When it comes to foreign leaders, Donald Trump has a type.
The incoming Republican president has shown he has respect for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, and Washington has been brimming with chatter about his budding relationship with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
It’s no secret that he admires foreign figures who remind him of himself, with their strength, business expertise or no-holds-barred style.
But after Jan. 20, once Trump is sworn into the most powerful office in the world, he may find himself forging his deepest connection with a man President Obama failed to impress: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu was quick to embrace the president-elect after his election victory in November and has professed an eagerness to work with the Trump administration to restore relations that soured under the current one.
In Trump, the prime minister sees a leader who is determined to relocate the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, who would support continued settlement construction in the West Bank, and who will stand up for Israel at the United Nations and with it in the Middle East. At least one senior adviser to the president-elect has also hinted at lifting the ceiling on U.S. security aid to Israel once the new administration takes over.
“He feels very warmly about the Jewish State, about the Jewish people and Jewish people. There’s no question about that,” Netanyahu said of Trump in December.
For his part, Trump has spoken of strengthening U.S.-Israel ties with avidity.
He moved swiftly, after last month’s U.N. Security Council vote, to criticize Obama for failing to shield the Jewish nation from a perceived anti-Israel bias that has plagued the international institution. And at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference last March, the then-candidate promised the crowd, “there is nobody more pro-Israel than I am.”
“I think these two men are going to get along very, very well,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who met Netanyahu during a congressional trip to Israel in March, told the Washington Examiner.
“They’re both very dedicated to protecting their nations against Islamic jihadism. They both have very strong personalities and they both understand the benefit of handling disagreements in the private sphere instead of in the United Nations,” he explained.
According to Republican Jewish Coalition spokesman Fred Brown, Trump and his Israeli counterpart share a realistic view of foreign affairs and fully grasp that “a strong Israel, a strong U.S., and strong ties between the two nations is going to make everyone safer.”
But Trump and Netanyahu share far more than homogeneity on foreign policy. Vast similarities in their style, upbringings, personal interests, and in how each man is seen by his critics, can be found upon closer inspection.
When the president-elect was brokering his first business deals as a graduate of the esteemed Wharton Business School, Netanyahu was balancing dual degree courses in architecture and business management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The latter went on to work at the upstart Boston Consulting Group before permanently relocating to Israel in 1978 to begin laying the foundation for his political career.
Netanyahu had launched an anti-terrorism organization less than a month after joining BCG after learning that his elder brother, an officer in the Israeli military, had been killed during a hostage rescue operation in Uganda. Like Trump, a teetotaller who lost his brother Fred to alcoholism in 1981, Netanyahu once said his own experience with loss ultimately affected many military decisions he has made during his time in office.
Richard Aldous, author of Reagan & Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship, has studied foreign leaders for years and said parallels between Trump and Netanyahu could influence how much entree both men give each other and the level of candor in their conversations.
“The personal relationship that stems from similarities like theirs gets you in the door. It gets you a seat at the table. Obviously if there’s bad chemistry, the president isn’t going to want to see you,” Aldous told the Washington Examiner.
He added that a mutual understanding of the dynamic by and between both parties is an equally important ingredient in making the relationship work.
“Part of the reason the Reagan-Thatcher relationship was so good was that they had personal chemistry, yes, but also because Reagan allowed Thatcher to speak to him in ways that offended members of his administration because he understood he was the more powerful partner,” Aldous explained. “You have to be able to speak truth to power, but ultimately you have to accept that you are the junior partner and sometimes you just have to suck it up, as Thatcher did in many cases.”
Trump and Netanyahu also share in their ability to gain or maintain power absent the support from establishment figures in the U.S. and Israel. Trump’s November election victory was the culmination of Americans’ dissatisfaction with career politicians and an established political order, while Netanyahu soundly defeated a challenger in 2015 who had the backing of many in Israel’s political and security establishments.
They may not be well-liked by establishment leaders in their respective nations, but such details won’t matter if the connection Trump and Netanyahu forge nurtures a new era of U.S.-Israel relations that makes both partners safer.
And instinctively, “both sides are going to want to make this relationship work,” Aldous said. “This is an opportunity for the U.S. to press the reset button on a relationship that has been very strained and for Netanyahu to befriend a leader who is sympathetic to Israel. Neither is going to want to risk squandering that.”
