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

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/are-we-witnessing-a-broad-reorientation-of-us-politics-in-the-trump-era-1.691522

Almost a year into the Donald Trump presidency, it is a good time to reflect on what it has, and has not, meant over the long run for American politics and foreign policy. In the short term, as I have frequently argued, it seems clear it has involved a degree of almost calculated and willful American decline in international influence and authority. But, in the longer term, are we witnessing the beginning of a broad reorientation, or is the Trump era essentially a speed bump in a broader trajectory that will remain essentially linear?

In these pages last February I speculated on how, if he played his cards right, Mr Trump might be able to preside over a redrawing of the American political landscape that could persist for at least a generation. Is that happening?

Largely, and probably mercifully, it’s not. In order to accomplish the potential restructuring I anticipated, Mr Trump would have to initiate a genuinely populist, pro-labour, economic policy of essentially Keynesian stimulus through the kind of gigantic infrastructure programme on which he campaigned.

If he could get Congress to authorise at least $1 trillion in new government spending on badly needed infrastructural repairs and improvements, and thereby create a huge wave of new and well-paid working-class jobs, Mr Trump could probably win over labour leaders as well as many of their constituents and reorient the Republicans away from traditional conservatism.

However, there is no sign of any such programme. On the contrary, the Republican Congress has just approved, to Mr Trump’s evident delight, a $1.5 trillion tax cut that will massively transfer wealth from the middle and working classes to the rich, explode the national deficit and debt, and therefore serve as the basis for large spending cuts on everything except the military.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the Congress that just passed this gigantic tax reduction approving a massive new spending programme. So the sine qua non of the total ideological realignment I imagined seems now unattainable.

However, other aspects of the changes I envisaged are developing. In particular, the process whereby an entire generation of neoconservatives and other foreign policy hawks begin to migrate from the Republican to the Democratic Party.

As with the process in the 1970s when hawkish liberals slowly morphed into neoconservatives and bolted the Democratic Party for the Republicans, the current counter-migration is fitful, fraught, unpleasant and non-linear. Yet, it is clearly gaining steam.

In some cases, the ideological transformation appears complete. The noted neoconservative intellectual Max Boot, one of the most vehement “never-Trumpers,” has recently written about how, as a good conservative and Republican, he used to scoff at the complaints of blacks and other ethnic minorities, women and others and dismiss the idea of white privilege. “If the Trump era teaches us anything,” he writes, “ it is how far we still have to go to realise the ‘unalienable rights’ of all Americans to enjoy ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ regardless of gender, sexuality, religion or skin colour.” His article might as well have been called “How Trump Made Me a Liberal,” and, inevitably over time, a Democrat.

Former Republican congressman turned journalist Joe Scarborough, once a follower of key Trump supporter Newt Gingrich, has been inching to the left for many years. But his recent scathing attack in the Washington Post on the Republican tax bill as a plundering of working-class pocketbooks by rich plutocrats might have been written by not merely a Democrat, but a Bernie Sanders ultraliberal. Mr Scarborough’s journey from right to left, while largely under chronicled and seldom analysed, is one of the most dramatic in contemporary American politics.

But, one need not become a full-blown liberal to have left the now-Trumpian Republicans, as George Will, who has boundless contempt for Mr Trump and all his works, has demonstrated. He has formally left the Republican Party but remains a committed conservative. Unlike most of the others, it’s hard to imagine Mr Will voting for Democrats, or at least admitting to it, on a regular basis. But, in the long run, where can he go?

Mr Will, and others such as Bill Kristol, son of one of the founding neoconservatives, Irving Kristol, have hinted at the creation of a new, center-right third party. They must know this is structurally impossible in the American system. Such sentiments are invariably an unhappy way station in the often dismal journey from one affiliation to the other.

Many conservative Republicans, who now rightly feel adrift and without a party, have no such illusions. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, among others, has been blunt about the need for all right-thinking people to hold Republicans accountable for their backing of Mr Trump at the polls, particularly in the upcoming midterm elections.

There are countless other commentators and columnists who have spent a political lifetime on the right and as committed Republicans but who are now identifiably somewhere on the road to permanently realigning as Democrats. At the very least, this one part of the grand reorientation I imagined back in February is actually happening.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-said-he-didn-t-care-about-the-jerusalem-fallout-turns-out-he-cares-a-great-deal-1.689962

The US president thought he was shoring up his evangelical base with the announcement – but the move backfired worse than he could have imagined

I am not in the outrage business. Years ago I trafficked in plenty of professional Arab-American pique. But around 2004, I deliberately abandoned the bluster, the community representation that required it, and the farcical television “debates” I then specialised in. Sober, constructive analysis intended to promote preferable outcomes seemed so much more valuable and interesting.

