Donald Trump is engaged in one of the biggest battles of his career. After spending millions turning the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool ‘flag day blue’, Trump is combatting a tenacious opponent that threatens to mar his upcoming 4 July celebrations. US National Park service workers spent much of yesterday on a desperate mission – dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool to eliminate the ghastly green clumps of algae that have colonised it.
Trump is awash in a sea of troubles. His name has been removed by court order from the Kennedy Center. His White House ballroom is facing cost overruns amounting to several hundred million dollars. But his most conspicuous setback has come with the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Iran, which the White House refuses to release but says will be signed on Friday in Switzerland.
Netanyahu’s affections are being spurned by Trump
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney stated yesterday on CNN that the MoU is a ‘game changer’. It certainly represents a change for Trump. After declaring that he was intent on ‘unconditional surrender’, Trump has abandoned his earlier talk about regime change in Tehran. Instead, he is embracing Iran and its leadership. ‘I never cared about regime change,’ he announced yesterday. ‘We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.’
The MoU contains abundant goodies for Iran. A $300 billion (£223 billion) reconstruction fund. The immediate lifting of sanctions on oil sales. No interference in internal affairs. A vague promise not to embark upon nuclear weapons. The only thing missing is the announcement of the return of the American embassy in Tehran and a state visit by Trump. But from a president who claimed that ‘we fell in love’ when referring to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a fresh romance might not seem improbable.
The conservatives who originally exhorted Trump to embark upon regime change are lashing out at him. They are aggrieved that the President has signed onto an agreement that is even less stringent than the dreaded Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which neutralised the Iranian nuclear programme. The conservatives who agitated against Obama’s agreement as a new Munich have been hoist by their own petard.
Now John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, is accusing Trump of ‘chickening out’. Appearing on a podcast with Megyn Kelly, Vice President J.D. Vance retorted that the neocons are ‘proposing an endless conflict. They want this to go on until every bomb has dropped’.
It’s no secret that Vance was never enthusiastic about going to war in the first place. His lack of enthusiasm places him in an older tradition on the American political right, one that views any foreign intervention with more than a pinch of scepticism. What’s more, the GOP has never been that friendly to Israel. Starting in the 1970s, the influx of Christian evangelicals changed that. But the GOP is reverting to form under Trump and Vance. A recent Pew poll revealed that 57 per cent of Republicans under the age of 50 have a negative view of Israel and its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
When I asked Curt Mills, the executive editor of the American Conservative, whether Trump and Vance were waving hasta la vista to Israel, he stated that:
Podhoretz had his best political day in at least a decade today: the sitting vice president said he vaguely mattered. But there are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want and the other is getting it. We’re seeing the consequences for the Iran hawks of the first scenario.
We are indeed. Netanyahu dissed the Democrats and plighted his troth to Trump and the Republican party. Now his affections are being spurned by Trump. The US President went out of his way to disparage Netanyahu, alleging that he had overdone it in bombing Lebanon on Wednesday. ‘Without the US, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel because no other President was willing to do what I did,’ Trump said.
The only country he seems to admire is Russia. At the G7 summit in France, Trump bragged that America isn’t aiding Ukraine and lamented that Russia had been expelled from the G8. But Ukraine appears as though it does have the cards to prevail against Russia. By contrast, Trump, the self-described ‘very stable genius’, has been forced to fold his hand in the Middle East.
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