[Salon] The silver lining in Trump's election that is turning to dross

The ‘silver lining’ in Trump’s election that is turning to dross

It is just under a week since Donald Trump took the oath of office and a number of the contradictions between his words before the election and his deeds after the inauguration are sorting themselves out.

Regrettably, there was no contradiction between ‘before and after’ as regards his policy on Israel and the Gaza genocide. Commentators in the alternative media said his personal inclinations were locked in by a $150 million campaign donation from arch Zionist Miriam Adelson and this seemed to be borne out by those he nominated for the ‘power ministries’ in his cabinet, all of whom were unreservedly pro-Israel.

Today’s news confirms the worst one could fear: Trump has now urged Egypt and Jordan to take in most of the population of Gaza. His idea is to ‘clean out’ the Strip, sending away to neighboring states what he estimated to be ‘a million and half people.’ Perhaps this was just another example of his disregard for facts, just as he spoke several days ago about Soviet war dead in WWII as 60 million when the true figure widely known to all is 26 or 27 million. Perhaps it was a tip-off that he knows more about the true scale of murder perpetrated by Israel in Gaza than the rest of us. My point is that the official number for Palestinians in Gaza before October 2023 was 2.2 million.

Even mainstream media seem to be astonished by Trump’s proposal.

The Financial Times says it ‘would upend decades of US policy promoting the two-state solution based on the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in Gaza and parts of the occupied West Bank.” The paper goes on to quote the damning remarks of a Middle East expert in Washington over what would be construed in the region as a second ‘Nakba’ or permanent expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. By reference to this expert, they call it ‘ethnic cleansing’ and note that ‘it would undermine prospects of a normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.’ In other words, Trump is destroying with his own hands the signature policy of his first administration that ended in the Abraham Accords.

In the absence of normalization in the region, Israel would remain under constant threat of renewed war, meaning that American military support for the country would be extended without end. So much for Trump’s aspiration to be a peacemaker and to scale back American military operations abroad.

My interest in all of the foregoing is because of what it means for Trump’s approach to the other big foreign policy issue on his desk when he took office: ending the Ukraine war. In a word, this does not point to his being above the boorish and uninformed remarks on how to deal with Russia that we heard in the weeks before his inauguration from his inner circle, including Sebastian Gorka, Michael Waltz and General Kellogg.

It will be a real challenge for Vladimir Putin and his closest advisers to find common interests with Trump that can lead him away from the obnoxious rhetoric that we saw in Trump’s mixture of threats that accompanied his invitation to the Russian president to a summit meeting. My guess is that the key to an understanding over Ukraine and a revised security architecture in Europe that accommodates Russian interests will be Russian proposals on stabilizing the strategic arms balance by, for example both sides freezing the deployment of medium range ballistic missiles in Europe including hypersonic missiles and the non-deployment of several Russian doomsday systems that have not gone into production like their nuclear underwater drone Poseidon or their Satan 2 ICBM which can raze to the ground half a continent at one go.

The issue of the growing disbalance in strategic weapons between the two nuclear superpowers was flagged by several U.S. Senators in the months after Putin presented Russia’s latest achievements to the world in March 2018.

See https://consortiumnews.com/2018/03/10/gang-of-four-senators-call-for-tillerson-to-enter-into-arms-control-talks-with-the-kremlin/

It became a major talking point in Joe Biden’s first and only summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in June 2021. It has not gone away. Indeed, the contrary is true now that Russia actually demonstrated its unrivaled and unstoppable capabilities with its Oreshnik missile attack on Dnepropetrovsk.

This issue of strategic power balance all by itself can move the U.S-Russia agenda in a constructive path when the talked about summit takes place. Leaving the talks at the level of a ceasefire or frozen conflict in Ukraine will be a dead end.