Trump’s & Biden’s Americas have almost nothing in common, tensions unseen ‘since the Civil War,’ ex-Israeli envoy to US tells RT

The indecisive preliminary result of the US presidential election and the expectation that its outcome may be decided in court clearly show how divided the country is, a former Israeli ambassador to the US told RT.

“The American society is a broken one. I would say that the tensions over there have not been as high, maybe, since the Civil War more than a 150 years ago,” Danny Ayalon told RT.

You have Biden’s America and Trump’s America, and they have almost nothing in common.

The ex-diplomat was commenting on a narrow race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. No clear victor emerged on election day, and it may take days before all ballots are tallied in a handful of battleground states. The incumbent president has already declared himself a winner and said he would have the US Supreme Court counter alleged “fraud” during the count. The Biden campaign called it “a naked effort” to steal the election by defrauding early voters and said its candidate would eventually win.

Speaking as a former Israeli official, Ayalon commented on what his country and the greater Middle East should expect from Washington, depending on who wins the election. He said there was no doubt that Trump has been the most pro-Israeli US president, but Biden obviously has a long record of pro-Israeli votes in the US Congress.

“Forty-seven years in the Senate, and in all these years there isn’t even one time that he voted against Israel,” he said. “When it comes to foreign relations and the Middle East, I’m not sure there will be much difference.”

Arguably the biggest foreign policy question for a Biden administration would be a likely resurrection of the nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump unceremoniously tore down. Ayalon said people should not expect things to go back to where they were pre-Trump in this regard.

“I just happened to speak to one of Biden’s advisers about a week ago,” he said. “The resumption, the going back to the JCPOA – the Iran deal – is not automatic… The Iranians need to make some adjustments too.”

Ayalon believes that Biden could get European support to pressure Iran to make concessions on things like its ballistic missile program. The Trump administration claimed it could extract a better deal from Tehran by bearing its economy with crippling sanctions.

The strategy evidently didn’t work as intended. Iran now holds the European signatories to the JCPOA accountable for their failure to resist threats from Washington and provide the business benefits which Iran was promised in return for accepting restrictions on its nuclear industry.

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