On Tuesday morning, just hours before the GOP suffered a historic shellacking in the midterm elections, Donald Trump came out with what he hoped would be a game-changing announcement: The U.S., he declared, would soon end its annual $4 billion military aid to Israel.
The news should’ve made me happy—my Tablet colleague Jacob Siegel and I spent the last three years making the case for this exact policy. But there was little to celebrate about Trump’s declaration, because anyone listening closely to the president on Election Day, or to the vice president the following morning, would have realized that the administration is making very few right moves—and even then, always for the wrong reasons, and often with disastrous consequences.
How so? To answer the question, and to understand why this week’s political upheaval may actually be very good news for anyone concerned with America’s strength and security, it helps to first understand precisely what U.S. aid to Israel is—or, more accurately, what it is not.
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