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      Taking American Carnage to the Next Level

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      It is a recent tradition among occupants of the White House, as they head out of office, to play a few practical jokes on their successors. The Clinton administration jesters, for instance, removed all the Ws from White House keyboards before handing over the keys to George W. Bush’s transition team. The Obama administration left behind books authored by Barack Obama for Trump’s incoming press team.

      Donald Trump has no sense of humor. His “gift” to the next administration is dead serious. With his recent foreign policy moves, the president is trying to change the facts on the ground so that whoever follows in his footsteps will have a more difficult time restoring the previous status quo. Forget about pranks. This is a big middle-finger salute to the foreign policy establishment and the world at large.

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      Of course, Trump is not preparing to leave office, regardless of the results of the November election. But in his policies in the Middle East and East Asia, the president is attempting to change the very rules of the game just in case he’s not around next year to personally make more mischief. The man is not going to win a Nobel Prize for his efforts — despite the recent nominations coming from a pair of right-wing Scandinavians — but he’ll do whatever he can to achieve the next best thing: putting the Trump brand on geopolitics.

      It cost about $5,000 to replace all those W-less typewriters. The bill for all the damage Trump is doing to international affairs in his attempt to make his Israel, Iran and China policies irreversible will be much, much higher.

      Israel Up, Palestine Down

      For several years, the Trump administration promised a grand plan that would resolve the Israel-Palestine stand-off. According to this “deal of the century,” Palestinians would accept some economic development funds, mostly from Gulf states, in exchange for giving up their aspirations for an authentic state.

      The hoops Palestinians would have to jump through to get even such a shrunken and impotent state — effectively giving up Jerusalem, relinquishing the right to join international organizations without Israel’s permission — are such obvious deal-breakers that Jared Kushner and company must have known from the start that their grand plan was not politically viable.

      But finding a workable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict was not the purpose of the plan. It was all an elaborate shell game. While the administration dangled its proposal in front of world leaders and international media, it was working with Israel to create “new realities.” Trump withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council for its “chronic bias against Israel.” The administration closed the PLO’s office in Washington, DC, and eliminated US funding for the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees. And in perhaps the most consequent move, Trump broke a global convention by moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Until recently, only one country, Guatemala, had followed suit.

      But then came a flurry of diplomatic activity this fall as both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain extended diplomatic recognition to Israel. The Trump administration also pushed Serbia and Kosovo, as part of a new economic deal, to include clauses about Israel: Serbia will move its embassy to Jerusalem and Kosovo will establish one there after establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

      Astonishingly, the Trump administration has promoted this diplomatic activity as restraining Israel. In May, Netanyahu announced that he was moving forward with absorbing sections of the West Bank that already featured large Israeli settlements. He subsequently stepped back from that announcement to conclude the new diplomatic deals with the Gulf states. But it was only reculer pour mieux sauter, as the French say — stepping back to better leap forward. Netanyahu had no intention of taking annexation off the table.

      “There is no change to my plan to extend sovereignty, our sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, in full coordination with the United States,” Netanyahu said in mid-August. Some further to the right of Netanyahu — alas, they do exist — want to annex the entire West Bank. But that’s de jure. As writer Peter Beinart points out, Israel has been annexing the West Bank settlement by settlement for some time.

      Where does this leave Palestinians? Up a creek without a state. The Trump administration has used its much-vaunted “deal of the century” to make any future deal well-nigh impossible. In collaboration with Netanyahu, Trump has strangled the two-state solution in favor of a single Israeli state with a permanent Palestinian underclass. The cost to Palestinians: incalculable.

      Permanent War With Iran

      Strengthening Israel was a major part of Trump’s maneuverings in the Middle East. A second goal was to boost arms sales to Gulf countries, which will only accelerate the arms race in the region. The third ambition has been to weaken Iran. Toward that end, Israel, Bahrain and the UAE now form — along with Saudi Arabia — a more unified anti-Iran bloc.

      But the Trump crowd has never been content to contain Iran. It wants nothing less than regime change. From the get-go, the Trump administration nixed the Iran nuclear deal, tightened sanctions against Tehran and put pressure on all other countries not to engage Iran economically. In January, it assassinated a leading Iranian figure, Major General Qassem Soleimani of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. And this summer it tried, unsuccessfully, to trigger “snap-back” sanctions against Iran that would kill the nuclear deal once and for all.

      Even as the Trump administration was celebrating the diplomatic deal between the UAE and Israel, it was going after several UAE firms for brokering deals with Iran. Trump recently castigated the Iranian government for going through with the execution of wrestler Navid Afkari for allegedly killing a security guard during a 2018 demonstration.

      And US intelligence agencies have just leaked a rather outlandish suggestion that Iran has been thinking about assassinating the US ambassador to South Africa. According to Politico, “News of the plot comes as Iran continues to seek ways to retaliate for President Donald Trump’s decision to kill a powerful Iranian general earlier this year, the officials said. If carried out, it could dramatically ratchet up already serious tensions between the U.S. and Iran and create enormous pressure on Trump to strike back — possibly in the middle of a tense election season.”

      Hmm, sounds mighty suspicious. Sure, Iran might be itching for revenge. But why risk war with a president who might just be voted out of office in a couple of months and replaced with someone who favors returning to some level of cooperation? And why would the unnamed US government officials leak the information right now? Is it a way to discourage Iran from making such a move? Or perhaps it’s to provoke one side or the other to take the fight to the next level — and take off the table any future effort to repair the breach between the two countries?

      Cutting Ties With China

      At a press conference earlier this month, Trump laid out his vision of US relations with China. Gone were the confident predictions of beautiful new trade deals with Beijing. After all, Trump had canceled trade negotiations last month, largely because the Phase 1 agreement hasn’t produced the kind of results the president had predicted (in terms of Chinese purchases of US goods). Nor did Trump talk about what a good idea it was for China to build “reeducation camps” for Uighurs in Xinjiang (he reserves such frank conversation for tête-à-têtes with Xi Jinping, according to John Bolton).

