The Middle East experts got the region consistently wrong, egregiously wrong, and Trump got it right. How could this be? After all, Trump has no hidden personal reserves of learning and expertise on which to draw. By all accounts, and there is no reason to disbelieve them, he has no patience for long intelligence briefings or for detailed policy discussions, either. And yet his judgments on the region have been far better than those of impeccably credentialed experts with decades of experience at the highest levels of American statecraft. What does Trump know that they don’t?
Read it all.
The left sides with Palestine as an article of faith. The professional foreign affairs bureaucrats and policy wonks are part of the institutional left where Palestine-good, Israel-bad. Trump isn’t part of that club.
Much more to it than that. I agree with Kate, read the whole thing. I disagreed on a couple of minor points, but he has a very good way of presenting the points.
Short answer? Moving the embassy. A move promised by multiple Presidents but never acted on because they listened to their “experts”.
Makes you wonder if it was intentional.
Trump knew that the Pala-slimians will never to agree to anything that allows Israel to exist. It’s as hard core as the obsession with abortion in the American left.
Trump is a logical man and doesn’t waste a moment on lost causes. He cut them out and deals were made and will continue.
Trump is a stable genius in my view. How he does with the piranha continually nipping at his heels is beyond reason. He is a superman.
Do you really think that the same people who preach “diversity of thought” and who get the vapours when whatever demographic isn’t over represented…are gonna go with “hey, lets let an outsider take a look at the problem” are you?
Consistency is not their strong suit.
President Trump owes nothing to anyone who profits from keeping the conflict going. Thus, he can set these up and provide a benefit to the adherents.
More than that, he has a business background. If you need agreement from 10 people, and one of them hates you/hates the deal, work with them last. After everyone else is signed on you have the hammer of everyone else’s approval (and letting them down, not letting you down) to apply to the naysayer.
“The path was clearly lit”..
Sure by the failures of past “efforts”.
The fake refugees have been used for so long even they have forgotten what they are complaining about..
I remain fairly certain that the constant failures in the Middle East are a feature not a bug.
For those addicted to taxpayer funded wars,there is no better playground.
This is why President Trump faces a very high risk of assassination,his policies are threatening some serious bank accounts.
How long would most of us sit through intelligence and expert briefings by mental defectives like Peter Strzok, Chris Wray, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, Alexander Vindman, Kathleen Sebelius, Lois Lerner, Jonathan Gruber blah blah infinity.
Our ruling class are idiots and President Trump has a very good bullshit detector.
Rich, I think you’ve just described the Seventh Circle of Hell.
Grreat Comments all…!!
But when “Lefty folks” (Every UNION incl Student unions on the planet, Every Green outfit, 99% of all Europes politicians, All the Dems-Liberals-NDP), talk about the “poor Palestinian people”. Who do they really mean eh.??
Hezbollah – HAMAS.? , yea, damned straight they do. Marxists Bastards the lot kissing Islamic Terrorist FILTH.
We can thank Obama himself for stopping a huge investigation of said TERROR Group as it would have impacted his sniveling Treasonous Deal with IRAN. Tell me again how great that rotten, race baiting, ME destroying sack of camel dung was..??
If our Western Civilization is to prevail, TRUMP Must win and over the next 4 years groom a successor.
John F. Kerry … the disgraced military veteran “… remained convinced that the strategic priority of the United States was to continue failing, in the service of what he saw as immutable diplomatic principles”
Indeed … “immutable diplomatic principles”. PDJT has shown our venerated “institutions” don’t know what the hell they are doing … they all just sit around in one giant circle jerk and tell themselves how lovely each other’s dikks are.
“The Palestinians” have been at their terrorism for generations now. The whole world is sick of it. They have lost their cache’. They have made themselves into a pariah State … esp. now that the whole world sees Iran pulling their strings.
“What does Trump know that they don’t?” He knows how the world works when you WANT it to work?
Said another way, the professional class has no interest in actually solving any of these problem. When your career is built around the problem, do you want to eliminate your own job? You might have to find honest work afterward.
I haven’t read the article, so I don’t know what the author concludes. But my SWAG is simply that for nearly forty years, Trump has been dealing with the people over there on a personal level due to business interests, rather than through the lens of professional diplomacy.
