An endorsement is the cheapest coin in politics and the one most carefully counted. This week, in Washington, the two highest offices of the United States spent it differently on the same man: Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces Israeli voters on October 27.
As Al Jazeera reported, Vice President JD Vance declined to endorse the Israeli prime minister in an interview on Monday with the journalist Mark Halperin, saying he would rather stay on the sidelines and attend to his own country’s midterm elections. The refusal would be unremarkable — vice presidents rarely anoint foreign candidates — except for its timing. A day earlier, President Donald Trump had explicitly endorsed Netanyahu.
And here the minor theatre begins. According to CNBC’s account, Vance explained his abstention while praising the president’s endorsement as, in effect, the most powerful in political history, American or international. The compliment performs a quiet evacuation: if Trump’s blessing is so mighty, whose could possibly add to it? Certainly not a vice-president’s.
The art of the sideline
Netanyahu has governed through wars, indictments and the slow arithmetic of coalition survival; he has received, over the decades, the warmth and the cold shoulder of several American presidents, sometimes from the same president in the same year. He will know how to read this week. One branch of the administration embraces him; another checks its watch and speaks of domestic concerns.
Perhaps it is a division of labour, perhaps a difference of instinct, perhaps nothing at all. In the courts of great powers — and a superpower’s White House is a court, whatever the constitution says — the distance between a president and his deputy is measured precisely in such small denominations.
On October 27, Israelis will vote. The midterms Vance prefers to think about belong to another calendar, another continent. The sideline he has chosen is, for now, a comfortable place to stand.