      Rather, Trump talked about severing the economic relationship between the two countries. “Under my administration, we will make America into the manufacturing superpower of the world, and we’ll end our reliance on China once and for all,” he said. “Whether it’s decoupling or putting in massive tariffs like I’ve been doing already, we’re going to end our reliance on China because we can’t rely on China.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      As with virtually all things, Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about. China has been largely unaffected by all of Trump’s threats and posturing. As economist Nicholas Lardy explains, “for all the fireworks over tariffs and investment restrictions, China’s integration into global financial markets continues apace. Indeed, that integration appears on most metrics to have accelerated over the past year. And U.S.-based financial institutions are actively participating in this process, making financial decoupling between the United States and China increasingly unlikely.”

      In fact, decoupling is just another way of saying “self-inflicted wound.” On the non-financial side of the ledger, the United States has already paid a steep price for its trade war with China, which is only a small part of what decoupling would ultimately cost. Before the pandemic hit, the United States was already losing 300,000 jobs and $40 billion in lost exports annually. That’s like a Category 3 hurricane. A full decoupling would tear through the US economy like a Category 6 storm.

      Geopolitical Carnage

      American presidents want to leave behind a geopolitical legacy. Bill Clinton was proud of both the Dayton agreement and the Oslo Accords. George W. Bush touted his response to the September 11 attacks. Barack Obama could point to the Iran nuclear deal and the détente with Cuba. Donald Trump, like the aforementioned twisters, has left destruction in his path. He tore up agreements, initiated trade wars, pulled out of international organizations and escalated America’s air wars.

      But perhaps his most pernicious legacy is his scorched-earth policy. Like armies in retreat that destroy the fields and the livestock to rob their advancing adversaries of food sources, Trump is doing whatever he can to make it impossible for his successor to resolve some of the world’s most intractable problems.

      His diplomatic “achievements” in the Middle East are designed to disempower and further disenfranchise Palestinians. His aggressive policy toward China is designed to disrupt an economic relationship that sustains millions of US farmers and manufacturers. His bellicose approach to Iran is designed not only to destroy the current nuclear accord but make future ones impossible as well.

      If he wins a second term, Trump will bring his scorched-earth doctrine to every corner of the globe. What he is doing to Iran, China and the Palestinians, he will do to the whole planet. The nearly 200,000 pandemic deaths and the wildfires destroying the West Coast are just the beginning. Donald Trump can’t wait to take his brand of American carnage to the next level.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Donald Trump: A President Against His People

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      In less than two months from now, Americans would have elected their next president. One can only hope that they have elected their 46th president, not reelected their 45th for another four-year term. Electing Donald Trump was nothing short of shooting oneself in the foot with a .45-caliber pistol. Reelecting him will amount to taking that pistol to the head and pulling the trigger.

      In four years, this man has caused countless harm to everyone possible, save rich white Americans and even richer American corporations. He has worked hard to reclaim whiteness in America, having done everything possible to ensure that to be American is synonymous with being white. He has characterized Mexicans as rapists and Central American refugees as criminals. Blinded by his xenophobic views, he promised his supporters a beautiful wall on the southern border that would be paid for by Mexico. Employing his executive powers to keep Muslims away from American soil, his exclusionary immigration policies have been openly Islamophobic from the first days of his presidency.

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      As president, Trump had the opportunity to make a positive impact on innumerable aspects of the lives of its citizens. Unfortunately, anything he turned his attention to — whether it’s education, health care, taxation, immigration, trade agreements or the environment — he managed to make worse. It requires an extraordinary amount of ineptitude and incompetence to accomplish what Trump has in his four years. He has done enough damage to the country — and the world at large — to vie for the unenviable top spot as the worst president in the history of the United States of America.

      Enduring the final year of his presidency, I had thought that it is impossible to be surprised or outraged any longer by whatever the man says or does. I was proven wrong. Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has made his previous transgressions seem like a walk in the park. On September 9, he acknowledged that he had intentionally downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic. The White House response was a pathetic effort to mitigate the fallout from the information contained in the upcoming book by The Washington Post’s veteran journalist Bob Woodward.

      The COVID-19 death toll in the US is just shy of 200,000, from over 6.5 million cases — the highest in the world. That Trump never cared for the welfare and well-being of his fellow countrypeople was amply clear from his policies and actions over these past four years. That he could turn a blind eye to the calamitous effects of the pandemic and lie to the nation about it likens him to a modern-day emperor, mocking the suffering of his subjects, not much different from Nero who fiddled while Rome burned.

      Trump’s bungling response to the pandemic makes him culpable for this exorbitant death toll, which could have been averted had he acted swiftly and decisively, with a plan of action based on scientific findings. Instead of encouraging responsible social behavior from the country, he mocked science with his refusal to wear a mask, by consuming hydroxychloroquine as a shield against the coronavirus and misleading the American public by not only not impressing upon it the gravity of the pandemic but, as we now know, willfully underplaying the dangers of COVID-19. Trump’s callous and reprehensible behavior during the pandemic not only taints his legacy with the unnecessary loss of life, but it also cements his position as the worst president of the country with an insurmountable lead over Andrew Jackson and quite possibly anyone else in the future.

      America is a nation that loves to bookmark in history the wars its presidents spearheaded during their tenure. Lyndon Johnson is remembered for launching his war on crime in 1965, Ronald Reagan for his war on drugs in 1982. Today, both those wars have resulted in more than 2.3 million incarcerated Americans, with a disproportionate amount of them being black and people of color. George W. Bush is identified with the war on terror that he commenced soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

      By contrast, what Trump has managed to do in his four years at America’s helm is wage a full-scale war on humanity. Sadly, Republican politicians have been abetting this war by kowtowing to the president. A vote for Donald Trump this November is an endorsement of his war on humanity and actively lending support to it.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      How Alexei Navalny Created Russia’s Main Opposition Platform

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      On September 2, German authorities stated that Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok group. Since August 22, Navalny has been treated at the Charité university hospital in Berlin, where he was transported from Russia in an induced coma.

      Navalny is best-known for his anti-corruption initiatives, particularly the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is commonly known under its Russian abbreviation FBK. Since its inception in 2011, FBK has evolved into an important independent investigative media outlet funded by over 15,000 recurring donations from Russian citizens. Although Navalny is not allowed on Russian state-run television, FBK’s video investigations have been watched hundreds of million times on Navalny’s YouTube channel.