Diplomats are almost as stupid as journalists, so the results of their efforts are no surprise.
More to it than that, but that’s a key part. The author misses that Trump came to a position of power in the real world while dealing with jerkoffs like Kerry, and also with sultans, businessmen, unions, building companies… to make deals he needed to understand what the drivers are to get things done in different places.
In NYC, support all political parties and grovel a bit and the licenses will come. Elsewhere in the world, be strong and be firm. Kerry thinks NY is the world. Trump knows that NY is only a small part of the world, with different standards and rules.
I just listened to a clip in which Trump noted that he has done more in 47 months than Biden has done in 47 years.
Trump is the man.
Meanwhile, we have Blackie.
Trump is far more, miles ahead, WISER, about human nature than ANY overpaid think tank talking head. Period.
I agree! I have always loved (and will watch at the drop of a hat) the 1970 movie “Kelly’s Heroes”. All of the characters had great nicknames, true to their personalities, but I LOVED Don Rickle’s quartermaster – I think his name was “Crapshoot”. His attitude was “what’s in it for me?”. I think 90% of the world operates on this principle.
Well, that was a back-handed compliment.
What did Putin have to do with anything? Is the point that Trump is a Stalinist? Because he is not.
No Marxist ever had an original thought with any truth value. Lenin was no exception. Who Whom is not a Marxist concept. It’s cold hard reality in this vale of tears. Live and let live will only be an option in the new heaven and new earth, after those who defy the Lord and make war on His people are cast into the pool of fire.
Who Whom. Who gets to expropriate Whom. Who gets to send Whom to a gas chamber, and have a good laugh as the cyanide does its work of ridding the world of Whom.
Trump merely judges that Jewish and Christian civilization should be the ones Who survive and thrive, and their enemies should be the ones Whom justice dispatches to join their master in hell.
The Arabs are negotiating from a position of weakness. They are running out of Christian money to make war on the west, over “Occupied Palestine” or anything else. No. They will not stop Israel from carrying out a permanent solution to her Arab problem in the short run.
What the ceasefire does not do is relieve those who fear the Lord from the obligation to annihilate Amalek and the Satamic Amalekite mockery of Judaism called Islam. In the end the crowned heads of the Arab world will be overthrown, and their peoples sent to hell or put to flight to clear the way for Israel to claim her full inheritance.
Why? Because the God of Israel is the One God. That Donald Trump is abhorrent to limp-wristed, lisping “mainstream” Christians and anti-Zionist “Reform” Jews does not mean that he does not do what is just in the eyes of the Lord. If anything, it means the President is genuinely the Lord’s servant.
Putin won over Obama because Obama did just about everything wrong. Putin played the strongman in a region where the strong horse is honoured. Obama was inconsistent, and his attempted pay-off is a sign of weakness.
Russia may be a third world country since the fall, but Putin dominated in Syria. Sadly for Putin, Trump is over-dominant.
“Mad Dog” Mattis fell for the Theranos con. He shares that distinction with George Schultz and Henry Kissinger.
While I’m at it John Kerry is a pompous fool, but he’s tall, has god hair and married money. So his stepson can be Hunter Biden’s business partner and the bribes flow indirectly.
For all those who hate God and the Bible read Revelation and read it now.
My favorite part is the Star Trek esque rescue vessel (with The Lord in the captain’s chair) that can only hold 144,000 or so if we don’t follow the rules, become civilized, and find a way to leave the planet before the van Allen belts start to die and the hard radiation starts to wipe us all out (previous passages describing radiation poisoning). Unspoken was the “let’s find some nice zoos to ship them too, they’re not smart enough to join society.”
It’s amazing how different some sections of The Bible look if you read a lot of Sci Fi before becoming a believer.
VOWG….me thinks you just went FULL JOKE BIN BIDEN, and one should never go full joke bin biden
Trump knows how to make a deal, and with the immolation of the republican guard general also looks like the strong horse, which is very important in the middle east
Trump isolated England, who created/insisted on the Palestine VETO over any UN Agreement… He aggressively pushed America OIL/GAS production such that we now EXPORT… The Arab States see that they need to create an M/E economical model like the EU for the Future….The M/E will compete favorably against the EU when they work “with” Israel……These agreements make sense for all of those in the M/E….