Time and again, though, Donald Trump is painfully forcing me back into indignation mode – most recently on Jerusalem. On this most sensitive of disputes, involving war and peace and therefore people’s lives, my instincts and values instruct me to craft frank and thoughtful but purposeful interventions that, hopefully, might help prevent matters from getting worse and perhaps even promote improvement. Words do matter.

Alas, Mr Trump is giving those of us searching for the least negative interpretation of his recent actions on Jerusalem nothing to work with.

Just before his announcement earlier this month pledging to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, I incurred the blustering wrath of a noted Palestinian activist on an Arab TV show. I suggested that Mr Trump was largely motivated by domestic political considerations and that there existed a wide range of possible statements he might make with varying diplomatic implications and, therefore, also an array of potentially wise Arab and Palestinian responses. The simple suggestion that political realities are complex sent him into paroxysms of outrage, peppered with ludicrous accusations.

But this angry rejection of analysis and indignant championing of un-thought illustrated that opportunists and demagogues were being handed a potentially potent rhetorical weapon that would be highly resistant to the simplest applications of reason.

I pointed out, for example, that some vital policy implications of Mr Trump’s announcement would hinge on quotidian but meaningful bureaucratic questions, such as whether American diplomatic documents would continue to refer simply to “Jerusalem” or would now read “Jerusalem, Israel”. Apparently there are no plans to refer to “Jerusalem, Israel”, which is clearly quite significant.

Beyond such details, however, both the announcement and several subsequent administration moves almost willfully block any broader reading that mitigates the enormous harm they have done to prospects for peace and broader US interests in the Middle East.

True, in his statement Mr Trump did claim: “We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders.”

But that is obviously false. Merely stating that “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital” unquestionably takes a strong new position on a core final status issue. It severely prejudices and might effectively remove Jerusalem from negotiations. This isolated, vague and factually incorrect sentence did virtually nothing to offset his echoing mantra that “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital”.

Since then, all serious people have been waiting, again in vain, for White House clarification that Mr Trump was talking about West Jerusalem and not occupied East Jerusalem.

Astoundingly, administration officials were unable to even identify what country they believed Mr Trump was in when he visited the Western Wall. Another senior official further muddied the waters by stating: “We cannot envision any situation under which the Western Wall would not be part of Israel.”

But please remember, they are “not taking any position on final status issues”.

Then came the US veto at the UN Security Council on Monday, whose other members voted unanimously in favour of repudiating and invalidating Mr Trump’s statement, followed by his offensive and insulting threats to link US aid to countries’ votes on a similar resolution that was passed overwhelmingly by the General Assembly.

Those of us looking for ways forward have been utterly thwarted. What can we honestly say? That Mr Trump was referring to West Jerusalem but not East Jerusalem? That he hasn’t prejudiced a core final status issue or trashed the very basis of the Oslo agreements and the peace process which Washington is supposed to guarantee? That we even understand what, precisely, US policy is now on Jerusalem?

Clearly, Mr Trump did this to shore up his evangelical base given mounting political pressure he faces from the Robert Mueller investigation and his dwindling public support. But it is also evident that this inexperienced administration thought they didn’t care about the international fallout, because they badly underestimated it. It turns out they care very much indeed, with anger and recriminations aimed even at close allies.

Mr Trump probably thought he was ticking a domestic political box and wouldn’t have to hear anything more about Jerusalem during his presidency. In reality, he’ll never hear the end of it.

The worst actors are having a cynical field day. Israel’s long-standing ally, Turkey, is now absurdly posing as the champion of Palestine and Al Quds to promote its pro-Islamist, pro-Hamas agenda. Ankara’s main competition comes from Hizbollah and Iran.

Mr Trump’s Jerusalem statement was reckless, miscalculated and deeply harmful. Instead of salvaging matters with simple but crucial clarifications, his administration is now repeatedly doubling-down on the damage. Someone should inform them Palestinians and other Arabs have domestic politics too.