      In July, Navalny was forced to dissolve FBK after a libel lawsuit filed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a US-sanctioned Russian billionaire accused of interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. Prigozhin is seeking 88 million rubles ($1.4 million) from FBK, Navalny and Lyubov Sobol, FBK’s lawyer and a prominent opposition activist. Despite FBK’s liquidation, its team continued to work as usual, and on August 18-20 was filming a new investigation in Tomsk, where Navalny is believed to have been poisoned.

      Breaking Through the Information Blockade

      Navalny’s anti-corruption crusade began in 2008, when he purchased a small number of shares in Russian publicly-traded oil and gas companies, including the majority state-owned Gazprom and Rosneft, and became an activist shareholder. He started publishing investigations into the opaque operations of these companies on LiveJournal, formerly a popular blogging platform in Russia.

      Launched in 2011, FBK initially published its reports on Navalny’s LiveJournal page. In 2015, it published its first investigative documentary on Navalny’s YouTube channel, previously used for promoting his Moscow mayoral candidacy in 2013. In the ground-breaking documentary, FBK accused Russia’s then-Prosecutor General Yury Chaika and his two sons of large-scale corruption, money laundering and links to organized crime figures.

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      Since then, FBK has regularly published its investigations on YouTube, pointing out the lavish lifestyles of Russian officials and visualizing complex ownership schemes of their businesses and properties. FBK’s videos were particularly appreciated for their humorous presentation, impressive drone footage of luxury properties and high-quality animations. By keeping the content entertaining and accessible while describing complex fraudulent schemes, Navalny managed to expand his follower base to include people from across the country and its social classes.

      In 2017, FBK published its best-known documentary, exposing the alleged corrupt activities of Russia’s then prime minister and former president, Dmitry Medvedev. The video was viewed over 36 million times as of September 2020. Shortly after the release of this investigation, Navalny’s YouTube channel gained one million subscribers, and Navalny announced the launch of a second YouTube channel, Navalny Live, intended for live streaming.

      In June 2017, TIME magazine included Navalny in its list of the 25 most influential people on the internet for “breaking through the Kremlin’s information blockade.” Navalny’s two YouTube channels became an influential alternative to state-run television and a vital source of information for many Russians. By September 2020, the two channels accumulated 4 million and 2 million subscribers, respectively.

      Transparency and Accountability

      FBK is widely credited for its scrupulous work with public records, which is the main source of information for its investigative documentaries. FBK has been actively challenging the common misconception that Russia is an opaque jurisdiction with poor record-keeping. Indeed, Russian authorities collect and publish a wealth of regularly updated data that is readily available free of charge or for a relatively small fee.

      FBK’s investigations are often based on information from Russia’s official land registry and corporate records as well as wealth declarations published by government officials. Based on open source information, in April 2019, FBK concluded that Russia’s longstanding minister of finance, Anton Siluanov, owned a plot of land in the elite Rublevka district outside Moscow and that, taking into account his declared income over the past 10 years, he could not possibly afford it.

      Similarly, FBK discovered that a neighboring plot of land is owned by an anonymous “natural person,” according to the official land registry. FBK claimed that the land is owned by the Russian Deputy Minister of Defence Ruslan Tsalikov; the size of the plot was exactly the same as the plot of land Tsalikov mentioned in his wealth declaration. Once again, FBK concluded that Tsalikov would not have been able to buy land in Rublevka considering his declared earnings. Both the finance and defense ministries confirmed ownership of the land but denied FBK’s allegations of illicit enrichment.

      Despite the overall transparency of the official Russian registries, names of senior public officials from Russia’s military and space sectors, and even their relatives, have been increasingly removed from the land registry filings on unclear legal grounds. For example, in November 2019, FBK stated that the 81-year-old father-in-law of Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency), disappeared from the land registry. His name was substituted by the “natural person” entry. FBK claims that he owns expensive properties on behalf of Rogozin. Rogozin has not responded to FBK’s allegations.

      Various global NGOs and think tanks, including Transparency International, have continuously classified Russia as a country with a high level of corruption. Russian government officials are often involved in illicit enrichment schemes, such as kickbacks, or conceal ownership of businesses and properties through their close associates or offshore shell companies. As demonstrated by FBK’s investigations into Tsalikov and Rogozin’s properties, officials tend to try to hide ownership by erasing their names from the official registries.

      Even though FBK can identify individual cases of illicit enrichment, Russia currently lacks the necessary mechanisms to investigate such allegations. Article 20 of the UN Convention Against Corruption defines illicit enrichment as a “significant increase in the assets of a public official that he or she cannot reasonably explain in relation to his or her lawful income.” While Russia ratified the convention in 2006, it refused to include Article 20. Due to this omission, FBK’s anti-corruption investigations have little to no legal consequences within Russia. Against this backdrop, Navalny has repeatedly claimed that political changes are necessary to end endemic corruption in Russia.

      Smart Voting Against United Russia

      As Russia’s leading opposition figure, Navalny has never concealed that FBK’s investigations are intended as a call for political action. His most recent investigations, including the one filmed in Tomsk, support his political campaign against candidates from the ruling United Russia party on the eve of the regional elections on September 13.

      This campaign is part of the so-called smart voting initiative, which is Navalny’s wider strategy to challenge the protracted rule of President Vladimir Putin and United Russia. The central election commission has refused to register Navalny or any other FBK employee as a candidate in elections since 2013, when Navalny came second in Moscow’s mayoral election with 27% of the vote. To challenge the situation, Navalny’s team used its reach to coordinate opposition voters to strategically and effectively beat United Russia candidates in hundreds of local and regional elections. In practice, this means voting collectively for the strongest non-United Russia candidate in any given district, regardless of his or her political affiliation or personal qualities.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In September last year, smart voting generated impressive results: Nearly half of the elected members of the Moscow city council — 20 of 45 members — had been recommended by the platform. During the campaign, FBK’s investigations into the source of wealth of prominent United Russia members in Moscow proved to be a vital agitation tool, given that Navalny or FBK have no access to popular state-run media outlets. According to a research paper published in March this year by Russian political analysts Ivan Bolshakov and Vladimir Perevalov, Navalny’s smart voting, on average, improved the results of opposition candidates by 5.6% in last September’s Moscow city council elections. For instance, FBK accused Andrey Metelsky, United Russia’s branch head in Moscow, of concealing his multimillion-dollar business empire by controlling it through his 75-year-old mother. Following the 2019 campaign, Metelsky lost his district to a candidate suggested by Navalny’s smart voting. Prior to that, Metelsky had continuously held office since 2001.