America just stops funding Trillions into the M/E quagmire of WAR… We have other enemies that need to be eliminated…..Marxism & China….N Korea, Russia…. Abolish the useless UN and kick butts with our coin…
When Joe Biden stated that if he had been President that ZERO deaths would have occurred! in the USA, that would mean that He would have Nuclear bombed China.. Who would have Guessed?
JMHO
Russia is not your enemy, you yank fool.
“Never trust the Russians.” Said to me by a wise old Czech. God rest his soul.
Who said Russia was? And don’t you think that Russia is a great way to blood and weaken common enemies?
Because Trump (unlike Trudeau) knows the difference between intellectual masturbation and something that will work in the real world. I find him (mostly) utterly pragmatic. He has my vote this November. The solution for the Palestinian problem is to take our money and walk away. If you subsidize corruption and bad behavior, you get corruption and bad behavior. Something that 70+ years of “smart people” have forgotten or never learned in the first place.
The best kept secret in the Middle East is that neighbouring Arab nations absolutely despise Palestinians or whatever they want to call themselves, viewing them as professional sh*t disturbers since the beginning of time but were quite happy to have them do their dirty work for them against Israel.
A late eighties edition of National Geographic pointed this out before the magazine swung to the left. Arab neighbors tried to work out a deal with Jordan early on, at least I think it was Jordan, to see if they’d be willing to carve out some land for a new country for “Palestinians”. It was quickly shot down – Jordan wisely citing the downside of having hardwired perpetually grievanced “Palestinians” living next door.
Trump’s entire adult life has been getting things done. One of his greatest strengths / greatest virtues in his pursuit of getting things done is his IMPATIENCE with whatever is NOT working, combined with his deep understnading of basic human nature / human motivations. He has learned that everybody on every side of every deal / negotiation is silently weighing their answer to WIIFM = “what’s in it for me?” Trump clearly tells them what’s in it for them, and it they don’t pay attention and reject the WIIFM (like the Palestinians always do) then he shuts them out and moves on to those who ARE paying attention.
Twenty-five+ years of failed ‘middle east peace efforts’ by ‘the experts’ led to this Trumpian new approach:
1) end American money going to the Palestinians…
2) wean America off its long dependence on mid-east oil via U.S. fracking …
3) move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, long promised by many but never actually done
Those 3 major new initiatives have completely changed the middle east dynamic. MAGA!
+1
All my adult life I have said that there will never be peace in the middle east! I was also aware that while they squabbled among themselves, they were less likely to create problems for the rest of the world. It is indeed a great irony that the Muslim world hates the west, and so many of its Jihadi types demand that no infidel should be in their lands, yet they depend on the west’s money to survive, thus making them hate us even more. With all their bluster about keeping the Islamic lands pure, they seem to be unaware that their forefathers spent centuries invading Europe, even occupying Spain for several centuries, and fighting all the way to the gates of Vienna, before being turned back. The current result, is the multitude of Muslim states north of Greece leading up to the Balkans.
Today, because of the plans created by the Muslim brotherhood in the early twentieth century, they now invade with refugees, and intend to out breed the west and eventually create Islamic domination by force of population. There may be economic peace starting to break out thanks to Trump, which is a phenomenal achievement, but they will continue to hate us, and can’t understand why their god gave the west to us. The Jihadi types will continue to attempt to wipe us off of the face of the planet, and it will never end until our side has enough backbone to take the problem seriously, and permanently remove this ever present threat from happening. Unfortunately, I don’t ever see this becoming real. The same SJW types that support the BLM narrative now, will be the ones that support the Arab Lives Matter narrative, when that conflict again rears up, which it will. Happily, I will not be here to witness the decline of the west, as it morphs into the promised world wide caliphate. Allah’s Will, will be done, because we are too squeamish to deal with the issue properly. I wish this were not so, as I don’t seek to harm anyone, but if a group is seeking to wipe out me, and mine, I personally will not stand idly by, and allow it to happen, yet collectively, the west is allowing this to happen. If the Islamic religion does not have a needed reformation, which I doubt will ever happen, then their Koran insists they destroy us, and deep down, the majority of these religious Jihadi adherents, believe that they should obey the Koran. Sadly, we in the west, simply refuse to understand and accept this fact.
We used to be so much more.