President Donald Trump can be infuriating. But his track record in the Middle East could make him the most consequential president of the last 50 years.
Trump says Israel, Iran agree to ceasefire
President Donald Trump says Israel and Iran agreed to a cease-fire after Iran retaliated for U.S. strikes on three nuclear facilities.
President Donald Trump had just sent stealth bombers over Iran on Saturday, June 21, and dropped 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrators or “bunker busters” on that country’s three most fortified nuclear sites.
As the world held its breath the following day, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona went on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and told host Kristen Welker we don’t have enough information to know if the mission was successful.
Then he dropped this snotty little aside, the sound bite he really wanted to deliver: “Well, you know, I find it interesting that the person without combat experience is often the first person to want to drop a bomb. And that’s what we see here.”
Kelly doesn’t know that.
In the same way that he doesn’t know if bunker busters destroyed Iran’s nuclear industrial complex, he doesn’t know that little-man syndrome compelled Trump to break from his own campaign promises and risk entangling the United States in another foreign war.
I get why Kelly, Ansari and Flake rip Trump
There is no shortage of Trump critics. I’m one of them.
A few weeks before the bombing, former Arizona U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, who years ago rejected Trump and joined the Biden administration as ambassador to Turkey, told a PBS forum in Seattle, “To be conservative has now been equated with being angry and engaging in grievance politics, and it’s just not for me.”
Elsewhere, Arizona U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari took her shot at Trump on social media. She accused him of “illegally” taking “military action against Iran – without congressional authorization.”
Oh, that old debate. The war-powers argument that goes nowhere because presidents from both major parties ignore Congress and commence bombing. Just ask Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
I understand these people and where they’re coming from. I think Trump is the most infuriating political figure in my lifetime.
He’s also the most complicated.
For all his bombast, all his incendiary tweets, all his reckless, loose-cannon populism, Trump might be on the cusp of greatness.
Donald Trump could remake the Middle East
If the ceasefire with Iran holds – and that’s a big if – America and its ally Israel will have delivered a decisive blow to a serious and destabilizing force in the region: the theocratic state of Iran that menaces its own people, the entire Middle East and the West.
With three years to go in his second presidency, there is still time for Trump to wreak maximum havoc. But brace yourself, Trump haters. He could be the man who remakes the modern Middle East.
Trump’s record in the region is extraordinary.
First, he had the good sense in his first presidency to build upon the coalition that President Obama organized to defeat the Islamic State, the terrorist army determined to create a jihadist caliphate in North Africa and the Middle East. Trump infused the coalition with new rules of engagement and more aggression, ultimately taking down ISIS with the help of Muslim nations in the region.
He launched the Abraham Accords that began a new round of normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries, in this case Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.
He courted the Saudis in a longer game of cooling the flames of Arab-Israeli enmity.
Peace is possible, if Trump can dial down Iran’s heat
As the Democratic Party and far-right Republicans turned more and more against Israel, Trump has embraced our most important ally in the Middle East.
He set the course many years earlier. At the end of his first term, Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the U.S. Embassy there.
Other American presidents didn’t have the guts to fulfill that American promise, but Trump did. And its importance grows clearer today as Israel reasserts itself as the most imposing military power in the region since Hamas attacked it on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Israeli rollback of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy armies that lobbed missiles routinely at the Jewish state, was nothing short of spectacular. In mid-June, Israel’s coordinated assassinations of Iran’s top military leadership and more than a dozen of its top nuclear scientists was a marvel of espionage that reflects years of intricate planning.
The mullahs are on their heels now, knowing they can trust no one in their own government and society.
If Trump can now dial down the heat that radiates from jihadist Iran, the possibilities abound for peace and greater economic cooperation in the region.
A fierce Trump critic understands what’s wrong
If you really want to understand the world you’re living in and how Trump helps shape it, you need to listen to the talk that Stephen Kotkin, one of our foremost experts on geopolitics, gave to a group of high-powered Asian-Pacific business people in March.
Speaking at the Fiduciary Investors Symposium in Singapore, Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, delivered a reality check to foreigners who apparently, by the tenor of their questions, have little regard for Trump or his government.
Understand that Kotkin is not a friend of Trump. He’s a fierce critic. But as a student of history, he understands that history has way of asserting itself to reset the scales.
And the scales are out of whack.
“The U.S. is 5% of global population, 25% of global GDP and 50% of global military,” Kotkin said. “Europe is 7% of global population, 17% of global GDP and almost 50% of global social spending.”
When his audience stirred at that, he said, “Yeah. How long could that keep going? It went way longer than we thought.”
He added: “Europe has been pocketing $350 billion a year in U.S. security assurance, for more than 30 years, spending instead on their quality of life. I would have taken that deal. And they took that deal, because the Americans gave them that deal.
“That deal is no longer affordable by the United States, and so the rebalancing is underway. …
“Others tried in their polite, eloquent, law-school-dean Obama kind of way. It didn’t work. And here we are.”
The global balance of power is completely off-kilter
As our Western European allies decline in global influence, our adversaries, particularly China and Russia and North Korea, have grown their militaries.
“Russia has a miniscule economy, in global terms, and has a colossal military budget. Because it over invests in repression and the military,” Kotkin said. “It’s the opposite of Germany. Germany’s army resembles Costa Rica.”
The Europeans are angry at America and talk about divorce. But our relationship with Europe was in a bad place. It was not reciprocal and had to change.
Said Kotkin, “When the Biden administration, pro-trans-Atlanticism, went to Europe and said, ‘Geez, if we go to war with China, are you in?’ What did they say?
“They said, ‘That’s your war. We’re not getting dragged into that.’
“So, the U.S. is the guarantor of European security vis-à-vis Russia, but the Europeans are not all in for the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific? Like, what’s that about?”
He added that the Cassandras who say the United States is losing Europe is “bunk, what a bunch of bunk. Do you have any idea what the trade volume is? What the tech transfer is? What the FDI (foreign direct investment) is? Let alone the cultural ties.
“Do you think that is going to go away because Trump is going to be in the White House for a few years? No. None of that is going to go away. It’s just going to come out the other side with a different balance.”
There’s more to Trump than we know
Kotkin credits Trump with leading the crusade that stopped an attempted leftist “ideological jihad to conquer American institutions” early in this decade, then accused Trump of leading a similar counterrevolution and radical right-wing takeover of the institutions.
Ultimately, the institutions will beat back both, he said.
Listen to his perspective. Neither Republicans nor Democrats will like what he has to say, but you will learn there’s a lot more to your world and to Trump than you might have realized.
The old U.S.-led world order is faltering, Kotkin said: “It wasn’t going to continue. And so it took something crazy out of the social media, reality television, real estate, pro-wrestling, beauty pageant side of America that you maybe didn’t know as well, and you know all too well now.”
We couldn’t reset the world the “normal” way, he said. So we did the “abnormal.” We did Trump.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic, where this column originally published. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com
