American foreign policy

Donald Trump has begun the process of banning the Muslim Brotherhood. The President asked his officials last week to investigate whether certain chapters of the group should be classed as foreign terrorist organizations, which would result in economic and travel sanctions. Some are portraying this as a reckless lurch into Islamophobia. In fact, it is overdue by at least a decade. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a benign religious association. It is a disciplined ideological movement with a century-long record of exploiting political systems. Its explicit objective is to work towards the establishment of a global caliphate – only by gradualist means, rather than the reckless confrontation and brutality favored by its distant offshoot, ISIS.

Thanksgiving weekend ends on Sunday, and still there’s no peace in Ukraine. Donald Trump’s latest attempt to end the war – his 28-point plan – began to fall apart from the moment it mysteriously leaked to various international news outfits last week. As that story landed, Reuters broke some other news: Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, would stand down in January. Kellogg, who represents the more ardently pro-Ukrainian faction of the administration, had clashed repeatedly with Trump’s peace envoy Steve Witkoff, who has been engaging in friendly dialogue with Moscow for most of the year. His departure seemed linked to the fact that Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the US Army and an ally of J.D.

The contrast could hardly have been starker. As Donald Trump palled around with Mohammed bin Salman in the newly gilded Oval Office, Congress was voting on a transparency act that would further expose Jeffrey Epstein’s grave misdeeds. Trump, who had worked overtime to try and quash the vote, was in his element with the Saudi crown prince. Transparency? Not a bit of it. Trump proclaimed that the crown prince “knew nothing” about the death of Jamal Khashoggi who was, after all, “extremely controversial,” the term that he often deploys to describe anyone he dislikes or finds nettlesome.  The hero, or, to put it more precisely, heroine, of the day was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is a profile in courage.

Donald Trump’s meeting with President Xi was the standout moment of this month’s Asia-Pacific leaders’ summit in South Korea. Yet almost as much attention focused on the rumors that Trump’s gaze had turned once again to North Korea. Addressing suggestions he would meet Kim, the President told reporters, "I’d be open 100 percent. I get along very well with Kim Jong-un." A meeting never materialized, but speculation – and tension – has only grown since.  Days after Trump’s departure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived as part of his own tour of Asia. In Seoul, he became the first defence secretary in nearly eight years to visit Panmunjeom, the border village within the Joint Security Area (JSA) of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

President Trump is being misled into a regime-change war close to home. Few Americans nowadays find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention that overthrew Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Regimes were successfully changed both times, but what came after the dictators’ downfall was civil war, regional instability and mass-migration flows that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbors. Now the Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolás Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. That will predictably do to the Americas – including the US – what the War on Terror did to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Why would Donald Trump make such a mistake?

As President Trump sets off on his East Asian tour, all eyes will be on the bilateral summits that the US president will hold. After all, Trump has made no secret of his preference for tête-à-têtes over multilateralism. With a meeting with Xi Jinping scheduled in South Korea, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, the question of whether Trump will meet Little Rocket Man is unsurprisingly pervading, not least given how few details have been revealed as to Trump’s agenda. Although such a meeting, whether at the Demilitarized Zone or otherwise, seems unlikely at a time when US-North Korea relations are poor, nothing can be ruled out. Nevertheless, whilst the first Trump administration taught the world to expect the unexpected, Trump 2.

To deal with big problems, the second presidency of Donald Trump adopts a three-step approach. First, the declaration of authority: in this case, the designation announced in February of multiple Mexican and South American cartels as international terror organizations, opening up new avenues for legal, intelligence and potential military responses. Next, eye-popping kinetic action: this came with SOUTHCOM’s deployment in August of eight warships to the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, including three Aegis guided-missile destroyers parked off the coast of Venezuela along with a landing dock, amphibious assault ships and a fast-attack nuclear submarine.

No, President Trump wasn’t referring to Russian president Vladimir Putin when he talked at a White House luncheon today about a “stupid guy” and a “knucklehead.” But he did make it clear that his long-standing bromance with the Kremlin’s big cheese has turned out to be unrequited, much to his distress.   Trump lamented that Putin’s talk about peace was so much rodomontade, amounting to more than a “nice phone call” followed by a bunch of missiles lobbed at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. It was Melania, he said, who had noted to him the inconsistency between Putin’s words and deeds. Perhaps Melania, more than anyone else, injected some iron into Trump’s previously anemic posture towards Moscow.

So much for the contention that President Donald Trump always chickens out. Trump has done what George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden contemplated but never executed: bombing Iran's main nuclear sites with a combination of bunker busters and Tomahawk cruise missiles.  In his brief White House address on Saturday night, Trump exuded confidence, stating that the Iranian nuclear program had been "obliterated." But he made it clear that he is prepared to up the ante, pledging that if Iran doesn't agree to a peace deal, then the bombing campaign will be expanded. Trump said that the US “will go to those other targets with precision, speed and skill." America is now at war with Iran. Already Trump's MAGA followers are (largely) hailing his audacious decision.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty told Alice scornfully, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. The question is which is to be master – that’s all.” This is an important angle to understanding that America First is whatever Donald Trump says it is, at the time that he says it. His declaration that he is the master of the term, and defines it according to what he sees as America’s interest on a moveable basis, is in no way inconsistent with the foreign policy of his first term or his second: he makes decisions, sometimes snap decisions, based on what he sees as choices standing to benefit the country.

The surprising thing isn’t that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran. It’s that the current bombing campaign didn’t occur sooner. Netanyahu has been inveighing against the Iran threat for decades. The prospect that Trump might be prepared to cut a nuclear deal with the Iranian mullahs finally forced his hand. Trump, who based much of his MAGA movement around opposition to endless wars in the Middle East, has been outmaneuvered by Bibi. Intent on a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump proclaimed that he would secure an end to the Ukraine war within 24 hours. Then he focused his attentions on Iran. But his impulse to avoid war, any war, in the Middle East has been foiled.

The Trump presidency is giving us all a type of news-related diabetes. So much sensational information is spewing out of our screens all the time. There are so many stories, so much richness and history and irony, and so much silliness and seriousness entwined. We are dangerously overfed and now the lines of reality are blurring and people feel mad and sick. The Trump-Musk saga goes on, as Elon telephones Donald and shows his contrition on X. Trump sends in troops to control anti-ICE protests. Trump attends Les Miserables at his increasingly camp Kennedy Center.

Washington, DC Usha Vance is on a mission. This year's low reading scores have shocked the White House into action – so they have placed the Yale-educated Second Lady at the helm of the reading recovery ship. But as well as addressing faltering childhood literacy, Vance has a host of other tasks to complete for the Trump administration. Vance described her role in Trump 2.0 at the annual US-India Strategic Partnership Forum hosted at the Waldorf Astoria in DC Tuesday. It includes reading challenges, the Special Olympics and US-India relations – fueled by her children's interactions with the country's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The conference followed the launch of the "Second Lady Summer Reading Challenge.