Why does Benjamin Netanyahu, whose career has largely been defined by caution, seem intent on taking the dramatic step of applying Israeli law to the southern and eastern suburbs of Jerusalem, and to the Jordan Valley? Haviv Rettig Gur argues that the move is a strategic response to Washington’s efforts to disentangle itself from the Middle East, which began under President Obama and will likely continue whatever the results of the 2020 elections:
A Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated regime in Turkey is on the march in Syria and asserting new maritime rights in the eastern Mediterranean. Iran is briefly contained—primarily by America and by the weaknesses of its own regime. But remove America, lift the sanctions re-imposed by the Trump White House, and the Shiite axis Tehran has constructed from Lebanon to Yemen is, at least in the short term, contained no more. Russia has moved into the region, as has China with its forward base in Djibouti.
This point is argued by Israeli defense planners on both sides of the annexation debate. The anti-annexationists say a dangerous region and a retreating America require bolstering alliances with conservative Sunni states like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and [other] Gulf states. Annexation only makes that more difficult.
But the same vulnerability lends a new importance to the West Bank. A withdrawal from the Jordan Valley, say most Israeli defense planners, now becomes impossible to justify. A vacuum of Israeli security control in the West Bank would be used by rising enemies from Ankara to Tehran—and their proxies and ideological compatriots in Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic Jihad—to threaten directly the Israeli heartland of the coastal plain.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-fear-of-a-us-retreat-from-the-mideast-is-driving-netanyahu-toward-annexation/