You may have actually missed it! But on Thursday Trump played a diplomat, delivering to the Middle East a…
Historic Deal (CNN)
Historic Deal (CBS)
Historic Deal (Foreign Policy)
Historic Deal (BBC)
Historic Deal(et tu, Guardian?!?)
Only NBC opted for a slightly more nuanced “major diplomatic breakthrough”. But nearly all others (including of course Faux News) reported a Historic Deal.
Wow, how often do you see so much of the media agreeing on the exact wording of a headline? Where did they get the term from?
Perhaps from Whitehouse.gov?
President Donald J. Trump Has Secured a Historic Deal Between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to Advance Peace and Prosperity In the Region
Say what you will about the mainstream media, they are nothing if not consistent. No matter how much criminal incompetence and corruption Republican politicians commit. No matter the damage to the nation and the world:
- Letting the hot trail of Al Qaeda grow cold because “We don’t swat flies”, allowing 9/11 to happen?
- Ludicrous invasion of Iraq that destroys entire Middle Eastern countries for generations, erodes the US military and bankrupts the US treasury?
- Fostering an incomprehensible financial bubble that destroys the global economy?
- Refusing to accept a Black President and deploying (truly) historic scorched-earth tactics, breaking precedent after precedent to block him from doing his job, all the while whistling to the racist dogs?
- Running an entire campaign on racism, then bringing that racism to the White House as Pillar A of your policy?
- Basing all the rest of your Administration on pure corruption and destructive incompetence?
- Blatantly impeachable offenses which most of your party denies or belittles?
- Looking the other way when Russia sets a bounty on your soldiers?
- Coronavirus anyone?
Everything on that list and more, the US mainstream media (and much of the rest of the English-speaking press) has managed to normalize, belittle, explain away, or simply ignore, helping Republicans evade the full accountability they deserve.
On the flip side of this coin, particularly with Trump the media never tires of taking every hint of competence or partial sanity, every sliver of an achievement, and overplaying it to the max. In particular, stenographing Republicans without a shred of warranted scrutiny.
So… how great is Trump’s Middle East diplomacy? It only took one additional day for a reality check:
US sees embarrassing UN defeat over Iran arms embargo proposal
The US has suffered a humiliating defeat at the United Nations as its proposal to extend an arms embargo on Iran won support from only the Dominican Republic at the security council vote.
The US resolution was never likely to be passed in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition. It was proposed as a ploy by the Trump administration to open the way to more drastic action against Iran.
But the scale of the defeat on Friday underlined US isolation on the world stage...
Btw, check out media coverage of the Iran vote, and you’ll suddenly see a wide variety of word choices. Only the Guardian (above) has used “embarrassing”. Also, far less coverage of this vote, even though arguably it has a greater impact than the UAE deal, upon the Middle East and upon US-Mideast relations in particular.
Still, how about that UAE deal? “Historic” my ass. More below the fold.
Let’s revisit the public chain of events:
- In late January, Trump and wee Jared revealed their Piece Plan: a blueprint so laughably one-sided it became dead letter on the spot. The timing was carefully selected to boost Israeli PM Bibi in his desperate, 3rd-time-in-11-months re-election campaign, flagging at the time. It definitely helped Bibi reclaim his domestic image as Mr. Competence.
- Despite being only a (DOA) blueprint and not formal agreement, Bibi immediately claimed the Piece Plan gives him green light for annexation, announcing he will proceed to annex parts of the Palestinian West Bank within a week, even before the elections.
- US officials scrambled to halt him until after the elections. After cleaving his opposition with a typical post-election backstabbing deal, Bibi set up a government and set a July 1 date for annexation.
- Curiously, on June 12 UAE’s ambassador to the US published an unprecedented op-ed in a major Israeli newspaper, in Hebrew (English version here). He mentioned having actually been in the room when Trump unveiled the Piece Plan. He warned against annexation, and detailed all the great things the two countries with the two “most capable armies and most diversified economies” in the region could do together, if annexation is moved out of the way and normalization continues. The UAE has not been a major player in Israel-Palestine dynamics, so this was kind of odd.
- On June 30 Bibi blinked, postponing annexation and saying his government will continue “to work on it over the next few days”. Days and weeks have passed, Israel got overwhelmed by a 2nd Covid-19 wave, and then waves of anti-Bibi demonstrations due to domestic discontent (which continue every weekend).
- Then in August, Wham! a “Historic Deal”. So historic, that each side describes it differently: Israel says it’s actual peace in exchange for temporary postponement of annexation. UAE says it’s a limited, gradual normalization in exchange for taking annexation completely off the table. Tomato, To-mah-to. And Trump says… who cares what Trump says, really?
I don’t know about you, but to me this smells like (with deep apologies to anyone of Japanese heritage who might find this inappropriate) a game of Political Kabuki. Or perhaps 3-card Monte is more appropriate?
Israel and UAE’s regimes, already having unofficial and semi-official contacts for decades, were craving more normalization, but needed a pretext. So with Trump’s help they pulled a fast one on the world stage, as usual at the expense of Palestinians. Israel and UAE get to normalize, at the price of less than zero progress on Palestinian rights and Israel-Palestine peace. Simply by threatening annexation and then removing the threat.
For the uninitiated reader, a reminder: Israel already has full peace with its largest most populous immediate neighbor (Egypt, signed 1979 in exchange for returning all of Sinai and pledging an end to military Occupation of Palestinians), and with the neighbor with the longest border and most intricate relationship (Jordan, half of whose citizens are Palestinians; signed 1994 as a direct bonus for the 1993 Oslo accords with Palestinians).
While the UAE’s current strongman, a dude nicknamed MBZ, aspires to make it a regional power with some success, it’s not quite there yet. It may never get there, being an odd amalgam of principalities with 10 million residents, only 1 million of whom are citizens (the majority are South Asian workers and their descendants, who can never get citizenship). And even if a couple of other US-allied Gulf Oil countries follow along, this deal does not make the Palestinians and their demands for true independence and sovereignty, and the global consensus that these demands are justified, go away. That is the core problem; not whether Israel and a few wealthy Gulf states can do business under the table or right above it.
This deal continues George W. Bush’s 2002-2009 quest to relieve Israel of any pressure to end the Occupation, a quest which Trump has embraced wholeheartedly (dude has never seen a wrong and immoral idea he didn’t like). Instead, Trump like W before him prefers to go all bully on the Palestinians squeezing them harder and harder; a strategy that hasn’t worked thus far and is unlikely to work now. All in all, this takes us further away from peace in Israel-Palestine, not closer to it.
With the help of an incorrigible mainstream media, Trump got a practically free “Pro-Israel Coupon” and “Diplomatic Achievement Coupon” for this little 3-man con. Might be worth a little in Florida, maybe a teeny bit in Pennsylvania too. Might cost him in Michigan, if he still cares about a chance there.
But given the current priorities of the American people, the “Historic Deal” has barely registered amid all Trump’s scandals and failures destabilizing society and the economy on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, we’ve received yet another reminder that the mainstream media, unfortunately, are not our allies in the battle to hold the GOP accountable for its crimes.