https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/us-trade-deals-are-being-defined-by-the-president-s-passionate-but-flawed-beliefs-1.699332

Donald Trump’s appearance at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, was simultaneously bizarre and familiar. Though born into great wealth and advantage, he casts himself as a quintessential outsider, overcoming vast obstacles to seduce and dominate existing elites – first in Manhattan, then Washington and now globally.

The forum’s main topic was trade. And trade is exactly where one should begin in understanding how “America First” broadly operates in practice and what defines a distinctive Trump-inflected foreign policy that decisively breaks with previous American approaches.

Mr Trump’s attitudes towards trade explain much, particularly his visceral, troubling and otherwise inexplicable hostility to multilateral agreements, arrangements and institutions.

In his view, all people, both individually and collectively, in every encounter fall into two categories: winners and losers. Even in an essentially win-win scenario, one party will almost certainly be more advantaged, thereby qualifying as the “winner”. Anyone not the “winner” is, by definition, the “loser”. Money is the primary metric. There are no partners, just rivals and opponents.

He thinks Washington’s prodigious economic and military power, as compared to any other individual state, is its main competitive advantage. However, he reasons, at least since the Second World War, American leaderships have stupidly forgone this advantage by pursuing multilateral, systemic and rules-based arrangements. Because these involve negotiating with groups of countries, the overwhelming asymmetry of any one-on-one match-up between Washington and another party is pointlessly squandered.

A simple example is his interpretation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) boils down to that. Rather than negotiating with Canada and Mexico separately, Nafta pits Washington against what amounts to a new and much stronger opponent: Canada-Mexico.

He thinks that under Nafta, Washington foolishly consents – to its disadvantage – to confront the combined strengths of Canada and Mexico. Naturally it must accept less from both together than it could compel from each separately.

He has other concerns. Anything arranged by any of his predecessors is, by definition, “a bad deal”, especially the nuclear agreement with Iran (“the worst deal ever”). Even a bilateral treaty like the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement is objectionable, despite the obvious necessity of Washington-Seoul partnership against Pyongyang, because he is sure he could have done better.

Moreover, all agreements, particularly multilateral ones, mandate US responsibilities as well as rights. Mr Trump sees this as, by definition, impinging on US sovereignty.

Because all of life, including international relations, is a war of all against all and an unceasing competition of winners and losers, he rejects the idea, embraced by all of his predecessors since the Second World War, that Washington benefits from a rules-based international order.

Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama might have had different visions of the specifics of such an order. But, like naive hippies, they all assumed that international systems, even though they voluntarily commit Washington to certain constraints on its own behaviour, are inherently beneficial, especially when the United States is a key architect of their terms, procedures and purposes.

Mr Trump categorically rejects the dominant American internationalist consensus as the product of childish illusions. He instead insists that Washington’s power is best leveraged not by principled structures but via ad hoc, bilateral and non-systemic arrangements.

However, Mr Trump has inherited a set of policies and domestic and international institutions predicated on the very assumptions he derisively rejects. And they remain a powerful consensus in the US government he now leads.

That’s why, despite his nativist attitude and statements, many of his policies and pronouncements still reflect an internationalist agenda. Just as many American institutions, including the media, the Republican Party and even the Democrats, are learning to live with him, he is adjusting to a reality in which his anti-internationalist attitudes, although popular with his base, remain highly unconventional in Washington and largely dysfunctional in international relations.

For months, he resisted publically affirming that Washington is bound by Article 5 of the Nato Treaty to come to the defence of any other member that is attacked militarily. His position was that Nato members behind in their payments couldn’t necessarily expect the benefit of collective defence, which is the raison d’être of the organisation. He even removed a drafted reference to Article 5 from a May 2017 speech he delivered at Nato headquarters in Brussels. But in June, he finally acknowledged Washington’s responsibilities under Article 5.

Mr Trump is operating in an American and global system largely shaped by ideas he disdains. In most ways, as he is quickly discovering, he is their captive.

Because he is president, Mr Trump and the American establishment – and now the international economic elite in Davos as well – are stuck with each other. It’s not his first incongruous and unhappy marriage.