      According to the Charité hospital, on September 8, Navalny has been taken out of an induced coma and is reported to be responding to speech. His recovery will probably take a long time, and long-term after-effects cannot be ruled out. But it is worth noting that Navalny’s projects seem to be working smoothly even in his absence: The latest investigation, released on September 9, has already garnered nearly 3 million views. Acting under constant pressure from Russian authorities, Navalny and FBK focused on establishing autonomous operations that do not overly rely on any single person.

      On the eve of the 2019 elections, Navalny spent a month in jail for violating Russia’s strict protest laws, while his allies continued to shoot FBK documentaries and campaigned for smart voting. The smart voting platform has already provided its recommendations for the upcoming local and regional elections scheduled for September 13 and intends to do so for the 2021 state Duma elections.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Donald Trump’s War With the Troops

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      My father enlisted in the Army to fight in World War II. He was 19 or 20 years old, and he wanted to defeat the Nazis. He was one of a million other young Americans to sign up that year. But my father was also a fun-loving guy who played clarinet in a jazz band and liked to party. Instead of reporting for duty, he went AWOL on a bender. When he showed up late at the military base, he was assigned to the kitchen patrol to peel potatoes. As a result, he stayed behind when his unit shipped out. According to my father’s version of events, that entire unit perished somewhere in the Pacific.

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      From then on, my father did everything he could to avoid getting sent overseas. He was part of a group of radiomen who continually failed their final test. Spending the entire war stateside in a succession of Army bases, he developed a distinctly anti-war perspective. Together with my mother, whom he met at an Army dance, he passed that philosophy onto his children.

      Stupid War

      I shudder to think that I have any overlap with US President Donald Trump. But we both inherited our discomfort with the military from our fathers. Fred Trump preferred to focus on the business of making money. My father had his close brush with war, and it changed his life.

      Many other members of the Greatest Generation had a similar change of heart as my father. Like every preceding generation, they experienced the horrors of combat and suffered trauma for much of their postwar lives. Some learned that the other side, too, used the language of “sacrifice” to push young men into battle and persuade families on the home front to accept economic austerity. Some even came to agree with Smedley Butler, the retired Marine Corps major general who wrote, in 1935, that “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”

      Donald Trump knows a racket when he sees one. Growing up wealthy and white, Trump saw no reason to sacrifice limb or life to serve his country. The military was a lousy career for a would-be billionaire who had his own scams to foist on the American public. As my father discovered, the military was often a career-ender, particularly during wartime. Lots of other men of Trump’s generation avoided the military. Joe Biden received five deferments, and so did Dick Cheney. Bernie Sanders applied for conscientious objector status and then aged out of the draft. Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton — they all somehow skipped the Vietnam War.

      Unlike these men, however, Trump said aloud what most of them must have been thinking — that the United States was involved in a “stupid war” in Vietnam. Trump has gone much further by disparaging military service his entire life. Trump’s anti-military remarks reported in a recent article in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg, “Trump Calls Americans Who Died in War ‘Losers,’” are no surprise. Because they are blunter than even what the president blurts in public, the alleged remarks are causing a larger than usual frisson of schadenfreude among anti-Trumpers, and I confess to my own delight at the frenzy of denials coming from the White House.

      Perhaps The Atlantic article will subtract just enough supporters from Trump’s side to ensure his defeat in November. Military support for the president was already slipping before the publication of the article: Trump had a 20% lead over Hillary Clinton in active-duty support in 2016, but Joe Biden now has the edge of 4% in this critical demographic. The military remains the most trusted institution in American society. It’s political suicide to diss the troops.

      Trump’s comments are not going to change the way Americans think about war. He has neither the war record nor the gravitas of a Smedley Butler. But with the coronavirus pandemic is racking up more casualties on the home front than the United States lost in combat during World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, America is perhaps at a watershed moment when it comes to the meaning of sacrifice.

      Trump’s Approach to War

      Americans are tired of war. That was one element of Trump’s support in 2016. He criticized America’s “endless wars,” promised to bring US soldiers home and decried the corruption of the military-industrial complex. Aside from some token reduction of troops from Afghanistan and Syria and the closure of a US base in Germany, Trump has not honored his promises. He has pumped money into the military-industrial complex and brought its top people into his administration, like Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist. Nor has Trump fundamentally altered US military footprint in the world.

      True, Congress and the Pentagon have blocked some of Trump’s plans. But the real problem has been Trump’s own ambivalence. The man might not like soldiers or the military more generally. But he likes power and force. He likes to give orders to all the generals he has appointed as advisers. Above all, Trump likes to break things. If your intention is to smash a china shop, the Pentagon is just the bull you need.

      Remember, this is the guy who promised to “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State. He fulfilled that promise, killing a large number of citizens in the process. Trump also refused to stop helping Saudi Arabia do the same to Yemen. Last year, he vetoed a bipartisan congressional effort to withdraw US assistance for a war that has pulverized one of the poorest countries in the world. In his statement, Trump said, “This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      It’s difficult to imagine that an effort to end a war would endanger the lives of “brave service members.” But read another way — that weakening Trump’s power endangers American citizens and soldiers — the sentence perfectly encapsulates the president’s me-first mentality.

      Trump might have an aversion to putting US boots on foreign soil, but he sure loves waging war from the air. In his first two years, Trump ordered 238 drone strikes — compared to the 186 strikes that Obama launched in his first two years. And he has made it more difficult to find out how many people have died in those strikes. Yet, as The Intercept reports, intrepid organizations continue to try to determine how often the administration conducts its aerial missions: “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the U.S. carried out about 1,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen in 2016 — that is, strikes by both drones and manned aircraft. So far in 2019, they believe that the U.S. has conducted 5,425 airstrikes, five times as many. In the month of September, the U.S. upped the pace to almost 40 airstrikes per day.”

