The Huckster-in-Chief gearing up for his biggest deal yet! Let's start like we always do, with some schwag. How's this look?
I think Trump is on the move and his putting his pieces on the board. We normally don’t ascribe much in the way of strategy to Donald Trump. But with his recent reorganization/shakeup/’CHAOTIC’ atmosphere in his administration, lashing out at the Justice Dept and FBI by getting Jeff Sessions to fire Acting Deputy Director McCabe, ditching Tillerson at State for true neocon Pompeo, talking up ur-neocon John Bolton (Bolton? srsly?) as Nat Sec advisor after the graceful-not-really involuntary retirement of McMaster, losing his body man, his girl Hope (Hicks) all in the last 10 days, while Kelly remains the disciplinarian Trump is able to continue putting up with, I think there’s something afoot.
To what end? I think Trump imagines himself an American populist-Jacksonian with Russia’s Putin as a contemporary model of what that means. And he needs the kind of hard-nosed people he thinks he needs to execute what he already knows he wants to be able to do. (So much for all his bs about ‘enjoying conflict’ in his advisors.) Trump isn’t interested so much in conflict between two opposing views as he is in fomenting conflict to prevent his day from being boring or disappointing or frustrating, like when someone says ‘we should sleep on that’ or ‘let me get an opinion on that’.
In short, Trump is ready to put some muscle into his #MAGA.
That’s why I believe there’s a better than even chance the United States will be publicly returning to, or be at war in, the Middle East before the end of the year.
Obviously, this will be hugely disruptive domestically. But anyone paying attention to foreign affairs knows there are a number of things in play over there that will feed into the Trumpian-Fox News psyche and worldview that will enable Trump to believe in a version of a ‘splendid little conflict’ that will:
- Distract from whatever domestic squabble-du-jour congress and special counsel (for as long as Mueller remains that) might have in play at any given time. Or use as political cover for some dastardly domestic deed.
- Meet the neocon agenda of :
- a) asserting American interests in the region, which inevitably include
- b) confronting Iran which means unilaterally withdrawing (reneging) on the Iranian Nuclear Deal, and
- c) shamelessly sticking it to the hated UN, and erstwhile European allies, who Trump believes are ‘taking advantage’ of America.
What has changed to allow this scenario to be defended in public? (In spite of the fact that Trump has already admitted to being able to shamelessly lie and say anything he wants with a straight face in person and in public)
Russia, Turkey and a newly-compliant Saudi Arabia with it’s Gulf State allies, making strange bed-fellows with Israel.
Tensions are escalating because Russia has cashed in its chips with Syria’s Assad, which alarms Israel almost as much as Iran does. At the same time, Turkey’s Erdogan is crossing its border with Syria and Iraq to pick a fight with America’s battlefield allies in the region, the Kurds, which are the indigenous people on Turkey’s southern border. Erdogan, to shore up domestic support for his post-coup power grab, is dangerously close to committing Turkey to a military campaign of pushing the Kurds out of their homelands in northern Iraq and Syria permanently, something that would disrupt the power balance (again) within Syria, Iraq, and the entire ME.
Russia, watching developments in Europe and Washington, holds an ace up its sleeve that could influence the European response to American maneuvering in the Middle East: by allying with Syria’s Assad he may have leverage over the fate of refugees looking to escape war by trying their luck crossing European borders, as they did in 2014-15, causing huge political headaches in the EU and enabling the rise of far-right wing challenges to European democratic institutions and cooperation. Depending on whether Russia sees American involvement as a geopolitical plus (ripping apart American and European domestic politics) or a geopolitical minus (substantively challenging a Russian toehold in the Middle East) will determine whether and how Putin plays this card.
But in Trump’s mind, that’s not his problem, and we’re just ‘missing out’ on an opportunity to ‘shape the ME...and do deals’. Oh, and nevermind about ‘not going to war without allies’. Do not expect UN ambassador Nikki Haley to make much of a serious effort to enlist any traditional allies for supporting a Trumpian Middle East adventure.
So, while Mueller ramps up the investigation, America gears up for a mid-term election in November, Trump—simpleton that he is—thinks he has the answer that will be ‘genius’, to sweep those troubles away by wrong-footing his political enemies, and why he’s bringing on the people he wants, to put into places he thinks he needs them.
He’s going to leverage the Pentagon’s cultural and bureaucratic bias towards the Kurds (and Israel) and against the Russians by allowing them to support the Kurds (as we already do) and use that to announce an escalation into a new ME foreign policy, supported by a Pompeo State department and allied with the Saudi’s newly-militarized foreign policy, that will ultimately, if not immediately or officially, have Iran as it’s target.
It’s not that hard to see, in it’s broad outlines.
But it’s all based on a domestic gamble that Trump thinks he can get away with: waving the flag and rallying the country toward another military adventure in the Middle East that will have the appearance of being halfway credible in terms of American short term interests, at least among so-called conservatives, while being the cat’s paw in a larger game he can deny for as long as he wants as ‘fake news’. All of which will be part of a domestic power play within the Republican party (during an election year) that will attempt to blunt the ‘blue wave’ threatening Republican control of congress. Trump knows that Party support, not to mention national support, is not a given, which gives him an opportunity to ‘sell this deal’ and make himself relevant during an election year when he’s going to not only challenge Democrats, but the same skeptical conservatives still left in the GOP that are currently full of ideas of how candidates can hold the line on Republican majorities in Congress by putting some distance between themselves and the administration.
Trump’s foreign adventures are going to be an attempt to put that to the test, even if (or especially when?) it risks splitting the party. Trump fancies himself a gambler of sorts. This is the kind of Grand Strategy he lives for. He thinks it’s three-dimensional chess. The rest of us see it for what it is: a ‘game’ of falling dominoes, where he gets to set up the pieces...and put them in motion. (And he probably calls it ‘art’)
The real question is, how has he been able to continually do this in his career? By having willing enablers in a cultural and economic environment that no long knows how to defend decency, take responsibility, and accept consequences, either in the market or in politics. Be they yesterday’s bankers, or today’s Republican party.
Every time they try to split the difference, be greedy, make excuses, they become complicit in this escalating farce of a minority-administration, representing a minority party running Congress as a manufactured majority that is fast approaching a point of no return that will have real consequences for the nation and history. And we thought George W. Bush, the original instigator of post-millennial Middle East instability, was the nadir of the American ‘paranoid style’? Guess again.
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