Trump turned foreign policy into a farce
Donald J. Trump has underlined once more the power of one of Marx’s few witty aphorisms — “History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.” Except in this case, the worst U.S. president in history has managed to do it all within one week.
Agreeing once more to be directed in Middle East foreign policy by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s delusional view of Israeli national security interests, Trump ripped up the Iran nuclear treaty.
He precipitated a crisis with his closest allies, gave Israel licence to bomb Iranian forces more openly — which it has seized — and may have pulled the trigger on a war with Iran. A war that equally delusional national security adviser John Bolton has lusted after for more than two decades.
Trump slapped one tyrant, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, so vigorously that he single-handedly revitalized the discredited Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s regional military ambitions to a religious leadership that was under increasing domestic pressure about endless wars on three fronts.
Trump then turned to give a fat wet kiss to his second tyrant of the week. The American president thanked North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for treating his released American hostages “so excellently!”
Since when do leaders thank tyrants for releasing kidnapped hostages?
So, the Iranian tragedy has morphed into the farce of a North Korean bromance, to be consummated on June 12 in Singapore … or not. With all the feel-good theatre of recent weeks, Kim has played tyro Trump masterfully. Still, it seems staggeringly unlikely that what Kim’s father and grandfather were determined never to concede, and what American presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama each failed at winning, will be delivered in reality by such a feckless leader as Trump.
It seems like a North Korean reality TV show, staged for the gullible vainglorious American leader’s benefit: singers, dancers and parades promising the world and delivering little. Kim has reconciled with China, won a new partner in South Korea and isolated both Japan and Russia. Whatever would possess him to now give up his nuclear ICBM capacity, having achieved it just a few months ago after nearly three decades of hard struggle?
More likely is a reprise of the stunts pulled by his two predecessors: say yes to a freeze or even denuclearization and then start cheating in secret almost immediately. Would he agree to IAEA inspectors? Perhaps, but given the Iranian fiasco, he could follow their likely path and, like Saddam, simply expel them over some pretext later.
Will Trump’s advisers be able to caution him from swallowing the Kim fairy tales whole? Not on the basis of any previous experience. Are both the Iranian destabilization of the Middle East and its escalating military collisions with both Saudi Arabia and Israel likely to accelerate? Yes. Is North Korea going to extract significant financial and political concessions out of South Korea and the United States before they are once again found to be reliably unreliable? Bien sûr.
Since his improbable election, it was always in the theatre of foreign policy, and damage to U.S. interests internationally, that caused the greatest shivers among American and allied leaders. We hope we have dodged the bullet on NAFTA and a trade war, though China remains a potentially explosive policy failure for the gormless Trumpies.
However, last week we may have seen the opening moves in the nightmare that seasoned veterans of global realpolitik dreaded the most — that Trump would destroy the tense and fragile balance of forces in the Middle East and trigger a confrontation on the North Korean peninsula.
Comparisons of Watergate and today shout at us daily. But on the global stage, history is not repeating itself. Nixon and Kissinger saved the peace in the Middle East following the ’73 Yom Kippur War, at the depths of Watergate, holding off the endgame in their fatal political scandal.
The tragedy is that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Bolton may have wrecked the peace and despite the farcical theatre, also accelerated Trump’s slide into a swamp of scandal.