The Bloody Truths of Foreign Policy Strategy Choices
Yes, it’s Inauguration Day, but I won’t be talking about the event itself until after he’s safely sworn in and finished delivering his address to the people. This is related, of course, but otherwise directed. The topic is the ceasefire.
Watching the reactions to the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire deal has been instructive in multiple ways. Typically, the strongest objections have come from the right, including the “true-blue” MAGA advocates among the intelligentsia.
“Bad Deal,” they’re telling us, claiming it’s a false step by Trump for an immediate media splash that will ensnare him in Biden’s decrepit neocon policy of playing both ends against the middle as a means of merely kicking the can down the road.
Maybe. That was my first impression too. I understand the bad deal perspective. Couple thousand Hamas killers released into the wild in exchange for a handful of surviving hostages and the bodies of many others. All for a big Inauguration Day flashback to the Iranian hostage release on Reagan’s Inauguration Day 44 years ago? Symbolism without substance. Gaza is still a snake pit. Hamas is badly wounded but not dead. Never dead as long as Sharia mothers keep squeezing out baby suicide bombers. What has been accomplished?
Happened to watch Frank Gaffney’s show on the America’s Voice network this morning. I have great respect for Gaffney. He has an old-fashioned professorial reserve in his analyses of national security issues. He is generally opposed to the neocons and an ally of Trump, but he would never sport a red MAGA cap, literally or figuratively. His guests tend to be academically estimable and chosen for their real world experience of the inside workings of foreign policy administration and decision making. They worry more about China than Russia, and they are gravely suspicious of the American Intelligence shenanigans that complicate everything Presidents try to do. They know secrets they can’t fully disclose. Gaffney’s conversations with them are a teasing out process.he asks them to explain their own perspectives and he listens to their answers without heat, though not always complete agreement.
I must admit, I watch Gaffney when I wake up too early, and I frequently use his show to fall back to sleep for an hour or two. There’s no yelling, just the metronomic soft-spoken prattle of men dented and scarred by conference room wars over life and death issues. Couldn’t be a worse time of day to air such a show, but it reassures me that Gaffney and friends are thinking about it more than I want to. Usually I can get back to sleep, or at least a helpful doze.
This morning was an exception. Gaffney is very not happy with the Trump ceasefire deal or the highhanded way it was imposed on Netanyahu (on the Sabbath no less). His principal guest, an insider with IDF were also not happy, though not as not happy as Gaffney. Hamas has been saved from the brink to fight another day. Without this showy, hurried deal, an Israeli brigade recalled from the northern border was poised to enter Gaza and finish the job, the above ground portion at least, though the underground tunnel machinations would continue as they always do, impervious to complete destruction.
The next guest, on a slightly different topic, represented a conservative think tank, also pro-Trump, discussing the efficacy of The blizzard of executive orders Trump will be issuing today about both foreign and domestic policy matters. His message was also skeptical. The Democrats can make implementing these orders difficult and prolonged, since they always use expensive legal challenges in ways Republicans never think to. He seemed kind of dour. Academic, not yet caffeinated, and dour.
Which is when I remembered the old 48-hour (sometimes 72-hr++) rule about anything Trump says or does. It’s been four years since we’ve seen him acting with authority instead of persuasion, on offense instead of defense or in pure survival mode. It’s a different day now. Now he is in politician-in-office mode. (He’s always been a politician who says he isn’t, until this time, when he can no longer deny it), and whatever he seems to be saying and doing he is engaged in a continuous negotiating process on everything in his purview.
I had occasion to correct myself for being too hasty just recently, when I finally did the math about his Canada as 51st state flap. He was using a serious-sounding joke to remind Canada that they are a runt chick under the eagle’s wing, regardless of how yawpishly they cheep at the boss parent in the relationship.
What does this have to do with the “bad deal” ceasefire? it may seem a bad deal for Israel, but it’s not a bad deal for the Trump administration. Why? Because Trump needs his Hundred Days and the months before the midterms to get most of his critical agenda accomplished. To the extent possible, foreign policy has to be put on a back burner. What’s the mission of a second Trump term? America First.
Back burner, even though the feckless Biden Administration has dragged the whole world to the very cliff edge of World War 3, with confrontational tinder boxes ready to go off in Ukraine, the Middle East, Korea, and Taiwan. Most dangerous immediate threat? The Middle East. What happens without this ceasefire? Israel will launch a bloody new offensive in Gaza. Which will do what? Reawaken the violent protesters in the terrorist nurseries of the Ivy League and their chattel institutions across America. With deportation of illegals the overwhelming top priority of the Trump Administration, the last distraction we need is anti-semitic riots and loud sympathizers with Islamic terror reprisals in New York, Chicago, and other sanctuary locations vulnerable to unchecked infiltration.
The campuses have to be kept quiet. Not with the National Guard. With preemptive, nonmilitary foreign policy moves. Which Trump has made, with seeming recklessness, in a crafty one-two punch that disciplines both the Hamas/Hezbollah/Iranian nexus and the State of Israel.
