Yet, Arab states in the Gulf were always willing to overlook the U.S. intimacy with Israel because of their security fears and desire for U.S. protection. Might the Saudis go so far as to make the same bargain with Israel itself, abandoning their support—or pretense of support—for Palestinians in pursuit of whatever reassurance vis a vis Iran that an overt diplomatic relationship with Israel might confer? We will know the answer to this soon enough.

Even if this Saudi-Israeli rapprochement does comes to pass, it won’t add significantly to the benefits of the U.S.-Israel alliance. And that alliance—at least in the form that a now retiring generation experienced it—will probably fray if, as seems likely, the two-state solution approaches an irrevocable demise and there arises a new American generation that knows not Joseph. Trump himself has spoken of applying his negotiating skills to achieving the chimerical Israeli-Palestinian deal that has eluded his predecessors—although his one state/two state/whatever formulation belies the vacuity of his vision for what the deal might look like. The bigger problem is that Washington cannot organize a complex negotiation without a fully staffed and experienced White House and diplomatic corps.

Visiting Israel the week of Trump’s inauguration, we were told by a just-retired senior Israeli security official that the president-elect’s unpredictability might well pose a danger to his country. This was a striking assessment at the time. It has since been validated by the spectacle and drama of Trump’s first four months in office. It is not so much the president’s remarkable disclosure of sensitive Israeli intelligence to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister; the Mossad will get over it, as will the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, assuming they were the originating source. The U.S. and Israeli intelligence services will continue to cooperate closely on targets of mutual concern to the extent that their political masters wish them to. Yet Trump’s entire attitude towards the Russians, like his expressed views towards China that changed 180 degrees after one conversation with President Xi Jinping, reveals a man without strategic principle or moral compass. Who is to say that his views on Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or even Israel will not change just as abruptly.

There are obvious limits to Trump’s span of attention and impulse control. The notion that a seventy-year-old man confronting the awesome responsibilities of the presidency would undergo a fundamental change of character never looked plausible. Some Israelis might seek comfort in remembering that the last such sinking administration, Richard Nixon’s, was able, even in the throes of Watergate, to substantially upgrade U.S.-Israeli ties. It was during the 1973 October War—with the Jewish state under coordinated attack on two out of three fronts, and a vital U.S. military airlift resupplying the Israelis in the days before—that Nixon ordered the firing of his own special prosecutor in the Saturday Night Massacre, followed by the resignations of his attorney general and deputy attorney general. And indeed, Nixon was a president who could conduct a criminal conspiracy at the same time as he was improving America’s strategic position on almost every front: nuclear arms control with the Soviets, a balancing rapprochement with China, withdrawal (albeit after painful delay) from Vietnam, leveraging the Israel connection to pry Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, bravura shuttle diplomacy by his secretary of state to achieve disengagement of forces between Israel and Syria. To pull off this high-wire act, of course, Nixon relied on that secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, along with cadres of capable and experienced officials in the State Department, Pentagon and White House. The admirable generals in the current administration’s key national-security positions are necessarily cut from different cloth than Henry Kissinger, and they have their hands full, besides, in dealing with West Wing turbulence and the administration’s understaffing. And Donald Trump, by any measure of strategic acumen and adult self-awareness, is no Richard Nixon.

Steven N. Simon is a professor at Amherst College. He was senior director for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council 2011–12. Dana H. Allin is editor of Survival and a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. They are the authors of Our Separate Ways: The Struggle for the Future of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (PublicAffairs 2016).

Image: Donald Trump at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Flickr/Creative Commons/Gage Skidmore