Israel has never once had any intention of foregoing its claim over Jerusalem and the Palestinians are a hopeless cause. The decision is long overdue in recognizing this reality. Also, the decision hardly pissed anyone off. Israel has gained relations with 3 countries (UAE, Bahrain, Kosovo) in the last month. Serbia has also agreed to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Mauritania, and Oman are probably the most likely next candidates to normalize relations with Israel. Pakistan too if the Pakistani army has its way over the current Islamist Populist government. Saudi's apparently are still hesitant to do it directly but they still approved of Bahrain normalizing relations with Israel too. (Bahrain is a Saudi vassal state and occupied currently by Saudi soldiers.)
But the thing is, all these countries were de facto no longer real enemies, as they are all allies of the US. And they all had an aligning anti-Iran agenda before.
The general consensus here is that this is just symbolism that Trump was able to get because his son-in-law Kushner is best friends with Netanyahu.
Also if the Palestinians are to be given up (do you actually support ethnocide here?), then that's also a declaration of bankruptcy for the Israeli democracy. It has been 25 years now since Rabin got murdered.
Fortunately, Netanyahu's time is limited now and this is something where I hope that the Biden administration will capitalize on to bring forward actual progress towards peace in the region.
Reputation and reality are very different kinds of beasts.
It doesnt matter a lot what german citizens think of obama. Under Obama, there never were serious divisions between Europe and the Us.
Even the spy scandal was a scandal for the public, but not for politicians.
Merkel was not angry about american espionage organs (as germany strongly benefits from them), she was angry about the incompetence of the story getting out. Because then she had to deal with it and never heard the end of it, being pushed to 'a reaction' and other unnecessary stuff.
Merkel must have been really angry as she is a profound transatlantic herself. Obama and Merkel wanted to negotiate a free trade agreement, TTIP, which faced massive criticism among the population here even before Trump closed any windows on it.
A lot of this criticism was justified, but a lot also came from general mistrust.
The one that mainly benefited from the spy scandal was Russia. The perfect fuel for their conspiracy theory bullshit stuff.
The problem is, the memory of the public lasts longer than the daily topics in politics. Before the NSA scandal, there was the lie around the Iraq War and other stuff before and this creates permanent damage of mistrust.
Mistrust on which right-wing populists capitalized. We still got like a dozen of "Trumps" left in Europe.
So as far as foreign politics go, I think this is actually a pretty big question.
The Biden administration will have its hands full with fixing just the damage caused by Trump but I also hope they get that there has already been damage present before.
Will there be a united front against climate change or not?
Everyone here expects Biden to rejoin the Paris Agreement but otherwise to just tackle it moderately.
This could become interesting here as many expect the Green Party to form a coalition with the CDU after the next election in 2021. By their nature they would get the Minister of the Environment and as the junior partner in a coalition likely the Minister of Foreign Affairs as well. More and stronger international agreements regarding climate change are one of their main promises to their voters so it would be interesting to see wether the EU and the US are willing to put something up together. The chances will likely be there.
Will there be a united western front against chinese/russian aggression or not?
No, and honestly I have no idea what the plan is here.
The interests of the US and the EU are already conflicting too much here.
For Russia it is obviously because it is a part of Europe. Granted, with Merkel you have someone that is strongly opposed to Putin but the limits of reality in Europe might be much tighter than the US would want them to be.
Even within the EU this is a dividing topic.
And for China, I can only say what is the case for Germany but China makes us rich.
But I also think that no one has any good idea on what to do with China and there might be none at all.
Will America be a force of consensus and stability or not?
Hopefully.
