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Foreign Affairs Trump’s Nobel Fantasies The president hasn’t earned the peace prize he plainly craves. President Donald Trump desperately wants the Nobel Peace Prize. His lust for the ultimate sign of international and establishment acceptance is truly cringeworthy. Does he know whose ranks he would be joining if he received the nod of appointees by the Norwegian parliament? Many prior recipients, however worthy, are international unknowns. Other better-known awardees were unworthy.  Consider three nods dating back to just 2007. One is the European Union, rewarded because it simply exists. Another is Barack Obama, who was anointed only a few months into his presidency because of what he represented, not for what he had done. Worse were the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former vice president Al Gore. Whatever one’s view of climate change, treating everything as a matter of “peace” violates the award’s intent.  Among the most notorious recipients were Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.” How’d that work out? Who in America, let alone the rest of the world, failed to recognize that the accord was designed for but one purpose, to allow President Richard Nixon to chant “Peace with Honor” as U.S. forces departed South Vietnam? Combat never ceased and two years later North Vietnamese forces collapsed a government that nearly 60,000 Americans died defending, entering Saigon on April 30, 1975, two weeks after the fall of Phnom Penh, capital of neighboring Cambodia. Nevertheless, so great is Trump’s desire that obsequious domestic appointees and foreign officials alike now ostentatiously press his case. Winning the title of America’s Flatterer-in-Chief undoubtedly is Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy to the Mideast and Russia who so far has moved neither region closer to peace. At last month’s extended imperial audience, disguised as a cabinet meeting, Witkoff declared, “There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about.” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was equally effusive when he took a break from slaughtering Palestinians and wrote to Norway’s Nobel Prize committee: “Few leaders have achieved such tangible breakthroughs to peace in such a short time. In these times of great historic change, I can think of no one more deserving than President Trump of the Nobel Peace Prize.” More consequential was the Pakistani government’s equally lavish nomination, issued shortly after Trump lunched with visiting General Asim Munir, Pakistan’s chief of army staff. Munir is his nation’s de facto ruler, despite its democratic patina. Trump’s irritation with India’s failure to follow suit, rather than his horror at Russia’s killing of civilians, as he claimed, likely motivated him to apply an extra 25 percent tariff on Indian goods. Reported the New York Times, in a June 17 phone call with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “Trump brought it up again, saying how proud he was of ending the military escalation. He mentioned that Pakistan was going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor for which he had been openly campaigning. The not-so-subtle implication, according to people familiar with the call, was that Modi should do the same.” Alas, the latter didn’t, and the rest, as they say, is history. Of course, Trump claims to be disinterested: “I’m not politicking for it. I have a lot of people that are.” In fact, he has played the eager suitor, making no effort to disguise his ardor for the recognition. During a phone call to Norway’s finance minister about tariffs, the president said he wanted the award. Moreover, he’s been playing the victim, repeatedly and publicly attributing his not winning the award to animus against him. Perhaps most galling for him is Obama’s admittedly unjustified award: “If I were named Obama I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds. He got the Nobel Prize. He didn’t even know what the hell he got it for.” Why should Trump corral the prize? He explained on Truth Social, laying out his supposed achievements:  I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this [treaty between Rwanda and the Congo], I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia (A massive Ethiopian built dam, stupidly financed by the United States of America, substantially reduces the water flowing into The Nile River), and I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for doing the Abraham Accords in the Middle East which, if all goes well, will be loaded to the brim with additional Countries signing on, and will unify the Middle East for the first time in “The Ages!” No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me![/BLOCK] In none of these cases did Trump turn war into peace. He may have helped calm both New Delhi and Islamabad after the terrorist attack in Kashmir, but their relations remain incendiary, and India denied that he played a mediating role. He encouraged a better relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, rather than ended a conflict, and his effort largely collapsed when Kosovo’s president was indicted for war crimes. If the lion and lamb had lain down together, NATO troops would no longer be on station. As for Egypt and Ethiopia, reported the New York Times: “Trump’s diplomacy has done little to resolve the dispute. Ethiopia recently announced that it had completed the dam, with an official opening scheduled for next month. Egypt and Sudan continue to oppose the project, fearing it will limit the flow of water from the Nile River to their countries.” No more persuasive