      Then there are the wars that Trump is threatening to unleash. He has continually upped the ante in the conflict with Iran, most recently attempting to trigger “snapback” sanctions that would doom the nuclear deal once and for all. Allies and adversaries alike rejected the US gambit. Meanwhile, even as he adds yet another round of sanctions against Chinese firms, Trump is pushing the US military to confront China in its own backyard by increasing U2 overflights and “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea.

      Lest you think the war on terror has ended in other parts of the world, the US Africa Command continues to conduct operations across the continent. As Nick Turse, Sam Mednick and Amanda Sperber report in the Mail & Guardian:

      “In 2019, U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 22 African countries: Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Côte D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Tanzania, and Tunisia.

      This accounts for a significant proportion of U.S. Special Operations forces’ global activity: more than 14 percent of U.S. commandos deployed overseas in 2019 were sent to Africa, the largest percentage of any region in the world except for the greater Middle East.”
      So, let’s put to rest (once again) the notion that Donald Trump is interested in restraining the military. In addition to pumping the Pentagon full of cash, he has ensured that it can conduct its actual war-fighting with as much flexibility and in as many places as possible.

      Post-Trump Sacrifice

      Donald Trump has devoted his life to hedonism and the accumulation of personal power. His dismissal of military service is actually the least of his sins. He doesn’t believe in sacrificing anything for others. He entered politics purely as a vehicle for his own self-aggrandizement. But the alternative to Trump is not the glorification of military service. War is stupid. Devoting one’s life to extinguishing the lives of others is not the answer the world needs at this time of pandemic and climate catastrophe.

      Coming out of the Trump era (I hope), it’s difficult to imagine Americans making a collective sacrifice for anything when even the mandatory wearing of masks is seen by some as too much of an abridgment of individual liberty.

      Imagine asking gun-owning Americans to hand in their weapons, en masse, in order to make the country a safer place. Imagine asking wealthier Americans to tighten their belts in order to rebuild the economy along more equitable lines. Imagine asking Americans to give up their non-electric cars, their jobs in the dirty-energy sector or their frequent airline travel to help save the world from climate catastrophe.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At the same time, the pandemic has brought mutual aid to the foreground. In the absence of coordinated responses from states, people have banded together to help their friends, neighbors and communities. This is all impressive, but it’s a stopgap, not a strategy. The problems facing the world can’t just be solved by individuals volunteering their time and energy. Indeed, the notion of voluntary service, like enlisting to fight in World War II, is antiquated. Ultimately it is as fragile a concept as the voluntary compliance expected of the world’s nations in the Paris Climate Agreement.

      Imagine if traffic were organized on the basis of mutual aid and volunteerism. There would be a few well-run intersections. The rest would be chaos and accidents. Traffic on the ground, on the water and up in the air requires states to establish the rules of the road and punish non-compliance. That is what is necessary, post-Trump. US society desperately needs fair, equitable rules of the road. And scofflaws have to be punished.

      The next administration needs to reestablish the rule of law in America, cracking down on vigilante violence, police violence and executive-branch violence. I can’t think of a better place to begin than by putting the Scofflaw-in-Chief on trial for all of his law-breaking. A long prison sentence would be a fitting cap to Trump’s career.

      But poetic justice dictates a different punishment. After a lifetime of selfishness, Trump should be sentenced to a very long period of community service. Wouldn’t you like to see the former president picking up trash by the side of the road for the rest of his life?

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Alternate Reality Is All the Rage in Election Time America

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      It should be obvious by now that “reality” has Americans very confused. This is nothing new. This happened when the word “reality” somehow became a synonym for fantasy, delusion, illusion and fake. I am not sure when this happened in the American lexicon, but I am sure that there is next to nothing real about any “reality” show. This observation becomes more worthy of note each day as “reality” is manipulated to feed fantasy narratives.

      First, there were “alternative facts.” Now, the oxymoronic notion of “alternate reality” is exploding its way into the vernacular. There used to be something called “parallel universe” that seemed to sum up the world inhabited by delusional people, particularly during delusional episodes. “Alternate reality” somehow seems more dangerous.

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      What we are witnessing in America at the moment is nothing short of the normalization of fantasy, delusion, illusion and fakery as a substitute for facts, truth and content in public discourse. Once this happens to a society, the negative impact on public policy cannot be overstated. Historic examples are everywhere, but just take a moment to reflect on the rise of Nazism in Germany and the destructive pathology of McCarthyism in mid-20th-century America. Those examples and the toxins they injected into the body politic still resonate.

      The persistence of white supremacy in America and ethnic purity in Europe is the spawn of one earlier “alternate reality.” The highly charged message that leftists and Marxists and socialists are burrowing into every corner of American life is the grotesque spawn from the other earlier “alternate reality.”

      A Critical Time

      So, at this critical juncture in America’s political journey, there should be no tolerance for any normalization of any “alternate reality.” Yet everywhere one looks, words are being reworked to create the space in which fantasy and delusion can reign supreme. Just two examples should be enough to make this point.

      First, when did an assault rifle become a “long gun”? Just within the last few weeks, a 17-year-old in Wisconsin murdered two protesters with an assault rifle — not a long gun or a short gun, an assault rifle. Second, when did “walked back” enter the vocabulary to describe someone trying to correct blatant falsehoods purposefully uttered?

      Within the same few weeks, and even more of a threat to public safety, the current commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration “walked back” a blatant public lie about the efficacy of a therapeutic treatment for COVID-19 offered originally to please Trump while knowingly posing a threat to the rest of us.  “Walked back” sounds like the first step on a road to redemption for some minor miscue, not an effort to excuse a purposeful falsehood that never should have been uttered in the first place.

      With a presidential election looming, what passes for the responsible media in America now features more “fact checks” than facts. Now, with “alternate reality” apparently all the rage, the media have cleverly added “reality checks” to their arsenal.

      It is long past the time when anyone should believe that the nation can be saved by tortured linguistics. It is time for a new and long overdue reverence for facts to simply overwhelm the untrue and delusional that pollute our public discourse. It is time for direct and specific language that may make some people uncomfortable. And it is surely time to stop trying to save the sensibilities of those who wallow in their own “reality.”

