Yes, Donald Trump cares more about neodymium and other “rare-earth” elements than human rights and more about the price of gasoline than humoring Israel’s fantasies of “hegemony” in the Middle East. Who could have seen this coming? I mean, who?
Well, put not your trust in princes, folks—especially those with orange hair. Bibi and Donnie’s excellent adventure has proved to be an “own goal” of truly Trumpian proportions—comparable, I believe, to the “Diplomatic Revolution” of 1756, engineered by Austria’s Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz and agreed to by Louis XV, which ended up costing France its overseas empire in both North America and India, not to mention, several years later, poor Marie Antoinette her head, for Marie had to marry Louis XVI and move from Vienna to Paris as part of the deal. But that was another revolution.
Poor Bibi probably won’t lose his head over this one, but he could end up in jail, which, considering the endless lies he’s told, and the thousands of innocent people who’ve been killed thanks to his endless lust for power, is more than fitting. It’s too bad that Big Donnie won’t end up in there as well.
In the meantime, we can all get a chuckle or two out of the sudden plight of “Likudia USA”, the Jewish and Evangelical champions, not of Israel’s right to exist and prosper, but of its “right” to expand and dominate as an outright imperial power. The command center of Likudia USA has traditionally been “AIPAC”, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose lack of commitment to democracy in the U.S. was documented by its decision to endorse 109 of the members of Congress who voted not to recognize Joe Biden as president elect on Jan. 6, 2021—109 out of a total of 147—proof positive that AIPAC doesn’t give a damn about democracy in America or anywhere else. And now poor AIPAC is turning into the Democratic left’s favorite whipping boy. It almost makes you nervous about sowing the wind, doesn’t it?
To get back to our fearless leader, what is most striking about Donnie’s turnabout is not just that he’s calling off the invasion, he’s expanding U.S./Iranian relations in a way that would have gotten Barack Obama impeached for treason back in the day. Reason’s Matthew Petti has the story: Trump Lets Americans Buy Iranian Oil for the First Time Since the 1980s.
“As part of peace negotiations,” Matt tells us, “the U.S. Treasury issued an unprecedented total waiver from Iranian oil sanctions.”
The waiver goes beyond the prewar situation, or even the situation before the first Trump administration began its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran in 2019. Iran is now allowed to load oil onto American ships, sell to American refineries, and—most importantly—collect the payment in American dollars that passed through the American banking system. It is a sign that the Trump administration is serious about turning the peace process into a comprehensive new relationship.
Turns out, the Iranians are our friends! Hey, they’ve got lots of oil, don’t they? Isn’t that what counts in this world? To Donald Trump, at least!
If you enjoy “schadenfreude” (pleasure at the discomfort of others), and I surely do, you’ve got to like what the frequently but not always Trump-enabling crowd over at the National Review are going through. The U.S. Loses Its War Against Iran, groaned Jim Geraghty a few days back:
The terms of the memorandum of understanding are not quite an across-the-board surrender on the part of the United States, but they’re close. I suppose you can’t call it a wholesale surrender, in part because the U.S. government is paying retail prices in its concessions.
Ba-da-bing, n’est-ce pas? Hey, Jim, at least you haven’t lost your sense of humor. Only a few short months ago—early March, to be precise—the NR boys were whistling a different tune—America and Israel Remind the World How Wars Are Fought to Victory, crowed Noah Rothman—just like every other war the U.S. and Israel have fought since World War II. But not everybody was on board with Jim’s triumphalism. Michael Brendan Dougherty, for one, had seen this movie: The Wishful Thinking of Surgical Strikes, a prescient piece that even foreshadowed what has become NR’s go-to move when covering just about anything Trump does these days: “The President is making the same mistake as [insert name of Democratic president here].” Because whenever Trump does something bad, it was the Democrat in him that made him do it.
Trump’s record increasingly makes clear that, wonder of wonders, he really is a “peace candidate” at heart, because, when it comes to foreign affairs, Trump is nothing more than a one-trick pony, that pony being his beloved “fuck you” diplomacy, which, much to his confusion, never works. Remember his first foray abroad, his farcical “bromance” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, first threatening the poor guy with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” before embracing him? How did that go? Now North Korea is far more potent militarily than at any previous time in history, and no one seems to notice. It seems like only yesterday—“yesterday” meaning before Jan. 6, 2021—when, for some inscrutable reason, military intellectual complex certified chin strokers stopped warning about North Korea, which had been one of their favorite hobby horses.
And as with North Korea, so with China and now Iran, and even Venezuela.1 Trump struts and frets, like a stereotypical WWE kayfabe villain—the resemblances are uncanny—and then, when his opponent simply waits him out, climbs awkwardly through the ropes, waves his arms in triumph and not only declares victory but declares his supposedly vanquished opponents to be great guys when you get to know them—“very smart, very sharp, very good.” I guess all that stuff about wiping Israel off the map was, you know, “kidding”! Oh, those Khomeinists! Always with the jokes!
Afterwords
Both Wikipedia and ChatGPT inform me that the current ruling clique in Iran follow the doctrine of Ruhollah Khomeini, who taught that, contrary to long-standing Shiite doctrine, clerics should rule directly instead of indirectly, replacing the traditional Iranian monarchy with a theocratic republic. Yet their fabled “fanaticism” has always been a little bit more “pragmatic” than the American and Israeli war hawks have maintained. I have complained, well “often”, that our deliberately blind hostility to Iran over the decades, a policy pursued with even greater vigor in Israel by Netanyahu and his predecessors, was deliberately engineered to maintain an air of continuing crisis—we dare not relax for a second!—as a way of justifying, in the U.S., the “necessity” of our massively bloated defense establishment, and in Israel, a guarantee that the possibility of an independent Palestinian state could never achieve reality.2 The Khomeinists, of course, replied in kind, oppressing their own people far more than they oppressed anyone else. But Trump is clearly of a mood to jump off the merry-go-round. All that war stuff is too complicated! Let’s have a party! A big one! That’s all about me!
1. In Venezuela, which looked to be “total victory”, it seems that Trump has no plans other than to take the oil and run. Remarks a deeply disappointed Elliott Abrams in the National Review, “In Venezuela, [Trump] seems completely comfortable with a Maduro regime without Maduro; every other thug and thief remains in place, hundreds of political prisoners continue to rot away, and Trump never utters the word “democracy” or imposes any political demands on Delcy Rodríguez.”
2. It’s my strong impression that a great many Israelis, not all of them Likudist or “worse,” believe that if only there were regime change in Iran, all their problems would go away. As long as Israel pursues an expansionist policy in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, and now in Gaza, and has no policy regarding the Palestinians other than hoping that they can drive them to the four winds, their problems will not go away.
