News with Suz: Trump's Foreign Policy Bombshells

What's really behind the shockwaves

Trump’s most striking foreign policy pronouncements of the last few weeks – on both Gaza and Ukraine – have been met with incredulity from the international community. The promise to take Gaza ‘for real estate’ and, this week, to veto Ukraine’s NATO membership and abandon any attempt to return Ukraine to its pre-2014 borders have evoked a clutching of pearls from Munich to Brussels, and from Kyiv to Capitol Hill. Even by the standards of the first Trump term, the 47th President has set about slaying sacred cows in foreign affairs with an enthusiasm that has outraged the foreign policy establishment in Europe and the US.

And yet, as so often with this President, the outwardly crazy things he says contain more than a germ of truth that the establishment would rather not acknowledge.

Gaza: A Reconstruction Dilemma

Take Gaza: the reconstruction of Gaza will take at least a decade and require tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars. There is no route to completing that reconstruction that does not flow through both Israel and the United States. The Arab world would not foot the bill and take on the responsibility, even if it had the means to do so (and possibly only Saudi Arabia really has the resources to afford it). It is inconceivable that the US and Israel will back any Gaza reconstruction plan that offers the slightest possibility of Hamas or anything like it ever taking power again. The suggestion of emptying Gaza without the right of return is provocative and, to many, highly offensive, but it does engage with the reality of the dire situation on the ground – that Gaza is all but uninhabitable and that many younger Gazans would be prepared to leave for good if they had a credible promise of a brighter future elsewhere in the region.

Ukraine: An Unspoken Reality?

And on Ukraine, again Trump is saying out loud what many have discussed in private: that any peace plan has to offer the Russians some fig leaf of retaining some of their post-2014 gains, and that NATO membership is as much a provocation to Russia as it is a route to a solution. The former head of MI6, Alex Younger, speaking to the BBC this morning, made the point clearly – Ukraine’s NATO membership was vanishingly unlikely in any case over the next four years. On one level, Trump’s giving up two key negotiating points to the Russians before talks have even begun makes no sense. On the other hand, no progress has been made on any peace settlement since the war began. Trump’s favored technique – if you can call it that – is to upend the whole table before talks even begin and see where the chips land, with the possibility of jump-starting progress. He may yet turn out to be right, even if the result will please nobody. And that’s almost always the end result of any peace agreement.

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