Biden's Middle East trip: Following in Trump's footsteps
WATCH: Biden looks poised to betray his campaign promise to sideline Saudi Arabia. Does this really serve America's interests?
Responsible Statecraft
Responsible Statecraft is a publication of analysis, opinion, and news that seeks to promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility, diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure.
Top image credit: Dr. Mike Evans with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2023 (Creative Commons license)
Read this Evangelical Zionist leader’s leaked suspense novel
November 06, 2025
Writing a novel is a vulnerable experience. After months or years of work, many authors come to view their book as an extension of themselves. So when a writer starts looking for a fresh pair of eyes, it can be hard to decide who to trust. But for Evangelical pastor and Trump adviser Mike Evans, the choice was simple: just ask the Israeli government.
Leaked emails reveal that, back in 2018, Evans sought help from Israeli officials on his new novel about an all-out war on Israel, masterminded by a rogues’ gallery of Iran, Hamas, ISIS, and, to a lesser extent, the media. The outline that Evans shared offers a unique look into the thinking of an informal Trump adviser, as well as the Israeli reserve colonel who edited the story (and seemingly received about $1,150 for his troubles).
The worldview depicted in the outline, which was never published, is bleak. Iran and Hamas sneak explosives and even Sarin gas canisters into children’s backpacks in order to provoke Israeli soldiers into attacking innocents. When their plan to destroy Israel goes sideways, Iranian officials try to instigate the apocalypse. At the end, our hero’s wife reminds him that all of this fighting is simply inevitable. “[T]hey hate us for who we are,” she intones. “As we are who we are, and they are who they are, things will always be this way.” (Writing in the margins, the Israeli colonel wonders if this may be “overly simplifying the situation.”)
Evans, who founded the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, is among America’s most prominent Evangelical Zionists. He is a long-time friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was a “confidant” to several other Israeli prime ministers. In 2017, he joined other Evangelical leaders in laying hands on President Donald Trump in the Oval Office before presenting him with a “Friends of Zion” award. In a 2021 blog post, Evans claimed credit for putting up 220 billboards in Jerusalem calling on Trump to “make Israel great.”
The precise extent of Evans’ relationship to Trump is unclear. In Trump’s first term, Evans served on a board of Evangelical advisers to Trump that encouraged the president to focus on religious freedom and support for Israel’s government. Evans broke with Trump in 2022, claiming that the president had “used” Evangelicals in order to get elected. But he appears to have returned to the MAGA fold in the meantime. He hosted Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, for an event earlier this year. And in a January interview, he told an Israeli outlet that, while he doesn’t speak for the president, he knows him “extremely well” — well enough to speculate on Trump’s plans for peace in the Middle East, at least.
There is, however, no lack of clarity surrounding Evans’ relationship with Israel. “I told my wife when I married her that there was another woman in my life. I had to be with her a lot,” he once wrote. “Her name was Israel.”
But writing has always been Evans’ second passion, judging at least by his wide range of self-published tomes, including such classics as “Showdown with Nuclear Iran,” “Netanyahu: A Novel,” and “What I Learned as a Moron.” The leaked outline, simply titled “Hamas Novel,” never made it to print. But luckily for you, digital ink is cheap, so we’ve decided to share it in full here.
Evans did not respond to a request for comment submitted through the Friends of Zion Museum. Reuven Ben-Shalom, the Israeli reserve colonel who edited the story, confirmed in an email that he was paid for providing comments on Evans' book. Ben-Shalom said the edits were a "singular project" done "at the request of a friend."
The plot to destroy Israel
Like all good action stories, Evans’ novel begins with a conspiracy. Iranian generals gather around “the Ayatollah,” which apparently refers to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and present their plan for destroying Israel. The dastardly plot revolves around an escalating series of operations, starting with protests in Gaza followed by child-led suicide bombings in Jerusalem and culminating with an invasion of Israel from all sides. If all goes well, then the world will also break with America over its support for Israel and impose sanctions on Uncle Sam.
“[W]hat if the strategy does not succeed?” asks one general. “[I]t won’t matter,” responds another. “We will all be dead.”
Enter Ben-Shalom, the Israeli reserve colonel charged with editing Evans’ outline. Some of his notes are practical — a “large scale operation” like the one the Iranians propose can’t be “executed in two days,” he warns — while others are more about PR. When Iranian generals plot to “provoke IDF soldiers to shoot” civilians at the border, “as they did in previous protests,” Ben-Shalom warns Evans that this is “buying into a Palestinian agenda” by simply calling them protests.