are several cases that he left unmentioned on Truth Social but has promoted elsewhere: Armenia–Azerbaijan and Cambodia–Thailand. Even where his administration helped deescalate conflicts, fundamental issues remained unresolved, and implementation of agreements proved halting. More egregious are his final three claims. Trump cites the Abraham accords, which he suggests should turn the Mideast into a modern Garden of Eden, from which evil and other forms of unpleasantness will be banished forever. In fact, Israel was not at war with any of the countries which extended diplomatic recognition. In the most important cases, Israel and the Arab governments already engaged in back-channel cooperation, especially over security issues. In contrast, browbeating Sudan, then under military rule and now both wracked and wrecked by civil war, to participate was geopolitical nonsense. These agreements do nothing to promote peace. Instead, the Abraham accords were designed to strengthen Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic hold on power and legitimize his government’s annexation of the West Bank, leaving millions of Palestinians to permanently suffer under a violent apartheid occupation.  As for Russia–Ukraine, the president has proved inconsistent, taking contradictory positions and seeking to impose his preferred settlement. To get his way, Trump has been threatening to escalate Washington’s proxy war against Russia and provide military backing to European garrisons after any agreement. Yet the greatest danger today in the Ukraine conflict is the U.S. ending up at war with nuclear-armed Russia over interests the latter views as existential. As long as President Vladimir Putin believes he is winning, he is unlikely to widen the conflict. However, with Europeans pushing Russia’s economic collapse and endorsing regime change, allied “success” could cause Moscow to strike out.  Worse is Trump’s Israel–Iran claim. Against Tehran the Trump administration became a cobelligerent, arming Israel, greenlighting its aggression, defending it from Iranian retaliation, and then directly joining in the war. In doing so the president, who had loosed restraints on the Iranian program during his first term by foolishly abandoning the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, ended ongoing negotiations that showed promise in resolving the issue peacefully. Unfortunately, diplomacy likely is now dead: Iran would be foolish, indeed, suicidal, to trust any agreement reached with the aggressor Trump. The Netanyahu government appears to be preparing for another round and undoubtedly expects his support.  In short, Trump has no claim to the Nobel Peace Prize. And that judgment comes before considering his direct complicity in mass killing committed by U.S. client states. During his first administration he armed and otherwise supported Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in their murderous war against Yemen, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died. So outrageous was Washington’s policy that his State Department warned that American officials might be charged with war crimes. He further demonstrated his callousness when he protected Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman from accountability—“saved his ass,” announced Trump—for the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident.  An even greater bar to Trump claiming the title of peacemaker is his administration’s support for Israel’s depredations in the West Bank and Gaza. The president has turned U.S. Mideast policy over to Netanyahu’s radical coalition, driven by such violent extremists as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. With the administration providing weapons, diplomatic cover, and even armed support for Israel, Trump shares responsibility for the deaths of hundreds and likely thousands of Palestinian civilians. (Admittedly, Joe Biden’s hands are even bloodier, with his shared toll in the tens of thousands.) Highlighting the outrageous nature of Trump’s claim to be a peacemaker is his nomination by Netanyahu, a war criminal who has been charged with genocide. In the Mideast Trump has consistently turned peace into war. The president’s desperate, and almost certainly fruitless, pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize has a farcical air. Trump seemingly wants peace and was willing to criticize the atrocities of his predecessors, most notably George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq war. However, Trump is complicit in equally atrocious acts. His record suggests that he is more interested in snagging the prize than in promoting peace. In any case, someone committed to America First and Making America Great Again should focus on fulfilling his responsibility to the United States and its people. Helping other nations make peace is worthwhile. Keeping America out of war is essential. He should concentrate on keeping this nation at peace. The post Trump’s Nobel Fantasies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs What Does Trump Want in Gaza? The administration’s approach to the Israel–Gaza war has been incoherent. (BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images) What does President Trump actually want to see in Gaza? It’s a simple question, yet eight months into the Trump administration’s second term, the answer still isn’t clear. If anything, U.S. policy is muddled, confusing, and at times incoherent, a consequence of Trump’s competing impulses and a prime minister in Jerusalem who is the poster-child for obstructionism. On the one hand, Trump wants the war in Gaza to end. The nearly two-year conflict is not only one of the worst humanitarian abominations in the 21st century but has long since become a perfect case study of what my friend and colleague Will Walldorf, a professor at Wake Forest University, aptly describes as “moral hazard”—an international relations term of art that occurs when a junior partner, assured of external backing from a great power (in this instance the United States), begins acting in ways that undermine the interests of the benefactor.  