As his new tariffs on Chinese solar panels and South Korean washing machines demonstrate, when put into practice, Mr Trump’s nativist and protectionist attitude makes for policies every bit as bad as the assumptions which informs it. Simplistic and anachronistic attitudes are only likely to produce fundamentally self-defeating policies.

Nonetheless, his passionately held but profoundly mistaken attitudes towards trade are the best guide to what is emerging as a distinctive Trump approach to US foreign policy.

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/turkey-offensive-in-syria-is-a-barometer-for-the-unfolding-conflict-1.698457

The operation, through which Ankara is seeking to expand a buffer zone seized in August 2016, has been in the works for almost a year

Turkey’s latest offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria provides an excellent barometer for several of the biggest trends in the unfolding conflict.

The operation, through which Ankara is seeking to expand a buffer zone seized in August 2016, has been in the works for almost a year. Indeed, it was virtually announced in March 2017 when prime minister Binali Yildirim speculated it might be necessary. However predictable, the fighting represents a new escalation and complication in Syria, particularly as it pits Turkish forces, now effectively aligned with Russia, against Kurdish militias directly supported and promoted by its fellow Nato member, the US.

In 2016, Turkey’s attention in Syria shifted from broader opposition to the Bashar Al Assad dictatorship to a much more narrowly-focused project designed to limit the development of Kurdish military and political power along the Turkish border in northern Syria.

The “safe zone” Ankara established then is now being expanded in the area of Afrin, where most fighting is concentrated. However, there are strong indications it may then spread east to Manbij and include efforts to control the Mennagh airbase and, eventually, Tel Rifaat. Turkey regards the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces as a wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody war inside Turkey for several decades. Unlike the campaign against Mr Assad, then, such Kurdish-related issues are closer to domestic policy than foreign policy for Turkey.

The Turkish offensive is part of the emerging post-ISIL phase of the Syrian conflict, even as remnants of that terrorist group continue to operate in isolated places. However, Turkey’s move to bolster its position in northern Syria reflects the political and strategic situation following ISIL’s collapse in Raqqa and other key areas.

Ankara’s co-ordination with Moscow is among the campaign’s most striking features. Not only did Turkey clearly ensure that Russia did not object to or oppose, particularly with anti-aircraft capabilities, the offensive. In all likelihood, Turkey and Russia have quietly agreed to a new “de-escalation” arrangement with Moscow and its pro-Assad regime allies consolidating their positions in the city of Aleppo while Turkey and its forces gain ground to the north, beginning with Afrin. Indeed, Russian forces discretely vacated these areas before Turkish troops attacked. Each side is permitting the other to entrench their control over areas they consider crucial but the other can, if need be, live without.

The post-ISIL rearrangement of zones of influence in Syria is only just beginning. Some of it will be agreed and others will simply emerge in the new strategic circumstances following the downfall of the “caliphate”. One party that is playing almost no role in shaping this outcome is the US. Washington had relied heavily on YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as the ground troops against ISIL. The American plan had been to transform these militias into a “border security” force ostensibly to ensure no resurgence of ISIL. Neither Turkey nor Russia and the Assad regime, however, are willing to allow the SDF, let alone the YPG, to consolidate and institutionalise their military and political gains.

Washington has protested Ankara’s attack on its allies, but has little leverage given that American engagement in Syria has been limited and strictly focused on ISIL, to the exclusion of all other considerations. If Turkish forces do turn in the direction of Manbij, they will be charging directly not just at US allies but American forces themselves. It won’t be the first time US troops find themselves caught between their Turkish Nato allies and Kurdish counterterrorism partners. Ankara, however, does not appear deterred, let alone intimidated, by this prospect.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/the-trump-administration-has-made-a-grim-situation-worse-for-palestinians-1.696921

As it was being assembled a year ago, the Donald Trump administration announced it was making Israeli-Palestinian peace-making (“the deal of the century”) a priority to be led by presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.

The new American team was entirely inexperienced and almost entirely ideologically aligned with the Israeli far right. However, it was argued, given the track-record of “experts” in the Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, why not try novices who might deploy “fresh thinking” and Mr Trump’s supposed “art of the deal?” How much worse could things get? Clearly, the answer is: much.

