light to perpetrators of lethal actions, ranging from shootings to arson, that have ruined lives and livelihoods. In most cases the only offense of the victims has been to live in the land where they and their families have lived for centuries.
All these U.S. and Israeli policies are a recipe for increasing the never-ending violence by both sides in the West Bank. Neither military raids nor settler intimidation will lead the Palestinian residents of the territory to roll over and accept their treatment. Resentment from subjugation and apartheid will be amplified by anger over death and destruction.
As with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, even sustained, large-scale military operations by Israel will not kill the will to resist. Hamas itself has called for a “popular mobilization” in the West Bank to oppose the Israeli military escalation there as well as to resist the violence by settlers. Also as in the Gaza Strip, the will to resist will mean recruitment of more fighters to replace the ones Israel manages to kill.
The ill consequences of the violence include still more suffering beyond what the residents of the West Bank have already endured. The violence also is an additional destabilizing factor in the wider region — especially in next-doorJordan, with its large Palestinian-origin population.
For the United States, the ill consequences include resentment and anger—which can take various forms, including anti-American terrorism—stemming from close association with inhumane Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The United States already is paying a price in this regard from being associated with the carnage in Gaza. The price will rise the more that the West Bank is swept into the same unseemly picture.
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Top photo credit: Russian special forces at a check point in the Zaporizhia region, February 2024. (Shutterstock/Sergey Nikonov)
Russian President Vladimir Putin in a military meeting (President of Russia photo)
Russia has spent the past five months swallowing up ever bigger tracts of Ukrainian coal, lithium, and uranium in the Donbass. Yet Western politicians still cling to the belief that they will be able to tap these resources to repay Ukraine’s ever mounting pile of debt. This is economic madness.
In the summer of 2024, most Western politico-military commentators were predicting that Russia was focussed on storming the strategically important military hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. Russian troops had advanced slowly, inexorably westward in a straight line following the bloody attritional battle for Avdiivka which was captured in February 2024.
But from August, Russian tactics shifted. First from the south of Donetsk they stormed Vuhledar, literally translated as “Gift of Coal,” a site of significant reserves, capturing it on October 1. That opened the way to swallow up large swaths of land in the south. Following the apparent encirclement of Velyka Novosilka in the past two days, one of Ukraine’s three licensed blocks of extractable lithium is now within short reach in Shevchenko.
Russian armed forces skirted Pokrovsk, instead battling through Selydove and in a straight line for about 20 miles, capturing a Uranium mine in a village called Shevchenko (not the same Shevchenko where the lithium is located). In recent weeks, Russian forces have taken Ukraine’s most important mine for coking coal in Pishchane and two related coking coal shafts in Udachne and Kotlyne. Together, these mines alone had produced the coking coal for 65% of Ukraine’s steel production. There are now fears that Ukrainian steel production could plummet to 10% of its prewar level in 2025.
Since President Trump was elected in November, and the prospect of an enforced ceasefire grew brighter, Russia’s advance has progressively accelerated. Today it is on the verge of completing its capture of the coal-rich bastion of Toretsk, the only town on the line of contact that hadn’t moved since 2014.
That’s bad news for Ukraine, not just because of a potential loss of further territory.
Prior to the crisis in Ukraine starting in late 2013, the extractives sector accounted for over a third of total exports, with agricultural products a third of that value. Today, the situation has been flipped, with agriculture by far the largest export sector.
By capturing every coal, uranium, and lithium mine that they can, Russia is cutting off an important source of Ukrainian wealth. Ukraine faces deeper current account deficits as its agriculture sector is unable to make up the difference for lost exports of minerals, especially with President Zelensky wanting to give away Ukrainian grain to Syria.
Fitch ratings has predicted Ukraine will record current account deficits of 6.5% of and 5.7% of GDP respectively in 2024 and 2025.
As I have pointed out before, with Ukraine still cut off from international lending markets because of its junk sovereign credit rating, that means the only way it can make up the difference is foreign aid or loans from foreign governments. With debt now about 100% of GDP, Ukraine has had to dip into the domestic bond market.
However, as Ukrainian banks are largely state owned, that amounts to borrowing from itself. Ukraine’s central bank governor has denied that the country will need to print money in 2025 to keep the lights on. If it does, hyperinflation and a collapse of the hrynia will beckon, rendering Ukraine’s debt impossible to pay, at which point Western governments will need to bail the country out.
Fear not, though, as Western politicians have a cunning plan to repay Ukrainian debt. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been outspoken this year in saying that Ukraine could pay back U.S. loans with its mineral wealth. He first raised this in a CBS interview in February 2024 as Congress worked hard to unlock former President Biden’s $61 billion aid package to Ukraine. He repeated this position one month later in Kyiv. Standing beside President Zelensky, he said, “they’re sitting on trillion dollars of minerals that could be good for our economy.”
A month later, Congress passed the long-delayed $61 billion U.S. aid package to Ukraine. That included just $9 billion in forgivable loans, short of the two-thirds Sen. Graham had hinted at in February.
Nonetheless, it marked another step on the road towards shouldering more debt onto Ukraine in the belief that this might one day be repaid in Ukrainian uranium, lithium, and other bountiful minerals. This was solidified by the G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration loan of $50 billion agreed in June 2024, to which the United States contributed $20 billion at the end of 2024.
During this same period, the shift in focus towards Ukraine giving up its natural resources to secure Western aid gathered steam. In October 2024 when President Zelensky unveiled his so-called victory plan, giving up Ukraine’s natural resources became codified. He claimed that Ukraine would sign an agreement with the U.S., EU and others that would allow for use of Ukraine's natural resources, which were worth “trillions of dollars.”
Just last week, shortly before President Trump’s inauguration, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer penned a “100-year partnership deal” between the United Kingdom and Ukraine. While the document has yet to be made public, 10 Downing Street said that it would cement the UK as “a preferred partner for Ukraine’s energy sector, critical minerals strategy and green steel production.”
US and UK politicians see great potential profit in accessing Ukraine’s wealth when war finally comes to an end, with Forbes Ukraine valuing minerals at $14.8 trillion.
However, just over half of that is located in the four eastern Ukrainian regions that Russia has occupied and where it gains new ground each day.
Back in August, in a typically foul-mouthed tirade, former Russia President Dmitry Medvedev took to his Telegram channel, among other things, to pillory Sen. Graham, who he called a “fat toilet maggot.” He continued, “To get access to the coveted minerals, the Western parasites shamelessly demand that their wards wage war to the last Ukrainian... ‘You’ll have to pay off your debts very soon. Hurry up, dear friends!’”
Leading European politicians still urge Ukraine to continue its war using credit in the hopes it might be repaid with a stock of natural resources that Russia captures with ever greater speed and covetousness. That is the economic equivalent of Russian roulette with a fully-loaded revolver that President Putin is gladly pointing at us.
President Trump’s efforts to end this madness can’t come soon enough.
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