My raison d’etre as a commentator will remain crafting constructive arguments. But Mr Trump’s Jerusalem fiasco is a reminder that sometimes it’s just impossible.

http://www.agsiw.org/how-trumps-national-security-will-be-read-gulf/

When Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States just over a year ago, Washington’s Gulf Arab allies were generally optimistic. They were so alienated by President Barack Obama’s second term that almost any change would have been welcome. They expected to hear fewer complaints about democracy, and human and women’s rights, from a Trump administration than from a traditional Republican or Democratic White House. And, especially, they were buoyed by Trump’s strong campaign rhetoric against Iran.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/a-national-security-strategy-should-provide-clarity-but-the-trump-foreign-policy-doctrine-is-laced-with-contradiction-1.684825

Since Donald Trump took office almost a year ago, one of the most vexing questions has been: what will an “America first” foreign policy mean? With the administration torn between multiple competing power centres, unusually large gaps between rhetoric and reality and the inherent challenges of interpreting an essentially novel framework for US foreign policy, friend and foe alike have been left scratching their heads. Monday’s release of the new US national security strategy document, the first since 2015, should, in theory, do much to clarify what a Trumpian foreign policy doctrine involves.

It will be scrutinised at home and abroad on three main criteria: how much it diverges from traditional US foreign policy; how interoperable and logically consistent its component parts seem and how well these ideas comport with the administration’s practical actions and stated goals thus far.

While the 70-page text has been fairly closely-guarded, the outlines have become clear. The drafting has been led by Nadia Schadlow, senior director for strategy at the National Security Council, who is widely respected as an establishment conservative figure well-versed in traditional US and Republican Party foreign policy thinking. Therefore, it’s not terribly surprising that much of the text frequently doesn’t deviate dramatically from strategies issued by the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

While the continuities will be marked, there will also be some significant distinctions. Perhaps most notably, and unsurprisingly, the Trump strategy will downplay, although not eliminate, several traditional pillars of US foreign policy, particularly the role of values and human rights and the importance of multilateral institutions, alliances and treaties.

Even more strikingly, the virtues of nationalism, and indeed parochialism, will be stressed at the expense of Washington’s traditional championing of a rules-based international order that promises win-win scenarios. Instead, much of this strategy will implicitly assume an anarchical international competition of all against all, with clear winners and losers fighting over limited and diminishing, rather than expanding, global prizes and resources.

Critics will protest a surrendering of principles while supporters defend clear-headed realism.

But passages reflecting this binary and narrow vision will coexist uneasily with much more familiar articulations of how American principles inform both US foreign policy conduct and goals. There is likely to be a considerable degree of dissonance throughout between the Trumpian “America first” impulse and more normative iterations of “Americanism” in foreign policy.

“America first” has not translated into neo-isolationism, either in theory or in practice. Indeed, “expanding American influence” is among four central pillars of the new strategy. But it has involved a retreat of American global authority – whether by ceding new space for Chinese leadership on trade and technological innovation, expanding Russian influence in Syria and the rest of the Middle East, or favouring narrow bilateral arrangements over more advantageous but far-reaching multilateral institutions and agreements.

Mr Trump’s political base may actually welcome this calculated international retreat, viewing it as an essential prelude to emphasising domestic priorities. What otherwise appears to be foreign policy self-mutilation is thereby perceived as a practical expression of “America first”.

But will the strategy help resolve some of the profound contradictions that have plagued Mr Trump’s foreign policies thus far?

Mr Trump has emphasised the need to enforce undefined limits on North Korea’s nuclear programme. Indeed, his ally Sen Lindsey Graham says there is a 30 per cent chance of a war over this, rising to 70 per cent if Pyongyang conducts another nuclear test. Yet Mr Trump has almost started a trade war with South Korea for reasons that remain essentially mysterious. The priorities appear muddied at best.

Similarly, in the Middle East, Mr Trump has cited defeating terrorism and confronting Iran as key goals, as will likely be reflected in the strategy. Yet Washington has all but labeled Syria – which is plainly the epicentre of the threats of ISIL and, especially, Al Qaeda, and the focus of Tehran’s expanding power and potential land-bridge to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea – to be essentially Russia’s “problem” and therefore Russia’s prerogative as well. Again, policy means and ends don’t seem to match up at all.

One of the most intriguing questions is whether the strategy will reflect the assessment being advanced by national security adviser HR McMaster that Turkey and Qatar have emerged – implicitly in coordination – as the primary funders and supporters of groups promoting radical, violent Islamist ideologies.

