What's Left to Say?

I don't know anymore!

It’s a struggle to make a post these days that’s more insightful than “I told you so,” but look, I did kind of. The belief that Trump was going to be some kind of positive influence on the situation in the Middle East was wishful thinking at best. Three prominent and rather obvious facts militated against this feeble interpretation: 1) Trump’s closeness with the Israeli far right, 2) his oft-stated hostility to Iran, and 3) his inability to manage events or even set policy in any kind of legible and consistent way. I’ve said this before, but there is no “policy,” as such: it’s all improvisation based on reacting to events. There is not a lot of strategic thinking going on. Factions jostle for influence, and Trump goes with whatever sounds good and “strong” to him at the time. Not for nothing, that sounds like a fascist regime. According to his biographer Renzo De Felice, Mussolini had not even decided which side to join in the war in 1939, and there were both pro-Hitler and anti-Hitler factions in his government.

Maybe if Israel’s strikes on Iran grind to a stalemate, and do not eliminate the regime or the nuclear program, he will start listening to the Vance-Tucker isolationist wing again and distance himself from the whole thing, claiming he wanted to do diplomacy from the get-go. The fact that he has openly associated himself with the attacks now won’t be an obstacle to this about-face.

There are two interpretations of the events that led up to the strikes on Iran. One is that Trump conspired with Netanyahu to use diplomacy to conceal an attack. That seems devilishly clever on some level, but ultimately it demolishes the diplomatic credibility of the United States. It creates a short-term success and a long-term destabilization. Or suppose that Trump got dragged along by Netanyahu. In that case, he cannot control or shape events and is extremely easy to manipulate, so long as things appear “strong.” Both of these are almost equally disastrous possibilities. They go back to the simple core of the phenomenon: he’s both evil and stupid. People are still doing the wishful thinking thing by seeing some kind of strategic masterstroke here. It’s not: it’s a big fucking mess.

I don’t want to freak anyone out, but here’s what I wrote about Trump’s foreign policy in May of ’24:

The world we are living in was built during the Trump years. It can be directly traced to the failures of his policy. You can argue on Twitter until you are blue in the face about settler colonialism and campus antisemitism, but the reality we live in will be shaped through the high offices of state. And we have some limited capacity to decide who occupies them. Even if Trump is less positively disposed on a personal level to Bibi, he can be easily outmaneuvered by him or whatever goon succeeds him, because he’s very stupid and just not all that interested. Say what you will about the State Department under Biden, under Trump there basically won’t be one: policy will be made through the kind of informal dealmaking and influence peddling that typifies Trumpland. We can now clearly see the results of that approach.

I don’t like to hazard predictions, but if experience is any guide, I strongly believe a right-wing Israeli government, under the chaos of a second Trump administration, would attempt to go forward with annexation and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and God knows what permanent “solution” for Gaza. And I believe the chain reaction that would set off could very likely lead to World War III. We’ve already seen how bad things can get after just four years of Trump. What about eight? Or more!

I should’ve included a possible attack on Iran in all this, but the point remains. The most hopeful outcome now is that the attacks cease, they come to some face-saving diplomatic solution where everybody can claim victory, and we all hobble forward without a world-ending cataclysm. Even then, this will convince everyone—if they hadn’t already noticed from Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine—that the only way to preserve national (and regime) security is the possession of atomic weapons. Likely, this so-called “counter-proliferation” move will increase nuclear proliferation. And if the United States is so unreliable and dangerous now, why wouldn’t Germany pursue a program, or why wouldn’t France increase its warhead production? The lesson is if you have nukes, you pretty much get to do what you want. Otherwise, you’re fucked.