      Trump is a venal and pathological liar, and those who lie for him are at best dangerous collaborators. So, enough pretending it might be something else, hoping that if enough apologists get airtime, fiction will morph into truth. For those who are made uncomfortable by these uncomfortable truths, it is time to suck it up, admit that you have been conned and make those who took advantage of your ignorance pay a price for the harm that they and you have caused the nation.

      Discomfort Is Everywhere

      These are harsh words, and they are not written with kindness at their core. They are written at a time when fear and anxiety are being peddled by Trump, the Republican Party and all those smarmy people in their orbit. The rest of us are the losers, big time. The list is long but should not need to go any further than the almost 200,000 dead souls sacrificed in the American coronavirus pandemic at an altar of incompetence, narcissism and mendacity.

      Americans have reached a point where discomfort is everywhere, but is it enough discomfort to act individually and collectively to confront the unfolding threat of another four years of the Trump scourge and Republican Party complicity? Anyone who thinks that some cathartic unity will emerge from all of this isn’t paying much attention. Rather, all the roads of our discontent must merge at this time to meet the singular threat.

      It is for sure that if the effort is successful, some of those same roads will diverge again. But then, if our institutions hold, there will be new paths to progress and a much clearer picture of the reality of today’s America and the factual foundation that must inform this place and time. In that reality, some of us will again be able to dream of transformational change.

      But make no mistake. If the nation does not collectively act now to rid itself of the rot at its core, the road to the national discomfort required for transformational change will get even darker.

      *[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Deconstructing the Powerful and Persistent Russiagate Meme

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      The frontier between legitimate political analysis and fake news in the US has never been easy to draw. Politicians and polemicists have attempted to impose the idea that only established corporate networks can be trusted to steer clear of fake news. Content on topics they consciously neglect to cover is written off as fake news.  

      Conversely, any idea, incident or minor fact — whether real or not — that appears to comfort officially approved talking points will easily be “confirmed” and employed as evidence to support the spoken or unspoken agenda of “respectable” media. Last week, American journalist Glenn Greenwald provided recent examples of the flagrant abuse of the notion of confirmation.

      As storytellers, politicians and media presenters prefer to suggest simple links between real (and sometimes imaginary) effects and their probable causes. They believe that readers and listeners prefer simple narratives that confirm existing beliefs. This is a founding principle of the culture of hyperreality that pervades political news in the US.

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      The public has begun to react. Increasingly, Americans realize that their news has become profoundly unreliable. A Pew survey published on August 31 revealed that 80% of Americans feel that the news is influenced by corporate and financial interests. Unfortunately, they lack the means and possibly also the curiosity to understand how that influence works.

      Russiagate, a prime example of news pushed by the Democrats and “designed” by the corporate media four years ago, is still in the headlines. Reduced to its simplest form — a correspondence of cause and effect — the message is patently absurd. It requires maintaining the belief that so long as the Russian government has access to the internet, elections in the US will never be able to produce reliable results. Because both the Russian government and the internet will continue to exist for decades to come, democracy in the US is officially dead.

      Some politicians, mainly Democrats, and their allied media outlets have an interest in promoting this belief. The New York Times has doggedly maintained a strategy of regularly presenting new evidence of activity by Russians with the aim of demonizing Russia as the unique source of content designed to undermine US democracy while conveniently ignoring all the others, including pervasive domestic tampering.

      The most recent example appears in an article with the title, “Russians Again Targeting Americans With Disinformation, Facebook and Twitter Say.” Its authors, Sheera Frenkel and Julian E. Barnes, have found new evidence that “in April, Facebook removed a Russian-backed operation in Ghana and Nigeria that was targeting Americans with divisive content.” Like Satan himself, Russia is everywhere.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Divisive content:

      Any news item that calls into question the unparalleled goodness of the US political and economic system promoted by its two major political parties and suggests that it may be legitimate to contest the status quo

      Contextual Note

      No rational being would doubt any of the following isolated facts:

      The internet is a global platform for communication and exchange
      People all over the world use internet tools called social media, especially Facebook and Twitter
      These two dominant platforms are US corporations
      Social media platforms thrive on participation from every corner of the globe
      The dominant platforms work within the tradition that sees freedom of expression as a political right derived from the US Constitution
      Freedom of expression opens the door to conspiracy theories, propaganda, fake news stories, deepfakes, doxing, stalking, cyberbullying, revenge porn, identity theft and other antisocial or criminal activities in the land of opportunity known as cyberspace
      None of the facts cited above is controversial or even debatable. But there are subtler ones that are often hidden from observers’ attention. For example, this one never mentioned by the media: The people of all other nations, including Russians, are interested in US politics not just because they are curious about how another population manages its affairs, but also because those affairs have a dramatic impact on their own lives.

      Embed from Getty Images

      American media and Democratic politicians appear to consider foreign interest in US politics a violation of America’s political space. They are right to condemn any action that interferes directly with electoral processes. But using the communication tools available to all is not interference. Americans should be the first to recognize these forms of expression as examples of a modern skillset created and promoted by their own culture: marketing. It’s a science in which anything that falls short of breaking specific laws is legitimate.

      Russian political leaders can express themselves in a variety of ways. So can the British, the Israelis, the Saudis or indeed any nation that cultivates explicit or subliminal marketing. Those leaders can use official government communication channels to proclaim policy and vision. They can pay for lobbyists in Washington. They can (and definitely do) use their intelligence networks to spread messages using legitimate and devious means. They can also simply encourage enterprising private citizens to further their explicit or implicit aims.

      Random citizens of all nationalities — moved either by curiosity, personal concern, financial interest or loyalty to a government they identify with — can do the same thing. Individual Americans have done so in Hong Kong without necessarily being piloted by the CIA. This inevitably happens so long as freedom is not totally suppressed.

      Those who represent established interests may deem this “divisive.” But it cannot reasonably be called manipulation of democracy or interference in electoral processes. The current global system of the internet is dominated by impressively wealthy private interests whose strategy is to encourage and reward any form of successful influence. The worm is at the core of the apple, not on its surface.

