Gloating Trump loses trust of allies

Now that the Americans tell us they've killed one of the leaders of the terrorist army of Daesh, the so-called Islamic State, what should we expect from both sides? What will become of Daesh, and what of the Americans?

The killing of the man who called himself by the grandiose alias of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, if confirmed, will not kill his movement. Donald Trump tried to argue that this man's death was a much bigger deal than that of Osama bin Laden: "This was the big one. This is the biggest one, perhaps, that we’ve ever captured, because this is the one that built ISIS, and beyond, and was looking to rebuild it again," said the President.

"I mean, al-Baghdadi everybody hears because he’s built this monster for a long time. But nobody ever heard of Osama bin Laden until, really, the World Trade Centre."

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Why? Because it serves a real need: "What the Middle East needs right now is a secular force that dreams a secular dream. At the moment, the only 'dream' is the caliphate," writes the chair of the British think tank Quilliam, Maajid Nawaz, a reformed extremist who went on to advise British prime ministers Labor and Tory alike on counter-terrorism.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of bin Laden and al-Baghdadi is that the movement is now more widespread globally than ever. After the obliteration of its "caliphate" and the reported death of al-Baghdadi, violent salafist jihad is now transforming again.

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And, despite Trump's best efforts to belittle al-Baghdadi as a "gutless animal" who died "whining", he will be seen by Islamist sympathisers as having "martyred" himself if Trump's version is correct and he suicided rather than accept capture.

Indeed, Trump's unseemly public gloating over the gory detail of the killing of a fugitive terrorist does not reflect well on the leader of a superpower claiming the moral mandate of Western civilisation.

And what of the Americans? We know that foreign policy by assassination is an incomplete recipe for success. The larger lesson from these weeks in Syria emerges from Trump's treatment of a US ally. The coverline of Britian's Economist magazine last week read: "Who can trust Trump's America"? And the subtitle: "The consequences of betraying the Kurds."

If any country can trust Trump's America, surely it is the most intimate US ally in the Middle East, Israel. Trump is just the latest in a line of US presidents, Republican and Democrat, to declare his undying love for the promised land. But even Israel is disturbed by Trump's breezy betrayal of the Kurds. "Donald Trump may love you," says the leading Israeli political commentator Ehud Yaari, "but at the end of the day he leaves you alone confronting Putin's Russia and with Iran creeping in."

While Israel's political parties grope to form a governing coalition, "the main issue confronting Israel is the retreat of Donald Trump from the Middle East", he says. "The US will support Israel by selling equipment, and they will support it diplomatically, but look at what happened to the Kurds, and the spectacular Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities" to which the US signally failed to respond.

"We will come to the point in the very forseeable future that Israel will conclude that we'd better act now or otherwise we will wake up one day encircled by Iran," says Yaari. "We will not let them tighten the noose around out neck.

"Trump is deeply averse to military intervention. Israel is on its own."

If even Israel cannot count on US help in a fight, what chance does any other US ally have? Trump's America may defend its own most immediate and most obvious interests. But we are learning that Trump does not include American allies in that definition.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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