“[T]he riots and attacks were pre-planned and were carried out during a long period of time,” the Israeli officer argues. (During the protests in question, which Palestinians described as a grassroots movement, Israeli forces killed at least 300 Palestinians and injured 30,000 more, according to the United Nations.)
The emails, which were released as part of a hack by a pro-Palestine group called Anonymous for Justice, indicate that the Friends of Zion Museum paid Ben-Shalom 3850 Israeli shekels, or roughly $1150 at the current exchange rate, for his edits. Gidon Mor, an Israeli official whose exact job is unclear, appeared to facilitate the relationship between Friends of Zion and Ben-Shalom.
As the story continues, Evans rattles off a head-spinning series of pro-Israel tropes about Hamas, Iran, and their influence in the world. In order to prepare for the attack, an Iranian official enters Gaza disguised as a Qatari diplomat, presumably with help from the Qatari government. The operative instructs his Hamas contacts to orchestrate a series of protests, with “Women and children in front” for maximum effect.
Soon after, an Iranian advertising executive orchestrates coverage of the protests by subtly informing his gullible network executive friend of plans for a march. “You should look into it,” the secret Iranian agent says. “Get ahead of the competition in breaking the coverage.”
Evans goes to great lengths to blur the lines between Hamas members and civilians. In one dramatic scene, he portrays seemingly coordinated maneuvers in which Hamas operatives push protestors to storm a checkpoint as militants fire rockets in support. Elsewhere, agents with Shin Bet, Israel’s internal counterintelligence service, warn that “Arabs have never simply protested. It always turns violent.”
Perhaps most confusing is Evans’ view of Islam. On one occasion, an Iranian agent tells Hamas leadership that the plot is “the will of the Ayatollah as prescribed by Allah.” But Hamas, as a Sunni Islamist organization, would have no interest in a Shiite leader’s interpretation of the will of God. Evans goes on to lump together Hamas, ISIS, and al-Qaeda — all of which hate each other on both political and religious grounds — into one big anti-Israel fighting force.
The pastor also portrays Iranian leadership as nothing short of insane. When Israeli operatives thwart the first two steps of Iran’s plan, Iranian generals resort to the “Mahdi option,” in which Tehran launches a suicidal war in order to provoke the return of the Mahdi, a messianic figure that many Shiites believe will return to prepare the world for the end times. “[J]ust before we are obliterated, the Mahdi appears to protect us and restore order,” one general says.
Near the end of the outline, it becomes clear that Evans wants U.S. support for Israel to go much further than it has in the past. As Israeli soldiers work to beat back Iranian troops, U.S. forces provide close air support in what would be the first ever incident in which Israeli and U.S. soldiers carried out such operations side-by-side. Evans then portrays a series of U.S. airstrikes against targets within both Iran and Israel.
Ben-Shalom offers a series of increasingly frustrated notes in this section. “U.S. planes would not support Israeli troops,” he wrote, before chiding Evans a second time for “too much mixing [of] Israeli and American forces.” The third time, Ben-Shalom appears to reach a breaking point, simply commenting “NO” in response to the latest suggestion of joint U.S.-Israeli operations.
Evans ends his tale with a tender moment. After saving the children from their own backpack bombs — and thwarting Iran’s invasion — our hero sits with his wife and laments the state of the world. “[T]hey were just kids,” he says as he starts to cry. “They could have all been killed.”
But Ben-Shalom has no patience for melodrama. “There was an all-out war with Iran, with a serious threat to Israel, and the only thing on his mind are those kids?” he asks. “Shin Bet save people every day.”
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Top image credit: Secretary Marco Rubio arrives in Panama City, Panama, February 1, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
Death knell for the Summit of the Americas?
November 06, 2025
The government of the Dominican Republic has announced that the X Summit of the Americas (SOA), scheduled to be held in Punta Cana on December 4-5, has been postponed. This is the first time an SOA has been postponed.
There is no reason to think that the conditions for holding such a meeting will be better three or six months from now so it’s more likely the summit will be canceled. If so, this might very well ring the death knell of the SOAs, precisely at a time when they are more needed than ever, given the deep differences cutting across the hemisphere.
