Daniel expertly fleshes this out in a way that only he can…
TRUMP’S ART OF THE DEAL IN NORTH KOREA, ISRAEL AND SYRIA
Understanding Trump’s America First foreign policy.
It’s really not that complicated.
But President Trump’s Syria strikes have reopened the debate over what defines his foreign policy. Is he an interventionist or an isolationist? Foreign policy experts claim that he’s making it up as he goes along.
But they’re not paying attention.
President Trump’s foreign policy has two consistent elements. From threatening Kim Jong-Un on Twitter to moving the embassy to Jerusalem to bombing Syria, he applies pressure and then he disengages.
Here’s how that works.
First, Trump pressures the most intransigent and hostile side in the conflict. Second, he divests the United States from the conflict leaving the relevant parties to find a way to work it out.
North Korea had spent decades using its nuclear program to bully its neighbors and the United States. Previous administrations had given the Communist dictatorship $1.3 billion in aid to keep it from developing its nuclear program. These bribes failed because they incentivized the nuclear program.
Nukes are the only thing keeping North Korea from being just another failed Communist dictatorship.
Instead, Trump called North Korea’s bluff. He ignored all the diplomatic advice and ridiculed its regime. He made it clear that the United States was not afraid of North Korean nukes. The experts shrieked. They warned that Kim Jong-Un wouldn’t take this Twitter abuse and we would be in for a nuclear war.
But the Norks folded.
The Communist regime held high level talks with the United States and South Korea. It’s reportedly planning to announce an official end to the war. That probably won’t amount to much in the long term, but it shifts more of the responsibility for the conflict away from the United States and to the Koreas.
Trump accomplished more with a few tweets than previous administrations had with billions of dollars.
An instinctive negotiator, Trump’s realpolitik genius lay not in ideology, but in grasping the core negotiating strategy of the enemy and then negating it by taking away its reason not to make a deal.
For years, the Arabs’ idea of an “honest broker” was having access to a White House and State Dept. to say: “Make the Israelis do this. Make the Israelis stop that. … etc.”
The willingness of American Presidents to play along resulted in the PA refusing to negotiate directly. Finally, we have a President who realizes the basic truth in our original effort to bring peace: the parties must negotiate face-to-face.
For years, it was the Israelis who refused to negotiate with the PLO. Then, suddenly the PLO claimed victory because the Israelis recognized them as a negotiating partner. Since the PLO’s goal could not be realized through direct negotiations, the strategy became to leverage their newly found legitimacy to back away from direct negotiations and erode Israel’s strategic position through international pressure. As US administrations played along with this, the Israelis became more insecure and resisted making concessions as the Arabs continued to make no meaningful concessions of their own except for temporary truces.
President Trump merely had to act on a long-passed law requiring the U.S. to move our embassy to Jerusalem. This law was enacted in large part to give the Israelis diplomatic confidence in negotiating face-to-face with the Palestinians. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem was a simple act long passed into U.S. law. Yet it brought the parties back to the basic purpose of the law: negotiate face-to-face; work your problems out; stop telling the United States to “make them “.
After decades of abandoning the original formula for direct negotiations, this came as a huge shock to many people. The Palestinians had gotten spoiled. However, Arab leaders have much bigger worries these days. Their own people are being recruited by Sunni imperialists who have no use for national leaders. Iran is eroding Sunni leadership in neighboring nations with a larger imperialist view. A nation-state of Jews hardly seems so threatening after 70 years.
I think Greenfield got this pretty much correct. The original vision of Oslo was to have direct negotiations. Our President likes to solve problems that way. He also likes to build tall swanky buildings on expensive big-city real estate (in case you never noticed). Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem satisfies President Trump in two ways; not just one.
… and that’s something Greenfield did NOT tell you. 🙂
Sincerely,
There is NO Santa Claus