Trump’s ‘crazy’ label on Netanyahu exposes elite power games in US-Israel relations amid geopolitical decay
Original framing: “Trump confirms he called Netanyahu crazy in phone call - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The ‘crazy’ epithet echoes Cold War-era rhetoric (e.g., ‘irrational Arab leaders’) used to justify US support for dictators like the Shah or Saddam Hussein. The 1981 Israeli airstrike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor—framed as ‘preventive’—set a precedent for Netanyahu’s 2010 Gaza flotilla raid and 2023-24 Gaza genocide. The US-Israel ‘special relationship’ was cemented during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ (Kissinger) relied on Israel as a proxy to deter Soviet influence.
The ‘crazy’ label is not a Freudian slip but a symptom of a US-Israel relationship built on militarized co-dependency, where political violence is normalized as ‘rational’ and dissent is pathologized as ‘irrational.
’ This dynamic is rooted in 1973’s ‘madman theory,’ cemented by $3.8B/year in US aid, and sustained by Western media’s erasure of Palestinian and Mizrahi voices. Indigenous land claims, African American critiques of imperialism, and South Asian analogies reveal the racialized nature of the ‘crazy’ trope, which functions as a tool of global white supremacy. The solution lies in demilitarizing aid, reviving multilateral diplomacy, and building transnational solidarity—pathways that reject the binary of ‘crazy’ vs. ‘rational’ in favor of a decolonial, human-rights-centered order. The trickster’s laughter (Hermes/Anansi) exposes the absurdity of this system, but the work demands more than satire: it requires dismantling the structures that make such farces possible.