Is Donald Trump becoming a wiser global statesman?
COMMENT/ANALYSIS
After some of the headlines of the past couple of weeks you might be forgiven for thinking that Donald Trump is becoming, if not exactly a sage and seasoned diplomat, then at least a more moderate and wiser version of himself.
Commentators point out that he skipped a visit to Israel during his recent tour of the Middle East – perhaps a sign of his cooling enthusiasm for the pugnacious leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu - and that his tolerance of Vladimir Putin’s antics seems to be wearing thin.
His Middle East trip didn’t, after all, result in too much abject outrage. He hasn’t turned Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East, as he suggested he would. On a more global level Canada is still not the 51st state of the USA, nor Greenland the 52nd.
But is Trump therefore becoming a statesman?
To keep perspective, let’s look at a couple of examples of how leading global conflicts have evolved since Trump came to power.
First off the war in Ukraine. In the last four months Kyiv has been forced to forego its two most important foreign policy aims: joining Nato and getting back the lands that Russia has seized by force in the east.
Both may, ultimately, have been unrealistic. Given that no western army was about to push the Russians out of Donbas, this first admission may simply have been recognition of the facts on the ground.
On the Nato front it is hard to imagine Hungary and some other members of the alliance agreeing to allow Ukraine to join.
Even so a more canny tactic might have been to offer these up in exchange for concessions from Moscow. Instead they were presented to a delighted Putin on a plate by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s lightweight Secretary of Defence.
Far from becoming more flexible as a result, the Kremlin has only dug its heels in more firmly. Even though Washington has offered to recognise the seizure of Crimea, Putin has still refused to countenance even a temporary ceasefire.
Taking a few steps back from all the hot air, the only thing that Trump has really achieved in Ukraine so far is to belittle and badger the victim while feeding the appetite of the aggressor.
Even if the US president now somehow persuades Putin to agree to a ceasefire the prospects of a lasting peace are as far away as ever. There have been dozens of ceasefires since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014 and not one of them has lasted.
(Joe Biden’s policy, by contrast, while it may have been on the timid side, was really the only feasible option: bolster the Ukrainians and slowly bleed Moscow until the cost of the war forced the Russians to conclude that peace might be a better bet than war.)
And then there is the conflict in Gaza.
On this score Trump has failed even more miserably. Even as Netanyahu and his political allies have embarked on a bloody campaign to carve a Greater Israel out of Arab lands, the White House has remained broadly supportive.
When Netanyahu was charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes, Trump sanctioned the court. Now with Israel gearing up for a new invasion of Gaza Washington continues to provide it with high-payload weapons that take a terrible civilian toll.
Israeli actions in Gaza have become so egregious that putting them into some kind of contemporary perspective is difficult. For the last two months Israel has been blocking all humanitarian aid to Gaza, which is home to more than two million people.
When the Serbs did the same in the 1990s with the Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia there was outrage, they were - rightly - condemned as resorting to medieval tactics, and the big powers forced them to back down. Today there is only a whimper of protest in the West.
According to the best estimates – foreign journalists are banned from Gaza unless they are on an Israeli army press trip – about half of Gazans are now starving with many hundreds having already died from hunger-related disease.
According to the UN – an organisation the Israelis troll obsessively – this summer could see a full-on famine with tens of thousands or even more deaths.
Meanwhile the Israelis have continued to bomb relentlessly and only this week killed more than 60 civilians in one air strike. Much of Rafah, one of Gaza’s largest cities, has been razed to the ground by Israeli bulldozers.
The Israelis, of course, deny they are committing genocide and a vociferous pro-Israeli lobby in the west targets any outlet that dares say differently. (Many journalist friends who work in Israel complain of pressure from their editors to go easy on the Israelis.)
But given the scale of the killing – upwards of 50,000 Palestinians have already died, at least half of them children – as well as the attacks on journalists, aid workers, doctors and hospitals, the Israeli argument that they are not committing war crimes is flimsy.
In both of these conflicts Donald Trump has talked of his friendship with and admiration for the aggressors and threatened and berated the victims.
Then again Trump has never claimed to be motivated by a higher sense of morality.
Instead his key metrics seem to be how many billions of dollars of deals he wins for US business – not an unworthy aim for an American leader – as well as how many millions he can bring rolling into the Trump family coffers – a more dubious ambition.
On his latest trip Trump accepted a $400 million airplane from the Qataris as a present. When challenged, he replied that anyone who turned down an airplane was ‘stupid’. Even the New York Post, a reliably pro-Trump outlet was critical.
And so perhaps the best way of seeing Trump’s latest foreign policy moves is not as evidence of a growing sense of moderation, a sagacity born of experience, or even a late-to-the-table sympathy for the Palestinians or the Ukrainians.
More likely his actions are driven by a motivation as old as the hills – greed.
After all ending the Russo-Ukrainian or the Israeli-Palestinian war was always going to be a tall order, even for a president with great acumen and a highly-experienced negotiating team, neither of which Trump has.
But taking a backhander – be it in mineral wealth, flying palaces or bricks and mortar – is something that is easy for a US president to do. And something at which Trump, in recent US history at least, knows no rivals.
Trump is what he has always been…a self enriching ignorant bully. He melts at a compliment but does not have the ability to recognize when the compliment is insincere or offensive. He saw money, “bigly money”, and he sold out his country for it. These Arab country leads must be chuckling into their caffe cups knowing how cheaply and easily they could buy the president the President of the United States.
I tend to agree with most of what you write and once again agree with this analysis ... it is increasingly obvious that the strategy (or maybe the tactics) is unambiguously focussed on capturing material gains for the US (as well as those close to him, and his family) regardless of the wider consequences ... this fits like a hand in a glove with the MAGA vision - no one can suggest there was any doubt as to the goals ... of course there have been mis-steps like the tarrifs own-goal and the inevitable climb-down (when you are hunting with a shotgun, rarther than a rifle, there is a greater risk of collateral damage) ... it is a Brutal Fact however that, while Trump may be an extreme example, it was ever thus when it comes to US policy and in general the policies of any empire ... even a casual student of history knows this is not the first time this has happened, and it is certain it wont be the last.