The vain and bullying persona that Donald Trump projects online and in three dimensions is consistent: he is convinced that all that is required to restore the globe to a state of order and prosperity is his own good self. “The world was gloomy before I won—there was no hope,” he tweeted on the day after Christmas. “Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!” He is both the Prince of Peace and the savior of the Nasdaq index.

In the weeks since Election Day, Trump has also proved more than once that it is possible to deepen global anxiety armed with nothing more than a galling level of presumption and a Twitter account. Set off a new arms race with Moscow? A trade war with China? Whatever. Type for a few seconds, press “Tweet,” and the world trembles.

Trump is prepared to insert himself into any argument—even if it is a century old and endlessly complex—with half a thought and a hundred and forty characters. The subject this week is the Israeli-Palestinian question. Just hours before President Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, was to deliver a valedictory speech warning that the status quo of settlement-building in the occupied territories is “leading toward one state or perpetual occupation,” Trump took to Twitter and sent out a two-stage rocket:

We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect. They used to have a great friend in the U.S., but….

… not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!

Minutes later, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, tweeted back his affection (and implicit contempt for Obama): "President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support for Israel!” Netanyahu put in emojis for the Israeli and American flags and made sure to add “@IvankaTrump” and “@DonaldJTrumpJr."

Trump also denounced the Obama Administration’s decision to abstain from, rather than to veto, a United Nations Security Council resolution last week condemning Israeli settlement-building in the occupied territories. “Too bad, but we will get it done anyway!” Trump tweeted. Get what done? Of this he did not extensively tweet.

On one level, it seemed as if the traditional language of diplomacy—stilted, guarded, but respectful of complexity—had finally devolved into the realm of the sitcom. More seriously, and more outrageously, Trump, after making appreciative noises about the Obama Administration’s courtesies and coöperation in the orderly transition of power—one of the foundations of a functioning democracy­—felt free to violate those norms and insert himself blatantly into foreign policy before his Inauguration. (“Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks,” he tweeted today. “Thought it was going to be a smooth transition—NOT!”)

Daniel Kurtzer, who was Ambassador to Egypt under Bill Clinton and Ambassador to Israel under George W. Bush, told me that he was appalled both by Trump’s presumption and Netanyahu’s collusion.

“We are in uncharted waters—a President-elect trying to make policy and a foreign leader conspiring with that President-elect to undercut a sitting President,” Kurtzer said. “But such are the times. In any normal situation, we would all be out on the streets protesting and saying to Trump, ‘We elected you President, but you don’t start until January 20th.’ But this guy doesn’t care.”

The political center of gravity in Israel has been moving to the right for many years, so much so that the greatest threat to Netanyahu’s personal power comes from politicians and parties who support some form of annexation of the West Bank or some form of one-state resolution in which the Palestinians do not have full civil rights. And even though Netanyahu has paid lip service to a final settlement and two states for two peoples, he always, given a choice between power and principle, acts to preserve his power. In his last electoral campaign, he made it plain that he has no intention of uprooting any settlements, and warned Jewish voters that Israeli Palestinians were coming to the polls “in droves.”

For at least two years, President Obama, frustrated by Netanyahu and by failed attempts to make serious progress on the Palestinian question, has been considering the question of legacy. Pressed by Kerry, who has shown an almost quixotic desire to press the Israelis, Obama considered laying out a framework of any future peace. Two things prevented it. The first was that such a gesture would not much influence the Israeli leadership. Second, Obama expected that Hillary Clinton would win the election; he thought it would be better to coördinate what sort of diplomatic gesture to make before leaving the White House.

But then came the Trump victory. The President-elect's appointment of David Friedman, a pro-settlement bankruptcy lawyer, as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel “had a lot of weight in the President’s thinking” about what to do next, one senior Administration official told me. The official told me that the Administration had been “alarmed” by many of Trump’s appointments to his national-security team—notably the appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser—but the selection of Friedman was “over the top.”

“The last thing you want to do as you leave office is to pick a fight with the organized Jewish community, but Friedman is so beyond the pale,” the adviser said. “He put his political and charitable support directly into the settlements; he compares Jews on the left to the kapos in the concentration camps—it just put it over the top.”

In 2011, Obama, in explaining why the U.S. vetoed a resolution condemning the settlements, told the U.N. General Assembly that a peace agreement cannot be imposed on the Israelis and Palestinians. But that was five years ago, when negotiations were still a possibility (though a resolution was never close). Now, as settlements expand and reach new, more distant corners of the West Bank, as the Palestinian leadership ages and fractures and grows more dispirited, as younger right-wing politicians, such as Naftali Bennett, gain more and more influence in Israeli politics, Obama, the avatar of hope, has lost hope. Or, at least he has lost hope for the near future. As time ran out, he came to believe that setting down a marker was essential.

“The status quo is leading toward one state, or perpetual occupation,” Kerry warned. Without resolving the Palestinian question, he went on, there is no way to maintain both a democracy and a Jewish state. Kerry’s long speech, which Kurtzer called “the most substantive” on the subject ever given by an American at the highest level, is worth reading for its clarity, fairness, context, and reasonable sense of foreboding. There is nothing radical or unfamiliar in the text, and yet it is a firm setting out of the problem in all its complexity and perils.