      The Times article demonstrates the absurdity of its Russiagate campaign. Frenkel and Barnes write: “Researchers are also concerned about homegrown disinformation campaigns, and the latest Russian effort went to some lengths to appear like it was made in the United States. In addition to hiring American journalists and encouraging them to write in their own voices, the Peace Data website mixed pop culture, politics and activism to appeal to a young audience.”

      The evil Russians are simply paying talented Americans banished from the mainstream by corporate money to speak in total sincerity. What could be more American? The Supreme Court established that “money is speech.” Russiagate is a predictable consequence of a system designed to reward anyone with cash to pay for content.

      Historical Note

      The media have begun constructing their preferred history of the latest Russian felon, a website called Peace Data. Defending the corporate monopoly on the news, The New York Times describes Peace Data as an example of “a more covert and potentially dangerous effort by Moscow” that uses “allies and operatives to place articles, including disinformation, into various fringe websites.”

      The Times cites the testimony of one of Peace Data’s American authors, who explains that the website simply asked him to express his views as someone who “had frequently challenged whether Mr. [Joe] Biden represented the progressive values of the Democratic Party.” Can allowing Americans to express themselves be called manipulating electoral processes?

      The funding of the website has been traced to Russia. But if the Russians didn’t create or even significantly edit the content, the fact that it is “divisive” simply reflects real divisions within US society. The source of division is none other than Biden’s policies, which many Americans banned from the corporate media happen to disagree with.

      It should be noted that any publication is likely to run some form of disinformation. The Times itself does so consistently, never more egregiously than in its push to invade Iraq in 2003. Its Russiagate coverage for the past four years has simply maintained a longstanding tradition.

      The seasoned journalist Joe Lauria deconstructs the Peace Data story in an article for Consortium News. Describing a website that “failed to gain significant traction,” he scoffs at “what the FBI calls a threat to American democracy.” In contrast, The Daily Beast decided to play the Russiagate game. Its article with the title, “She Was Tricked by Russian Trolls—and It Derailed Her Life” tells the story of a Peace Data author, Jacinda Chan. Only at the end of the piece do we learn that the supposed victim, a talented disabled woman, not only bears no grudge but rejects the Russiagate paranoia The Daily Beast is promoting: “To this day, Chan says she still doesn’t believe Facebook and the FBI’s investigations that show Peace Data was a front for Russia’s troll factory.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What Can the Gulf States Learn from the Belarus Crisis?

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      It might come as a surprise that the Gulf states have more than a passing interest in events in Belarus. Beyond growing economic ties, the political drama provides valuable lessons for the region’s monarchies and their efforts to maintain standards of living for their citizens without compromising power and influence. The Belarus crisis also offers useful pointers for Gulf states in their dealings with Russia.

      Over the past three decades, Belarusian domestic politics has been defined by its predictability. Despite the emergence of opposition candidates around election time, President Alexander Lukashenko’s grip on power was such that there was only one outcome. Yet, as with so much of 2020, life as Belarusians know it has been turned on its head.

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      While the veracity of past elections has been called into question, a mixture of political complacency and COVID-19-related turmoil has breathed new life into Belarus’ opposition movement. Beyond disputing Lukashenko’s winning margin in July’s poll, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Belarusians have taken to the streets calling for change. Mostly born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this generation does not regard the stability offered by Lukashenko as an asset. As they see it, state control of Belarus’ economy and society is incompatible with their aspirations.

      Lukashenko’s response to what has effectively become a matter of life and death for his regime has fluctuated between incoherency and heavy-handedness. The president’s disappearance from the public gaze at the start of the unrest, coupled with the disproportionate use of force against demonstrators, suggests that he did not seriously consider the possibility of mass protests. Continued police brutality and opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s flight into exile make it difficult to use “external forces” as justification for the crackdown.

      “Family” Comes First

      Much like Belarus, the Gulf states have relatively young populations, particularly Saudi Arabia, where over two-thirds of citizens are under the age of 35. Many have benefited from access to higher education systems that have grown exponentially since the early 2000s, both in terms of state and private universities. With this in mind, the region’s political elites can use the lack of meaningful opportunities for so many Belarusians to underscore the importance of their development plans and national visions.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Designed to meet the specific needs of Gulf countries, these strategies nevertheless have several objectives in common. In an effort to counter faltering prices and technological obsolescence, the region is attempting to diversify its dependence on oil and gas revenues by facilitating high-knowledge-content jobs in different industrial sectors. Doing so also requires the greater incorporation of indigenous populations into national workforces at the expense of expatriate workers. In this respect, Kuwait’s plans to drastically reduce its migrant population offers a glimpse into the future shape of the Gulf’s workplaces. While never explicitly mentioned in strategic documents, the Gulf states anticipate that encouraging their own populations’ development will offset opportunities for the type of political dissent that’s currently gripping Belarus and which rocked Bahrain almost a decade ago.

      The Gulf’s rulers have no appetite for an Arab Spring 2.0, a scenario that some warn is a distinct possibility thanks to COVID-19. Accordingly, local development opportunities will continue to be encouraged during these chastened times. When it comes to wider political participation, Kuwait will remain something of an outlier for the foreseeable future.

      The Gulf states’ responses to COVID-19 also merit consideration. Once dismissed by Lukashenko as an ailment that can be treated with saunas and vodka, Belarus was among the last in Europe to enact lockdown measures. While it remains to be seen what impact ongoing protests will have on infection rates, a spike in cases could be used by Gulf states to justify their no-nonsense approaches to tackling the virus. Qatar, for example, was one of the first to completely lock down all but the most essential public services. The country’s return to normal rests on the public’s strict compliance with a four-phase reopening plan.

      Don’t Annoy Next Door

      International reaction to the political crisis in Belarus has so far been muted, with presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and China’s Xi Jinping leading the congratulations for Lukashenko’s re-election. For its part, the European Union’s response has been cautiously led by the likes of Lithuania and Poland. Their approach reflects two important points. First, the protests are highly internalized and not about pivoting Belarus further East or West. Second, direct support for the opposition risks a Ukraine-type scenario whereby Moscow directly intervenes to safeguard its interests.

      Point two is of particular relevance to the Gulf states, whose economic ties with one of Russia’s closest allies continue to grow. Cooperation between Belarus and the United Arab Emirates is a case in point. According to government statistics, the volume of trade between both countries amounted to $121 million in 2019, up from $89.6 million the previous year. Minsk has also made overtures to Oman regarding joint manufacturing opportunities and the re-export of products to neighboring markets.

