Trump cuts the $3.8 billion to Israel: the empire revises its invoices

According to France 24, Donald Trump announced on Tuesday 3 November, in a telephone interview on Fox News, the end of Israel's security aid, which was due to run until 2028 at $3.8 billion a year. The American president claims that Benjamin Netanyahu was "on board". What we still don't know: the timetable, the details, Jerusalem's official position, and whether this announcement will be followed by action. A television statement is not a finance bill.

Everything else is our reading.

First temptation: see it as a falling-out, a whim, a matter of feelings between two leaders. Let's set that aside. A state has no friends, it has investments. This aid was never a gift. It was an imperial line item: an armed ally in a key region, with orders that, for the most part, flow back to the American arms industry. Cui bono? The manufacturers first. Washington next, which gained a foothold without maintaining its own garrisons there.

So why cut? A working hypothesis, to be verified. First, domestic politics: foreign aid has become a bone of contention within Trump's camp as elsewhere, and "making the allies pay" wins votes. Second, method: by announcing the end of an agreement, you open a negotiation. The president has always treated the alliance as a contract to be renegotiated, not as a principle.

Lenin saw military alliances, arms contracts and blocs as the political shell of economic rivalries between great powers. Let's apply that here. If Washington loosens the reins, it is not out of pacifism. It is because the spending must justify itself against the balance of power in the world, faced with rivals who are also seeking their own footholds. A costly protectorate readily becomes a paying client. The aid would then turn into a sale: Israel would buy with its own funds what the American taxpayer was financing. The arms dealers would not lose much.

The detail matters, and we lack it. If the aid disappears without a substitute, Israel will look for other suppliers or other guarantors, and other powers will step forward. If it is replaced by sales or bilateral agreements, nothing changes except the bookkeeping. In both cases, the message applies to all of the empire's protégés: protection is conditional, revisable, priced.

Commentators will talk of a historic rupture. They will be using the wrong register. What is at stake is the organisation of a system in which the state serves first the interests of those who run it and arm it. The $3.8 billion is not a question of morality. It is a budget line, and it has just been reopened.

To be followed: the exact text, the reaction in Congress, and above all what will replace this aid. Only then will we know who is cashing in. (our translation)