As the premier diplomatic event of the Western Hemisphere, the SOAs have been around for a little over 30 years. They provide a useful, some would say vital, forum for presidents and prime ministers from across the continent to get together and interact with the U.S. president, whom they rarely meet in person. Indeed, the summits were established in the halcyon days of multilateralism in the 1990s, when international cooperation flourished after the end of the Cold War and the sky seemed the limit in terms of what could be achieved in transborder projects.
The first SOA took place in Miami in 1994, and the most recent in Los Angeles in 2022. Democratization and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were the initial drivers for their agenda. Yet even after these faded, the idea that there is much to be gained by leaders from the Americas getting together to address common concerns kept them going. After all, it is difficult to say that some of the main challenges faced by countries in the Americas today, like the drug trade, illegal migration, organized crime, and climate change, do not need some form of collective response.
The SOAs, of course, build on the idea of Pan Americanism — the notion that there is something beyond the differences in language, history, and level of development that binds the countries of the Western Hemisphere, or the New World, and makes them different from the tired Old World across the Atlantic.
This can be a controversial concept. Many on the Left have denounced it as a non-transparent attempt to provide cover for U.S. imperial designs to facilitate the exploitation of Latin America and the Caribbean to benefit American capital. However, this overlooks the fact that in a globalized and interdependent world, regions have their own dynamic, that there are “international neighborhood” issues that need addressing, and that, in the end, it is by talking to each other that we can solve problems and find common ground. And those dialogues will be more fruitful and productive if they are institutionalized and structured, rather than undertaken in an ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment fashion.
President Trump dislikes multilateralism and international fora of various kinds — so much so that he skipped the VIII SOA in Lima in 2018, the first time a U.S. president ever did so. And we all saw that after meeting with President Xi in Seoul on the sidelines of the APEC Leaders’ Summit, he left immediately, without attending APEC’s formal proceedings. Indications are that, at least one reason the SOA was postponed this time around, apart from the difficulties in agreeing on a final declaration, which has been the official line, is because Trump was unwilling to commit to attend, which led to the host country’s decision to postpone, and effectively cancel it.
Still, the D.R. summit was already on the rocks. A few weeks ago, the Dominican government announced with great fanfare that it would not invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to the summit. This went down like a lead balloon in the region, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum saying that under such circumstances she would not attend and Colombian President Gustavo Petro criticizing the announcement and saying he would not attend either.
In this non-invitation, the Dominicans were following the U.S. playbook from 2022 when Washington’s exclusion of the group of countries John Bolton called “the troika of tyranny” led to the ultimate fiasco of the Los Angeles SOA, with the attendance of a mere 23 leaders (out of 35) and no final declaration. Moreover, the D.R. had originally spoken about “an inclusive summit,” code for inviting Cuba et al, but later bowing to strong pressures from the State Department to toe the U.S. line.
There is no doubt this whole exercise is a big failure of Dominican diplomacy. You don’t attempt to play in the big leagues if you are not ready to carry the ball across the finish line. More importantly, however, it is also a significant failure of the U.S. State Department. Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau are what is known as “old Latin American hands,” speak fluent Spanish (Landau spent part of his childhood in Chile) and have been managing many Latin American issues on the front burner of U.S. foreign policy, including Panama, Venezuela, the effect of mass deportations, and the U.S.-Brazil spat.
Part of their strategy has been to work closely with the smaller Central American and Caribbean countries, as well as with those in South America, like Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay, that are ideologically aligned with the Trump administration.
One result of that was a highly unusual and unorthodox recent statement signed by the U.S. and a number of these countries celebrating the defeat of the MAS (or Movement for Socialism) ruling coalition in Bolivia and claiming that the election result will end “the economic mismanagement of the past two decades.”
This is a factually incorrect assertion, given that Bolivia from 2010-2019 had one of the best economic performances in the hemisphere, consistently growing above 4 percent a year, except for 2019, when it grew at 2.2 percent, a higher growth rate than that of the U.S.
The truth is that these efforts to “divide and rule” by building coalitions with the region’s smaller countries to counter the likes of Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico by pressing the former to follow Washington’s diktat to the letter were bound to end in epic debacles, like now with the 2025 SOA.