      Saudi Arabia undoubtedly has the most to lose from antagonizing Russia in its own backyard. Last April, the kingdom sold 80,000 tons of crude oil to Belarus. This purchase, first of its kind, not only reflects Minsk’s determination to lessen its reliance on Russian supplies, but also happened against the backdrop of faltering demand and an oil price war between Moscow and Riyadh. Since then, both sides have brokered a fragile peace designed in part to ensure that OPEC+ members respect industry-saving production cuts.

      Accordingly, the “softly, softly” approach currently being employed by the EU’s eastern flank provides a blueprint for how the Gulf states should continue to manage their responses to the Belarus crisis. Not only does it offer the best chance of maintaining economic relations irrespective of the final outcome, but it also keeps regional oil supplies in still uncharted waters at a time of great uncertainty in global markets. Antagonizing Russia with even the most tacit support for Belarus is, put simply, too risky a proposition.

      Belarus’ unfolding crisis is ultimately about replacing an unmovable political leader and system that have dominated the country for decades. In a region defined by its own version of long-term political stability, a similar scenario among Gulf states is unpalatable. Fortunately, the region still has resources at its disposal to prevent this from happening and protect much-needed economic victories in new markets. While always important, the Gulf’s indigenous populations are increasingly being reconfigured as the most essential features of the region’s future prosperity and stability.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Gulf State Analytics.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The UAE and Israel: Not So Big a Deal

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      The Abraham Accord is a grand title well in keeping with the Trump presidency’s taste for overstatement and misdirection. But the expectation that other Arab states would fall into line with the United Arab Emirates and quickly normalize relations with Israel has fallen well short of the mark. Jared Kushner’s shortcomings as a self-appointed diplomat extraordinaire solving one of the world’s most intractable conflicts were on full display in an interview he gave to The National after arriving in Abu Dhabi aboard El Al flight 971, the first-ever commercial flight to a Gulf state from Israel.

      The president’s son-in-law called the deal an “historic breakthrough” that augured well for peace. Already sensing, perhaps, that the expected avalanche of Arab states moving to normalize relations was not happening as anticipated he nonetheless enthused: “So, not just in the Middle East, are now countries who weren’t thinking of normalising relations with Israel, thinking of forming a relationship and doing things they wouldn’t have thought to do a couple of weeks ago.”

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      Kushner also claimed: “There’s a lot of envy in the region that the United Arab Emirates took this step and we now have access to Israeli agriculture technology, security business. The opportunity in tourism. And so a lot of people would like to follow that now.”

      Friends of Convenience

      Parsing those two statements, does Kushner really think that it was only “a couple of weeks ago” that MENA countries were thinking of their relations with Israel? And does he think that describing those who have not immediately jumped aboard as displaying “a lot of envy” is the way to get them to do so? Kushner displays arrogance, ignorance and the patronizing attitude with which the Trump White House views Arabs: easily exploitable as malleable friends of convenience and eager purchasers of weapons.

      US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already come away empty-handed from Bahrain and Oman, two Gulf Cooperation Council states that were expected, given the precarious shape of their finances, to follow immediately in the footsteps of the UAE. He also struck out in Sudan. The Saudis had allowed the El Al flight to cross their territory — another first — but despite Kushner meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on his way back from Abu Dhabi, they were not rushing to join the historic breakthrough either.

      Indeed, abandoning the Palestinians so utterly on a thin promise from Benjamin Netanyahu to suspend (note: not end) West Bank annexation is proving too distasteful for many Arab leaders to stomach, even though  some of them have been prepared privately to go along with Kushner’s concoction of a so-called deal of the century designed to give the Israelis virtually everything they want while denying the Palestinians a viable, territorially contiguous and independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

      Part of the deal with the Emiratis was supposed to be the delivery of F-35 fighter jets, long sought after by Mohammed bin Zayed, the Abu Dhabi crown prince, deputy supreme commander of the armed forces and de facto UAE ruler. Much to his chagrin, Israel invoked what is known as its qualitative military edge (QME). The QME is designed to ensure that whatever weaponry the US sells to Arab states, none of it will challenge Israel’s military supremacy. The Israelis have two combat-ready squadrons of F-35s.

      And while Kushner and Israel made much of the deal signifying a common front against the Iranian threat, it is a simple fact that despite sanctions, the UAE, and Dubai in particular, do a lot of business with the Islamic Republic of Iran and has done so for decades. Trump’s “maximum pressure” tactics have not altered in any significant way that hard reality.

      Big Gestures

      Amongst other big gestures, Kushner and the Israelis hope to bring Mohammed bin Zayed to Washington in September to sign the deal and to celebrate what he sees — and Trump will claim — as history in the making. With the election heading into its final weeks, it will be sold as a diplomatic triumph for the president, intended to appeal to his evangelical base, hence the overblown title. Whether the Abu Dhabi crown prince will go along with such a blatant electioneering ploy remains to be seen.

      The deal does deserve to be acknowledged as significant if only because a third Arab state, an increasingly powerful and influential one, joins Egypt and Jordan in recognizing Israel. That is a breakthrough. Where Kushner has stumbled is in trying to hype it and sell it as something other than what it is. The Emiratis and the Israelis have been doing business for many years, but it has been done sub rosa. Normalization acknowledges that situation. And at a time when COVID-19 is laying waste to the global economy, it does herald economic benefits for both countries with deals in defense, medicine, agriculture, tourism and technology being mooted.

      Mohammed bin Zayed, though smarting at the nixing of the F-35 deal, can still lay claim to gaining much-added influence and stature in Washington, a situation that is not likely to change should Joe Biden win the presidency. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the wins are less clear cut. The settler movement, already outraged at his failure to deliver on annexation by July 1, may decide that what they see as his latest and largest betrayal — the suspension of West Bank annexation — is sufficient grounds to bring him down and force another election, one that, should he lose, will make him ever more vulnerable to a court case that could lead to conviction and jail for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

      *[Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Mauritania recognized Israel, whereas it froze diplomatic relations in 2009.]

      *[This article was originally published by Arab Digest.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More