In their own ways, all three of Mr Trump’s predecessors did significant damage to prospects for peace. For example, Mr Obama’s well-intentioned but misguided and mishandled demand for a comprehensive Israeli settlement freeze, which was eventually simply abandoned, put the already moribund Oslo process into indefinite hibernation.

In early November, Mr Trump’s team announced that, after ten long months of intensive study, the new administration was beginning to craft its own peace plan. Who needs a full year?

Since then, things have gone so badly we may never get a look at the presumably masterful breakthroughs being concocted by Mr Trump and Mr Kushner. What better way, after all, to kick off a peace initiative than by upending the final status issues structure and making, to no identifiable purpose, the most provocative move on Jerusalem since Israel’s purported annexation in 1980?

It’s hard to imagine anything that could more comprehensively foreclose progress and poison the atmosphere. The Trump team either didn’t know, or, worse, didn’t care about this inevitable impact.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responded with a counterproductive and damaging speechbefore the Palestinian Central Committee. Perhaps Palestinian fortunes have, by now, sunk so low that Mr Abbas felt he had little to lose diplomatically. He certainly felt compelled to shore up his domestic political position by articulating outrage.

But, at a minimum, his remarks exacerbated tensions. They will probably exact a significant cost without any national benefit to Palestinians. An indication of by whom and how that price will be paid comes as Washington has cut its annual support for UN services to Palestinian refugees by half.

Mr Abbas did not carefully explain how and why the Palestinians feel betrayed by Washington prejudicing a core final status issue, which is an important case that has yet to be carefully made to the international audience. Nor did he articulate the Palestinian national experience and yearning in a positive, proactive way. Astoundingly, after all their decades of struggle, such a defining Palestinian vision articulated at a major national forum remains undelivered.

Instead, Mr Abbas presented a history and anatomy of Zionism that wasn’t just hostile, but calculated to cause maximum offense to Jewish Israelis. Much of it was nonsense. Some of it was certainly true. None of it, however, was wise, useful or constructive.

Everyone should be grateful to Mr Abbas for continuing to stand against physical violence. But there was a hint of epistemological violence to his angry characterisation of Israel as a colonial and imperialist plot wholly disconnected from Jewish identity, and, essentially, a political and psychological pathology.

Given their history of dispossession and occupation, Palestinians have ample grounds for outrage. The occupation is a reality of intensive, daily violence and abuse. But anger is not only no strategy. When it dominates national politics and policy it is a surefire recipe for failure and defeat.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s smug response that Mr Abbas’s diatribe against the Israeli narrative “serves our political goals more than anything else” may be true in a very limited and immediate sense.

Yet Israel controls millions of Palestinians in a system that, with any honesty, can only be compared to apartheid. Israel now is neither majority-Jewish nor meaningfully democratic. And it has no idea whatsoever how to resolve that.

Palestinians basically know what they want, in both minimal and maximal versions. But they have absolutely no idea how to achieve it, or even how to move forward. Israelis are charging ahead, but without any consensus vision for the future.

For now, Mr Abbas and the Palestinian Authority will undoubtedly continue to limp along, mainly because everyone, including Israel, the Palestinians and the United States, needs them to. But the principal national goal they are serving is staving off the disaster of Hamas primacy.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to make a grim situation worse.

Indications that Washington plans to re-designate its consulate in West Jerusalem as an embassy sometime this year reveals no learning from the uproar over the Jerusalem statement and no sense of proportion or responsibility in the handling of this highly sensitive issue.

And Mr Netanyahu continues to lead Israel squarely into an entirely unmanageable future of unavoidable, endless and intensifying conflict.

Ultimately, something dramatic will shatter this impasse and it may well be disastrous for all concerned. Not all parties are equally powerful, but all current leaderships are culpable.

The “professionals,” frankly, have been bad enough. The last thing this delicate and dangerous situation needed was enthusiastic amateurs.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-won-t-advance-a-coherent-foreign-policy-through-constant-disruption-and-personal-volatility-1.694926

This was the week that Donald Trump was meant to counter the impressions created by the release of Fire and Fury. It didn’t quite work out that way

From the outset of the Donald Trump presidency a year ago, I’ve argued that the biggest challenge it might pose to US foreign policy stems from unpredictability. Particularly in volatile regions such as the Middle East, beset by self-styled “revolutionary” forces such as Islamist terrorist groups or Iran and Hizbollah and their proxies, Washington’s role as a status quo power and guarantor of international stability is fundamentally inconsistent with uncertainty and impulsivity.