This is a welcome recognition of a real threat. But it’s also at odds with Washington’s increasingly “even-handed” approach to the boycott of Qatar, its continued embrace of Turkey, and, especially, Mr Trump’s endless praise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In all three cases, and many others, it’s hard to see how the broader goals can be achieved if more limited bilateral issues with Seoul, Moscow, Doha or Ankara, or a reticence to make hard choices, keep dominating the practical agenda.

A national security strategy should provide guidance and clarity. That has rarely been more needed. But the danger is that confusion will proliferate if the document seems internally inconsistent, reflects major dissonance between goals and policies, and sounds more like Mr Bush or Mr Obama than Mr Trump.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/why-did-trump-make-his-jerusalem-decision-the-answer-is-rooted-in-us-domestic-politics-1.682870

The US president is hovering at a dangerous approval rating of around 35 per cent. It makes sense for him to shore up his most loyal supporters immediately and at all costs

Donald Trump’s announcement that Washington recognises Jerusalem as Israel’s capital served neither any US national security imperative whatsoever, nor his broader goals in the region. It undermines them all. Why, then, did he do it?

Mr Trump has said he wants to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace. This will make that virtually impossible. He wants to foster a new opening between Israel and Arab states. This pretty much forecloses that too.

He says his priorities are combating terrorism and confronting Iran. Yet plainly the biggest beneficiaries of this in the Middle East, apart from the Israeli right, are precisely terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIL, and, even more, Iran and Hizbollah.

Some argue Mr Trump is just fulfilling a campaign promise. But he has discarded a huge number of campaign promises, even by the standards of ordinary politicians. Indeed, the entire populist spirit of his campaign is about to be permanently jettisoned for a tax bill that amounts to a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy, and particularly the wealthiest, Americans.

Indeed, Mr Trump ignored this very campaign promise six months ago when he, like all his predecessors, signed a national security waiver not to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He’s still signing the waiver, but pledges to put the process, which will take at least four years, if not much longer, into motion immediately, and made the symbolic declaration and policy change unequivocally.

He might have avoided the worst harm to US national interests by clearly distinguishing between West Jerusalem and occupied East Jerusalem, and recognising only the first as Israel’s capital. Russia did precisely that in April, and met with virtually no opposition.

The United States plays a different role in the peace process and the Middle East, so any major change of American policy on Jerusalem would have provoked some indignation. But had he made such a distinction, and clearly stated that the United States was not in any sense recognising Israel’s presence in, or annexation of, occupied East Jerusalem, the fallout probably would have been manageable.

He didn’t do that. Why not? And what has changed in the past six months to provoke such a drastic U-turn?

Let’s begin with what this isn’t. It’s not an expression of Mr Trump’s views or foreign policy. In fact, it runs entirely counter to all of their identifiable features.

Second, it has almost nothing to do with Jewish American power, although Mr Trump has a small interest in placating the few wealthy right-wing Jewish Americans, like gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who have amply donated to him.

Instead, the answer does plainly lie in domestic politics, but with a different constituency. The real targets are right-wing Evangelical Christians, who are devoted to not just Israel but its occupation and, especially, Jerusalem, because of their violent fantasies – which are, ironically, largely anti-Semitic – about the Apocalypse and the second coming. Mike Pence, the vice-president, is the main broker of this unmitigated fiasco, not Jared Kushner.

But why would Mr Trump be scrambling to recklessly trash his own foreign policy to throw red meat at his key Evangelical Christian supporters, the most steadfast element of his political base?

Because Robert Mueller’s investigation is inching ever closer to the Oval Office. Former national security advisor Michael Flynn has turned state’s evidence, and nobody knows what information he will be sharing to protect himself and his son from serious legal jeopardy.

It’s barely conceivable that Mr Trump is defensive enough to be acting as guiltily as he has been, and appearing to engage in a huge cover-up, without any underlying criminal activity or real legal exposure. But it’s highly unlikely and implausible. The most recent evidence against this was his bizarre Twitter tirade last week against the FBI, his own federal police, which he denounced as corrupt, tainted and incompetent.

Why would any president denounce his own police force in such derisive terms? It’s difficult, if not impossible, not to conclude that he’s terrified of what they may one day confront him with and wishes to lay the groundwork for a broad public claim that they are pursuing a vendetta against him, either because they are already politically tainted or they object to him pointing out their failings in public.

