Hollywood actor and producer Clooney is a lifetime Democrat and, most crucially in this context, a major donor and fundraiser for the Democratic Party. He went on to say that Democrats will lose not only the White House but also the Senate, where they have a thin majority. He emphasised the point by writing “this is not my opinion” but the opinion of “every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with.”
What many people perhaps do not know is that Hollywood is the cash cow of the Democratic Party and money speaks volumes when it comes to US elections at all levels, including the presidential race.
Hence, if George Clooney calls for Biden to go, it matters.
Now that Biden has announced that he will not be a candidate in November and has backed his vice president Kamala Harris for the role, she has been endorsed by many top Democrats, including former presidential hopefuls, Senators and House members. The fact that Biden was actually an obstacle to more donations flowing into Democrat coffers was emphasised by the whopping $100 million that Harris was promised to spend on her campaign within 36 hours of being named as the presumptive nominee. She has already won more than the required number of delegates so is almost certain to be the official Democratic contender for presidential election and Hollywood, including Clooney, is only happy to pump in more cash.
Will Harris win on 5 November? That’s another matter. Being not only a woman, but also a woman of colour is a factor that could play negatively because highly polarised America may not favour having her as Commander in Chief given the currently turbulent global geopolitics. However, domestically, she has a far cleaner and credible record compared with Trump. As a former Senator and attorney general of California, she is running against a convicted felon regardless of how the former president is sentenced in September.
Every US presidential election is of great concern to America’s allies and foes around the world simply because it is a player, even an unwelcome one, in many regional and global issues. Be it the genocide in Gaza, Libya’s troubled election, the war in Ukraine or even long-forgotten Afghanistan, the US is there, and not always up to any good.
This makes the foreign policy of the next White House administration something to watch and analyse closely. What concerns us in the Middle East, for example, is what kind of policies the new president will enact when he or she is inaugurated on 20 January next year. It is almost certain that, if she wins, Madam President Kamala Harris will not stray much from her former boss’s foreign policy. On Gaza, for instance, she might use harsher words against Israel and more humanitarian rhetoric in describing the genocide victims in Gaza, but probably nothing more. She is unlikely, for example, to suspend arms shipments to Israel or stop using the US veto at the UN Security Council to shield the occupation state from criticism.
What is really hard to predict is what a second-term Donald Trump will do in the Middle East, starting with Gaza if the Israeli war hasn’t ended by then. Every indication from Israel says that it is likely to be going on beyond January 2025.
Let me play the devil’s advocate and assume that Trump will be the 47th president of the United States, as I predicted his victory back in 2016. What could another four years of Trump mean for the Middle East?
It is hard to forecast the behaviour of someone as ignorant as he is about global issues.
His understanding of geopolitics is negligible, but his record when he was president from 2016 to 2020 gives us some clues.
Trump’s support for Israel will be as “ironclad” as Biden’s and Israel will be able to count on him in all matters, important and trivial alike. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu is quite probably dragging the genocide in Gaza on as long as possible in the hope that it will still be ongoing when Trump re-enters the White House, leaving Israel with all the room needed to manoeuvre to murder more Palestinian women and children, and allowing Netanyahu to stay in power. He is as much a criminal as Trump, and birds of a feather tend to flock together.
A new Trump administration is also likely to pursue a more confrontational policy towards Iran by tightening sanctions and making sure that the 2015 nuclear deal is never revived. This means he will be more of a warmonger towards Iran’s regional allies such as groups in Iraq, Lebanon and, of course, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine.
What is really worrying is the fact that he will, undoubtedly, try to bring back his failed and fraudulent “Deal of the Century” initiative by bullying and encouraging more Arab and Muslim countries to normalise ties with Israel. That initiative led to the Abraham Accords, which saw four Arab countries normalise relations with the apartheid state. Let’s not forget that one of the objectives of Hamas’s daring 7 October cross-border incursion was, and still is, to stop the train of normalisation before it reaches the next stop: Saudi Arabia.
A revived “Deal of Century” will dilute most of what Al-Aqsa Flood has achieved so far, namely the suspension of normalisation indefinitely, and making the acceptance of Israel across the region conditional on the creation of an independent and viable Palestinian state. Another four years of Trump will likely push for Israel to be “friends” with more Arab states and be more solid in its denial of all Palestinian rights including, of course, a Palestinian state anywhere within occupied Palestine.
Given such a scenario, Harris might be the lesser of two evils for the Middle East since she, like the self-declared Zionist Biden, does at least support the principle of the two-state solution. She is also likely to take into account the fact that the International Court of Justice has just ordered Israel to leave the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza. Trump will not even try to understand what the court is about and what its rulings mean, let alone factor it into any articulate Middle East policy if he ever has one.
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