America or Israel First?

For those who find the question itself offensive, I'd ask the same one if the President and his UN ambassador threatened to cut American aid to countries voting the "wrong" way on a resolution pertaining to another country. On this specific occasion, I suppose, would see it as an insult to both American and Israeli sovereignty if nations vote to recommend that the U.S. reconsider its decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The real idea behind the threat is more likely that Trump wants to force a resolution of the Palestine question by intimidating countries into acquiescing in his fait accompli. He also wants to remind his "Judeo-Christianist" base that he isn't afraid of Muslims and doesn't care what the international community thinks. Israel remains the exception to the supposed Trump rule of foreign policy based on national self-interest. Many of his supporters and many of his opponents, if not the man himself, see Zionism as a moral imperative to which no one has any reasonable objection, but could be denied only on the basis of Jew-hatred.  They simply don't care whether support for Israel makes life more difficult for Americans as a nation or as individuals. Tying foreign aid to acquiescence in Jerusalem as the Israeli capital is a defining statement of this derangement. No matter what many yahoos may think, foreign aid is not a handout but a strategy premised on a calculation of costs and benefits favorable to the U.S. Trump himself may despise the calculus of foreign aid -- he sneered that the U.S. would save a lot of money if nations vote the wrong way at the UN -- but he just finished endorsing a National Security Strategy that deplored the emergence of power vacuums exploited by competitors whenever the country retreated from its rightful world leadership. It should occur to him that withdrawing foreign aid for this petty reason would create a similar vacuum that our competitors and adversaries would be happy to exploit, and that the pettiness of it will only further alienate the international community from an administration already seen, to a hysterical degree, as part of some white revanchist movement. Obviously principled arguments for reducing foreign aid can be made, and one can even argue that a degree of "ingratitude" might disqualify some countries from consideration. Denying countries aid because they won't kiss Israel's ass is not a principled argument, however. It will only further fuel (if not confirm) all the arguments against "imperialism," "arrogance," or "cold war mentality" that much of the world finds increasingly persuasive. The U.S. gives out foreign aid to further its own interests, in the final analysis. We should defend Israel if that's what the American people really want, since no one has an ultimate veto on Jewish nationhood that we're bound to respect,  but our desires and our interests are two diferent things, and we should not sacrifice our own interests out of spite for Israel's sake.