Mr Trump is hovering at a dangerous approval rating of around 35 per cent. Given the impending and extremely unpopular Republican tax bill, that’s not likely to improve. If he really does face significant legal and political exposure, it makes sense for him to shore up his most loyal supporters immediately and at all costs.

If trashing every articulated element of his own Middle East policy goals, abandoning the logic of six months ago, dispensing with the UN charter and the bedrock legal principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, and upending 70 years of US policy and international consensus helps, then fine.

This is what circling the wagons in a panic looks like. It will cause incalculable harm. But, until the roof falls in completely, it may prove effective.

http://www.agsiw.org/trumps-jerusalem-statement-may-foreclose-any-outside-in-initiative-with-gulf-arab-countries/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-jerusalem-announcement-means-the-us-can-kiss-its-remaining-moral-authority-goodbye

In what is almost certainly the low point of his administration’s foreign policy performance thus far, President Donald Trump announced today that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and will begin the process of moving the embassy from Tel Aviv. This is almost certainly a mortal blow to any peace plan Jared Kushner and his team have been working on for the past 10 months, and, in all likelihood, a massive setback in efforts to develop fledgling new relationships between Israel and Gulf Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Palestinians, in particular, will be outraged, and for good reason. This is a colossal betrayal by the guarantor of the peace process, the Oslo agreements and all of the understandings and treaties that have been entered into since 1993. All of them, without exception, hold that the future of Jerusalem is a final status issue to be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians.

The United States has just removed, in effect, that issue, even though Trump insists it has not. Unless he somehow clarifies that he was really referring only to West Jerusalem and not occupied East Jerusalem, and the administration makes it clear that it has not prejudiced the future of occupied East Jerusalem, which it sure sounds like it has, then it has totally betrayed all assurances Palestinians have been operating under since 1993.

Moreover, for the past decade Palestinians have been lectured ad nauseam by Israel and United States about not taking “unilateral measures” at the UN, just by upgrading their status in the international community and building their diplomatic relations and presence as Israel continuously does. This was held to be a violation of the agreements. Yet somehow, this infinitely more severe end-run around one of the most basic and essential premises of the Oslo framework, by its guarantor no less, is okay. That’s never going to wash.

Official Palestinian responses over time will depend a great deal on the reaction of Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan. But all those countries strongly warned the Trump administration against taking this step, and Trump really gave not just the Palestinians but even the Gulf Arab countries little mitigation upon which they could really rationalize moving forward with an “outside-in” engagement with Israel based on concurrent measures designed to build confidence. Any of that has become an even greater longshot than it already was.

Meanwhile, every bad actor and extremist in the region is certainly celebrating. Any remnants of ISIS hanging on in eastern Syria were smiling into their battered smart phones. Al Qaeda must be delighted. But, above all, Trump’s supposedly main regional targets, Iran and Hezbollah, will be cracking open case after case of sparkling apple juice, or whatever it is they substitute for champagne. This is the gift that will keep on giving for terrorists and extremists of every stripe.

Neither the president nor his administration even tried to make the case for why to do this now. What he said was, in effect, “We must do something different. This is different. Therefore, we must do this.” This is a logical fallacy known as a syllogism, and every well-trained high school student will cringe.

Yet, despite the incredible damage done to U.S. standing and goals in the Middle East—almost certainly undertaken to secure Trump’s support among his evangelical and Jewish-American supporters as Robert Mueller’s investigation inches closer to the Oval Office—the worst damage is to an essential principle of international law.

Since the adoption of the UN charter following the Second World War, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war has been held inviolable. Every UN Security Council resolution since 1967 invalidating Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and calling for an end to its occupation—every one of them supported by the United States—begins with a reassertion of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.

By saying, simply, that the United States now recognizes Jerusalem, without qualification, apparently including occupied East Jerusalem, as the capital of Israel, Trump has tossed this principle into the dustbin. On what basis will we object to Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine? On what basis did we expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait? On what basis will Washington or its allies object to any future act of aggression, occupation, and annexation?

Any reliance on the UN Charter and the basic principles of international law won’t work after this fiasco, because any international aggressor and miscreant will simply throw this in our faces and we won’t have any answer whatsoever.

Trump’s assertion that he is not prejudicing a final status issue seems absurd in light of the text of his remarks. Unless the administration promptly clarifies that the declaration applies only to West, and not occupied East, Jerusalem, the damage will be very difficult to undo, not just in the Middle East, but in the whole world, and, indeed, to one of the most essential and fundamental principles of the postwar international order.