Maybe something good will come out of the Trump plan, after all. By pushing the Middle East peace process to its logical conclusion, Donald Trump has made crystal clear something that was supposed to have been obscured: that no US administration has ever really seen peace as the objective of its “peacemaking”.
The Women’s Day march in Istanbul, 2017. The leaders of Brazil, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all friends of Trump, have been steadily eroding the rights of women. In Turkey, for example, a bill has been introduced to grant amnesty to men convicted of statutory rape if they marry their victims. OZGE SEBZECI/CREATIVE COMMONS
Hardly a day passes but some new and usually disturbing light is cast on President Donald Trump, and a recent illuminating glimpse came from publication of a recording that showed yet more of his expansive bluster.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
— Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005
Coercive might and money may be all that matter in Manhattan real estate. But they are bound to sink the president’s take-all-you-want “deal of the century” for Israel.
Patrick LAWRENCE
President Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Jan. 28, 2020, in the White House, unveiling details of the Trump administration’s Mideast peace plan, after keeping it secret for three years. It disregards any attempt to ensure a fully sovereign state for the Palestinians. SHEALAH CRAIGHEAD/WHITE HOUSE
When is a peace plan not a peace plan?
Look no further than Donald Trump’s cynically timed initiative to end the decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
If a breakthrough does result, it will be in spite of itself.
Daniel McADAMS
There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it’s even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.
Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.
Eric MARGOLIS
In 1916, as World War I raged on, a British diplomat, Mark Sykes, met with his French counterpart from the Quai d’Orsay, Monsieur Picot, and signed an agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire once victory was achieved.
The heart of the Mideast – Palestine, Syria and Iraq – was divided between Britain and France. Italy and Russia were offered other Ottoman lands: southern Turkey was promised to Italy and Constantinople to Russia. All this was top secret but was later revealed by the Bolsheviks after their 1917 revolution.
Susan Rice, US envoy to the UN from 2009 to 2013, with some of her fellow ambassadors, clockwise from left: Peter Wittig of Germany; Mark Lyall Grant of Britain; Li Baodong of China; Vitaly Churkin of Russia; and Gérard Araud of France, June 9, 2010. A study by a German scholar of US ambassadors to the UN reveals four styles, he writes: unilateralist, moderate unilateralist, moderate multilateralist and multilateralist. EVAN SCHNEIDER/UN PHOTO