The publication last week of Michael Wolff’s sensationalist but informative White House exposé, Fire and Fury, kicked off another American argument about Mr Trump’s fitness for office and the functionality of his White House. The book painted a relentless but entirely convincing portrait of a president who neither knows nor cares about most policy issues, either doesn’t or can’t read beyond headlines involving himself, tends to agree with the last person he has spoken with, and searches only for the latest “win” in what amounts to a reality TV show in which every day is a new episode.

That’s hardly an image to inspire confidence or instill fear either at home or abroad.

So, this week began with a public relations exercise designed to dispel that image. It was, at best, a wash.

Mr Trump hosted an hour-long “negotiation” about immigration policy with lawmakers from both parties. On the one hand, he seemed affable and collected. On the other, he seemed not to recall his own policies and had to be pulled back from the brink of endorsing a Democratic plan by panicked Republican representatives.

Shortly after the meeting, he reversed many of the positions he had apparently taken regarding his purported flexibility.

This week, Mr Trump also threatened to attack free speech rights; pushed his allies in Congress to interfere with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the last election; denounced the US legal system as “broken” because of a ruling he didn’t like; and resumed his bitter criticism of his own FBI. On Thursday, he seemed profoundly confused about pending legislation, denouncing on Twitter a foreign surveillance authorisation his administration backs before reversing himself yet again and endorsing it.

On foreign policy, Mr Trump claimed to have “a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” the North Korean leader with whom he usually trades highly personalised insults. He used a joint press conference with the Norwegian prime minister to resume his attacks on Hillary Clinton and call for the jailing of his enemies. Then he reportedly employed exceptionally vulgar language to denounce US allies in Africa, Central America and the Caribbean while calling, in explicitly racist terms, for more European immigrants to the United States from, for example, Norway.

In other words, a week that was crafted to refute the worst impressions created by Fire and Fury only reinforced and amplified them.

Over the past year, Mr Trump has been restrained by many factors, including the ongoing power of American institutions and the fact that many of his cabinet officials don’t agree with him, from realizing many of his most potentially damaging campaign vows. He abandoned the Paris climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but those hadn’t been implemented yet. The real disruption may yet be brewing.

While the North American Free Trade Agreement is still being renegotiated, it is certainly staring up at the axe.

Mr Trump has again avoided wrecking the Iran nuclear deal by continuing sanctions relief for Tehran, but insists he will abandon it soon unless it’s renegotiated. There’s still every danger that his coming moves on the issue could play directly into the hands of Iranian hardliners.

Yet despite his tough talk, Mr Trump is doing precious little to block the expansion of Iranian interests in the Middle East. Indeed, his administration has said nothing about a new joint Russian-Syrian offensive in so-called “de-confliction zones” in Syria, which can clearly only strengthen the regional hand of Iran. The reality is that Mr Trump’s administration is no more engaged helping shape the outcome of the most strategically consequential conflict in the Middle East than Barack Obama’s was.

Mr Trump may not agree with, or perhaps even understand, this but Washington’s global role is fundamentally that of a stabilizing force safeguarding the status quo. Disruption, volatility, and lurching from thought to thought, apparently at random, cannot advance that goal except in the rarest of circumstances.

The administration’s recently released National Security Strategy vividly illustrated the tension between traditional American policy goals and methods, most of which remain indispensable for both Washington and its allies, and Mr. Trump’s own inchoate and ill-defined “America first” agenda.

Combined with his own evident volatility, deep-seeded prejudices, anger and resentment, and profound ignorance of, and disinterest in, almost all policy questions, a degree of confusion and uncertainty about US policy is virtually inevitable. What, for example, precisely is Washington’s policy towards Jerusalem, following Mr Trump’s recent statement on that issue? No one can be sure.

Mr Wolff’s book now seems, if anything, understated.

Mr Trump may enjoy chaos and keeping opponents off balance. But this approach cannot serve the US national interest or those of Washington’s closest allies.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-s-fire-and-fury-reaction-in-trying-to-block-an-explosive-new-book-is-unprecedented-1.693200