There are instances when Trump is sympathetic to the crisis engulfing the roughly 2 million Palestinians who call Gaza home, illustrated most notably when he bluntly dismissed the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s absurd contention that famine inside the enclave was Hamas-aligned propaganda. At times, he has gone beyond rhetoric—in mid-January, Trump’s team helped the outgoing Biden administration facilitate a six week–long truce between Israel and Hamas that accelerated aid shipments into the Strip, got more than 30 Israeli and foreign hostages back to their families, and bought some time for Palestinian families to go back to their homes (or what was left of them). Trump is also cognizant of just how damaging the ongoing war is to Israel’s international reputation. The war, Trump recently told the Daily Caller, “is hurting Israel. There’s no question about it. They may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations, you know, and it is hurting them.”   Yet on the other hand, Trump has been noticeably deferential to what Netanyahu wants to do. In March, Netanyahu decided to return to fighting, breaking the Trump-sponsored ceasefire, which had been designed to bring a permanent end to the conflict and lead to the release of all the hostages currently in Hamas’s grasp. If Trump was displeased with what Netanyahu did, he didn’t show it publicly; in fact, according to reports at the time, the White House supported Israel’s resumption of the war, killing the very deal it helped negotiate two months prior. Since then, thousands of additional Palestinians have died and some of Washington’s biggest allies in Europe (the United Kingdom and France) have either formally recognized a Palestinian state or are on their way to doing so. Meanwhile, Israel’s own plans for Gaza have entered unprecedented territory, and the country itself is increasingly divided against itself.  Trump, however, has largely stayed silent through all of this, with the exception of cursory remarks about how the war needs to conclude as soon as possible. Earlier in his tenure, it would be reasonable to assume he was talking about doing so through a comprehensive ceasefire and hostage release agreement. Today, though, it sounds like he’s moving toward a different position altogether, one where the war ends after Israel’s complete and total military victory over the Palestinian terrorist groups that have ruled Gaza since 2007. “We will only see the return of the remaining hostages when Hamas is confronted and destroyed,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. But perhaps the biggest contradiction in Trump’s approach is his reported support for an Israeli military occupation of Gaza that would not only kibosh whatever diplomatic process is still viable but also jeopardize the 20 Israeli hostages who are still alive. This is reportedly the concern of Eyal Zamir, the chief of general staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), much of the IDF’s top brass, as well as the families of the hostages, whose relations with the Netanyahu government have gone from bad to worse this year.  Trump’s support for the current Israeli strategy is even more vexing when one considers that Hamas, which for much of the war opposed signing temporary, piecemeal deals that provided Israel with an opportunity to return to fighting whenever it desired, agreed to put its signature on exactly that last month. This draft agreement, which would release half of the remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and yet another temporary ceasefire, was the brainchild of Steve Witkoff, the man with the unenviable task of solving the Gaza problem. Yet in classic Netanyahu fashion, the Israeli premier has had a sudden conversion and is no longer amenable to the short-term truces he was pushing for months earlier. Indeed, Netanyahu didn’t even discuss the draft agreement during his cabinet meeting last weekend, calling it irrelevant, and went as far as to justify his decision to double down on military force with Trump’s pressure tactics. Trump, Netanyahu told his cabinet, is frustrated with the failure of diplomatic efforts thus far, believes Hamas is no longer interested in diplomacy and wants Israel to decisively defeat Hamas on the ground.   Is Netanyahu telling the truth? In the end, it may not matter because Trump is now essentially writing off Gaza as Netanyahu’s problem, all the while offering Israel unconditional military and diplomatic support regardless of how ineffective, counterproductive, and downright ugly the Israeli strategy is. This is a far, far cry from January, when Trump seemed genuinely committed to a diplomatic resolution in Gaza and tasked his old pal Witkoff with getting it done. Now, the U.S. policy is a mix of enabling Israel’s worst impulses and attempting to place some distance between the United States and the horrors currently unfolding in the Palestinian enclave. It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too framework that is too cute by half.  