Trump Demonstrates Foreign Policy Genius in Middle East

By Roger L Simon

Like so many others, I was wondering—what is Donald Trump doing, cozying up to all those Middle Eastern potentates?

Qatar was bad enough, but Recep Erdoğan, the prototype of a gangster as a national leader? And cajoling the new president of Syria, who was a most-wanted ISIS terrorist, lopping off the heads of his enemies, it seems like just weeks ago.

Was he turning into those twin doofuses of Western Europe, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, who are so despised in their own countries they couldn’t be elected the proverbial dog catcher?

Was he finally listening to those extreme right-wing pundits become nouveau antisemites, maybe not so nouveau, who will go nameless here because I am sick of talking about them. (Everyone knows who they are anyway.)

Evidently, not.

In fact, quite the reverse. Our president may be demonstrating foreign policy genius we haven’t seen in this country since World War II, and possibly before. He could be solving and pacifying the Middle East in a good way, as no one has ever.

What Trump understood is what the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir said many decades ago, “Everybody has his reasons,” meaning, at least in part, that if you respect others, lo and behold, they will respect you.

That was the intent, again in part, investments are always present, of his endless laudatory meetings with those potentates

And to prove that, everyone—and that includes the Foreign Ministers of Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt —have jointly signed a statement praising the sincere efforts of the President of the United States to end the Gaza war.

Ditto, they support his 20-point proposal to end the war, which has Hamas releasing all the hostages in 72 hours and permanently laying down its arms. They will no longer rule Gaza, nor will the Palestinian Authority (PA), unless it jumps through several hoops that would seem (for them) impossible.

The Arab statement pays lip service to a Palestinian state, but it is nowhere to be found among Trump’s 20 points. My best guess is the Arabs don’t really want one—they’ve seen enough—and the few who do are the AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and Bernie Sanders-types. They are certainly free to live there.

And who will supervise the new Gaza? Well, a combination of forces from nations across the globe. But to whom do they report?

None other than Donald J. Trump—who, emphasizing just how serious he is— has quite publicly told Benjamin Netanyahu the Israeli Prime Minister can finish the job as he wishes if Hamas does not sign on.

The president has a new sidekick, Tony Blair, brought back from obscurity to assist in the supervision, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to foresee who will have the real power.

Even the aforementioned President Macron has signed on, stating, “Hamas has no choice but to release all hostages and follow this plan.

In essence, Trump has checkmated Hamas. It is a virtual coup de théâtre in foreign policy of such virtuosity that I can’t think of a rival.

The usual suspects, foreign and domestic, are lining up to condemn it, calling it some kind of US-Israeli conspiracy like the 12-Day War on Iran. And in a sense, they are correct, but that doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do, deliberate or inadvertent. Trump knows who are real allies are and has never wavered.

Previous administrations have been impotent in their attempts to move the Middle East forward. President Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken may have been the worst of the recent lot as the organizer of the infamous letter from 51 former intelligence agents asserting the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the earmarks of Russian disinformation,” an action so fundamentally dishonest as to put him in the same category as James Comey and Andrew McCabe.

These people were too busy lying to the American people to really do anything about the Middle East.

President Trump has bravely taken the lead. If part of his motivation is to win the Nobel Peace Prize, so be it.

I am not personally a fan of such prizes. The Nobel Committee gave their peace prize to Barack Obama basically for getting elected U. S. president as a (half) black man. He never did anything discernible for peace; in fact, he gave billions to Iran, so they could spread endless war through their proxies.

The Nobel Peace Prize, like the Pulitzer in journalism, has been permanently besmirched. Donald Trump would actually honor it by winning it, not the other way around.

Nevertheless, what he is doing now in Gaza is well beyond any trivial prizes. It is for history. Mark it down.

First published in American Refugees