But the U.S. self-sabotage of the SOA is especially puzzling for another reason. We have heard much about how Washington in the second Trump administration will be retreating from the “pivot to Asia” launched under Obama to prioritize instead the defense and strengthening of the Western Hemisphere. And yes, both Rubio’s initial visits abroad and the issues mentioned above all underscored how the Americas have been front and center in the U.S. foreign policy agenda.
But how does this square with boycotting one of the key diplomatic hemispheric institutions, like the SOA? What comes next? Defunding the Organization of American States — as Deputy Secretary Landau did not rule out at the OAS General Assembly in Antigua earlier this year — or closing the Inter-American Development Bank?
It may well be that the SOAs have run their course, and that the time has come to give them a decent burial. Many said that the 2022 Los Angeles SOA showed that they were in their last gasp. The problem is that pushing them over the cliff while insisting that, for the first time since World War II, Washington’s top foreign policy priority is the Western Hemisphere is a contradiction in terms.
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Top photo credit: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth walks with Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Mission to NATO Scott M. Oudkirk upon arriving at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Feb 12, 2025. (DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander C. Kubitza)
Hegseth wants to make the Pentagon a global arms bazaar
November 06, 2025
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will gather defense industry leaders in Washington on Friday to announce a significant organizational change that will in part help streamline U.S. weapons sales to other countries.
To do this, Hegseth will reportedly move the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which administers foreign military sales, from the Pentagon’s policy office to the acquisition office.
The overarching idea behind Hegseth's anticipated plans is to cut bureaucratic red tape and increase the speed with which technology gets to the battlefield, according to reporters who have seen the six-page memo. But read the fine lines: it is also to force the Pentagon’s acquisition officials, who are supposed to focus their attention on ensuring the United States military has the hardware necessary to be effective, to also “give greater weight to what allies want to buy and make American offerings more competitive,” according to reporting by POLITICO.
The effect would be to further blur the already fuzzy public/private line between the government and the defense industry because it would effectively make Pentagon officials design partners with the defense contractors as they try to make their weapons more appealing on the international market.
Without this reported organizational change, the American defense industry already does brisk business around the world. Pentagon officials tracked a foreign military sales portfolio of more than $845 billion in 2024, making the United States the largest arms exporter in the world.
Weapons contractors generate a great deal of revenue selling their products overseas which is good for their bottom line. The business model by which they operate is unique because the capital used to develop the products they market was not their own. Most American weapons are developed under cost-plus government contracts meaning the companies are reimbursed for the research and development costs and receive an additional fee in profit.
This arrangement makes American citizens the venture capitalists in a business investment. Taxpayers provide the seed money to move a product from the drawing board to the market. But unlike traditional venture capitalists who expect a significant return on their investment, the American people rarely see a dime in return.
The American people should at least benefit financially from the arrangement. If the government partners with the defense contractors already by acting as sales representatives to overseas markets, the government — and the American people by extension — should be compensated appropriately. At the very least, foreign military sale profits should offset the prices paid by American taxpayers for the same weapons. But that happens only by exception.
The Arms Export Control Act passed by Congress in 1976 does require foreign military customers to reimburse the U.S. government for the research and development costs for the American-made weapons they purchase. But the act includes a provision that allows foreign governments to request a waiver for these payments. U.S. defense industry leaders have argued that the reimbursement fees raise the price of weapons sold overseas, which makes their products less attractive on the market and potentially impacting sales, and their company’s bottom lines.
The Government Accountability Office conducted an audit in 2018 that found the Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved Arms Export Control Act waivers at a rate of 99% during the previous 6 years.
The point can’t be made often enough that the products the defense contractors are selling overseas generally weren’t developed with their own money. Taxpayers covered those costs and the contractors then profit while actively working to prevent foreign customers from reimbursing the American people, thus denying them a return on their investment.
The arrangement is good for the defense industry, but a terrible deal for Americans.
Making the government acquisition officials adjunct defense industry staffers should not be a priority for the nation’s policymakers. The American people trust Pentagon staffers to look after the best interests of American troops, not the bottom lines of the defense contractors.
Rather than spending time considering the international arms market, American acquisition officials should focus their efforts on developing effective tools for the U.S. military that can be delivered on time and within budget — something that Hegseth's plans purportedly addresses. Simply avoiding acquisition failures that have been so characteristic of the past 25 years would do much more to make American arms more appealing on the international market than any organizational change ever would anyway.
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