Netanyahu’s veto and the limits of American power

Donald Trump has built much of his political identity around a simple proposition: American presidents have been too cautious about using American power. Allies, adversaries and bureaucrats, he argues, have learned to ignore Washington because Washington has forgotten how to make people comply. His Gaza initiative was supposed to demonstrate the opposite. Trump would impose a framework, the parties would accept it, and the United States would finally act as the indispensable power it claims to be.Benjamin Netanyahu’s swift rejection of that framework was not merely a negotiating tactic. It amounted to a pre-emptive veto, designed to weaken the initiative before it could gain momentum. It is tempting to portray the dispute as a routine disagreement between an Israeli prime minister and a US president, but that misses the larger significance. Netanyahu’s insistence that no Israeli withdrawal can take place until Hamas is “genuinely” disarmed strikes directly at the heart of Trump’s proposal and raises a question Washington has spent decades avoiding: What happens when a superpower allows an ally to dictate the terms of its own diplomacy?Trump’s 15-point framework is based on reciproc...