This is an appropriate moment to explain my introductory graphic. Managing the behaviors of antagonists in the Middle East is like herding cats. Plenty of hatreds, grudges, resentments, real and fancied sleights to go around on all sides. The tiger of the Middle East is not, of course, any feline of the Animal Kingdom. It’s the spitting cobra. Like the tiger, it lies in wait, and can injure or kill you at the very moment it appears with an offensive weapon that eliminates in a split second what might have seemed safe distance. It also has fangs to bite and kill with. That would be all manner of Middle Eastern foreign policy game changers. The IDF, Hamas, Hezbollah, Sunni and Shia militias, the nuclear pits of Iranian bomb development, and the ghostly immortal called OPEC.
All the problem nations of the world have their own versions of tigers and cobras, the wolf packs of Germany, the jaguars of the southern Americas, the lion prides of Africa, the bears of Russia, the wild boar of Korea, and the spectacled cobras, bears, tigers, leopards, and alligators of China.
The American neocons have historically been rattlesnakes. They strike with blinding speed if stepped on, and they hang on long enough to inject a deadly dose of venom. Their reaction to confrontation is not retreat but the intimidating warning rattle. They have a talent for infesting deserts of all kinds, where they rule, or think they do.
But Trump is no rattlesnake. He’s a boa constrictor, and if need be, a python or anaconda. His preference is to avoid confrontation unless seized or attacked directly. Does he have teeth? Yes. But not for killing. For defense, but when he bites he does not ever let go. Does he hunt? Of course. But principally for food, not the pleasure in killing. How does he kill, by strangulation, slowly increasing the tightness of his coils until the prey can no longer breathe and expires. Why a person can be saved from a mighty constrictor. Knowing people can unwind the coils and let the danger slip away, leaving them in peace. His evident size and power are their own form of deterrence. Only the unwise challenge him, but he does not, like the Black Mamba or Shaka Zulu, go berserk and kill every living thing within reach of the nest.
The one-two threat display delivered by Trump in the Middle East was 1) a warning to Hamas that all hell would break loose if the hostages were not returned by Inauguration Day, and 2) a tightening of the coils around Netanyahu to remind him that the United States possesses the power to neutralize Israeli venom because we are too close to resist with fang or poisonous sputum.
Result? A ceasefire that is still being negotiated, and probably will be lengthened indefinitely by typical Hamas wrangling over details. Meanwhile, the inflammatory next massive incursion into Gaza is back on hold, and the LGBTQ Islamophiles of Columbia University have no excuse to burn down Washington Square.
What I did not hear Gaffney or his expert mention was the coils of smothering sanctions that will be closing tightly around an already unstable Iranian Sharia government, which will progressively reduce the resources available to Hamas for another October massacre. It will also further deteriorate the Iranian technological capability to produce atomic toys that could lead Israel to spit preemptively with their own nuclear missiles. Bad deal or not in the 24-hr calculus of Inauguration Day, the danger of WW3 starting in the Middle East anytime soon has been postponed to the disadvantage of the Jew killers.
This is all a subtle collateral example of the power of Trump’s preference for tariffs and sanctions and trade agreements as a substitute for airlifting Marines into murderous foreign climes. The United States, for all its current economic woes, is still the most powerful income generator in the world. We can use this almost every arena to pressure foes, and friends too, into resolving differences peacefully if not always happily.
Unless things so suddenly and dramatically wrong somehow. Which can happen to any world power at any time. Looking for each and every way things can go wrong is not especially helpful though. It tends to promote inaction as a the safest course when it hardly ever is. It also tends to sap resolve by,the pessimists who see even the glass that’s three quarters full as more than half empty when you worry enough about the Schumer’s and Schiffs and Raskins and the DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA/DEI/BLM/LGBTQ+++ moles embedded in the Deep State legacy bequeathed us by FDR and his buttboys Truman, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, the Bushes, Obama, and Biden. Most of those dead now (breathing or not), and the ones who aren’t have already been diminished by the miraculous failure of multiple grand conspiracies to destroy their Nemesis.
The glass is three quarters full right now. Quit prattling and naysaying until there’s something real to whine about.
P.S. As I write this, the person who’s filling in as President till noon today has just pardoned General Milley, Fauci, and Cheney and the J6 Committee. The glass is still three quarters full. Every recipient of such a pardon for crimes none has been indicted or impeached for is admitting guilt or guilty knowledge the moment they accept the pardon. What may not be discussed in the traditional 24-hr window of weeping and wailing are two serious complications: 1) it’s not clear that a pardon can be granted when there is no crime officially in evidence (even Nixon had been impeached by Congress), and 2) the fact that the conspiracies behind COVID and the Biden administration’s role in the January 6 debacle are not confined to the person(s) pardoned. Any crimes involved can be investigated and those pardoned can be subpoenaed in the trials of any who are prosecuted, at which time they cannot claim protection from the Fifth Amendment and may be subsequently prosecuted themselves for obstruction of Justice or perjury. The name of Cassidy Hutchinson comes to mind. Look her up. There will be plenty of legal exposures created by these late pardons.
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