Ultimately, Gaza doesn’t matter to U.S. security interests. Washington doesn’t have any equity in how Gaza looks, whether the Palestinian Authority is allowed to return to the area, which country chooses to launch reconstruction initiatives there, or who ultimately holds an advantageous balance of power. From a macro-level perspective, the United States will be just fine regardless.  For Trump, however, Gaza does matter, if only because it’s currently the biggest impediment to every other major diplomatic initiative in the Middle East he hopes to accomplish. Whether it’s an expansion of the 2020 Abraham Accords, a Trump-mediated normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, or a peace treaty between Israel and Syria’s new government, none of it is likely to happen as long as Israeli bombs (often paid for by the American taxpayer) continue to kill hundreds of Palestinians every week. And none of it is possible if Israel formally annexes Gaza or effectively takes over the territory in some long-term permanent occupation. In the grand scheme, Israel holds a veto over Trump’s Middle East agenda. If this isn’t moral hazard in the extreme, what is? The post What Does Trump Want in Gaza? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics In Defense of ‘Defense’ What’s in a name? If nothing else, President Donald Trump has a gift for branding. That’s why it’s significant that he wants to restore the Department of Defense to its previous name: the Department of War. Well, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Like the more recent Department of Homeland Security, the current Department of Defense brought together a new government entity with several preexisting ones. In the Pentagon’s case, the National Security Act of 1947 consolidated the Department of War, the Department of the Navy, and the newly minted Department of the Air Force after the Second World War. The military branches fully fell under the secretary of defense beginning in 1949. But a return to what’s old is at least partly what Trump has in mind. “We won World War I [and] World War II. It was called the Department of War. To me, that’s really what it is,” he said last month. “I’m talking to the people. Everybody likes that. We had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.” Yet it has been the Defense Department for almost all of the 79-year-old commander-in-chief’s life. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, dubbed the secretary of war by Trump during the most recent NATO summit, floated the name change on X, and most respondents to his social media poll approved. Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, have introduced legislation to make it a reality. If enacted, it would also make the old name turned new more permanent than if the Trump administration attempted to do this through some kind of executive action.  Trump wants to rid the military of any vestiges of wokeness or DEI. Gone is one l-word, “liberal,” and in its place is another: “lethality.” The Pentagon is supposed to be about warfighting rather than social experimentation at home and, one hopes, nation-building abroad. To that end, the Department of War is starker and more to the point. Trump has acknowledged the War Department “just sounded to me better” and “had a stronger sound.” And even those who don’t like the direction of U.S. foreign policy over the past 25 years might like the transparency about what many hawks mean when they say defense: war. Maybe Congress would even start to declare wars again! But herein also lies the problem for a president who has said since his first term that great nations do not fight endless wars. Toughness, precision, and a lack of political correctness aren’t the only reasons Trump is drawn to a different name for the department. “We want defense,” he has said, “but we want offense too.” Sometimes, perhaps this is true. It is hard, however, to look at the interventionist turn of recent decades—including this summer under the second Trump administration—and conclude we aren’t very often on offense. Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who has at times been a close Trump ally, has frequently contrasted a strong national defense with an “irrational offense.” Relatively few American political leaders openly advocated nation-building or forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most said at the time that they wanted these engagements to be targeted and brief. Some of them actually meant it. Much early Iraq War planning was done with the conceit that regime change and its aftermath could be handled with a light military footprint.  Whatever may be true of his Republican predecessors, Trump does genuinely want limited engagements as opposed to forever wars. Having that desire and the political will to see it to fruition is important. But it is also something that is often easier said than done.  A foreign policy of offense often takes on a life of its own. You cannot easily cut and run from seemingly failed missions without clear-cut permission from the voters. American casualties need to be avenged. Like liberals with government programs, a war is something that supporters say can always be won with just a little more time and resources. Then two decades later, the war in Afghanistan cannot be ended years after its achievable goals were realized without the immediate collapse of the U.S.-backed government and a humanitarian crisis. The war begins to become its own justification. Different policy choices can always be made, of course, and those are not dictated by the name of a cabinet-level agency. Perhaps Trump is right that the Department of War would improve our focus. All we are saying is give defense a chance. The post In Defense of ‘Defense’ appeared first on The American Conservative.