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Opinion

The Gaza Announcement: Are Most Of Us Missing Trump’s Bigger Picture?

What if this is like his hardball negotiations with Colombia or Canada?

The same people who raged about Trump’s tariff announcement with Canada and Mexico have assumed the worst about Trump’s Gaza announcement. Could there be some other way of seeing things?

In the 2 weeks since Trump has taken office the second time, we’ve seen a much different approach to how he uses his Constitutionally-enumerated Article II powers.

Lessons Learned

He’s learned how even legitimate uses of his powers, even bills that have been passed and signed into law can be delayed, ignored, or tied up in never-ending legal battles. But some levers of authority are mandated by both law and precedent to be the direct responsibility of the President of the United States Of America… regardless of whoever may happen to be in that role at a given moment.

That’s because executive decisions, by definition, can ill afford to be bogged down in the petty politics of some glorified committee meeting.

He also had four years of watching how ruthlessly the other party used an equally-divided senate whose tiebreaker was the Veep herself and a razor-thin majority in the House to run roughshod over the usual rules of political decency and decorum to push through legislation that even they later admitted were (twice-over) given cynically dishonest names.

First, that they did nothing to fix inflation, and second that they *ought* to have been named for their real purpose: as a Trojan Horse to sneak in the Green New Deal that all those Dem senators had publicly pretended not to support just a year or two before. Shove it down the voters’ throats, whether they like it or not.

Unlike the other side, Trump’s agenda was not one he hid from. There were certain trends he saw as problems, and he announced during his campaign that he fully intended to solve them.

The Gaza Announcement

With Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu arriving in the White House as the first Head of State to formally visit him, it was to be expected that something would be said about America’s future involvement in the path to restoration in the region.

What he said made news alright. And it kicked off a firestorm of controversy, complete with the usual political marches, with three ideas in particular:

1) the use of ‘take over’ and ‘own’ the Gaza strip is an ambiguous choice of words from which supporters and critics alike can draw conclusions supporting their own biases. Many have already claimed to know Trump’s ‘real’ meaning in his use of this phrase. The obvious negative inference being seizing possession of the region, the other to be more in the sense of taking responsibility for the region. Whether that ambiguity was deliberate or no is a matter of speculation on both sides.

2) His proposal to resettle Palestinians in a safe state next door — Egypt or Jordan for example — while the area is rebuilt is obviously one that would be met with outrage by the people who once called the area ‘home’… as well as another interested party we will mention shortly.

3) He proposed it be rebuilt as a modern paradise, making use of natural economic advantages, not the least of which includes its prime location on the Mediterranean coast. It’s a pitch not unlike the one he made Little Rocket Man a few years ago.

In the same vein, Trump said this:

Assuming The Worst

Needless to say, people already inclined to believe the worst of him have chosen to interpret this as some kind of a land grab and push to destroy or erase the Palestinian people.

The protests we’re seeing waving those distinctive black, white, and green flags with the red triangle at the end have drawn that conclusion.

But is that the ONLY inference we can draw?

Lessons Learned From The Tariff Policy

What we’ve learned about Trump, particularly in his international dealings, is that he is more than willing to use leverage — especially the splashy headline-catching kind — as part of his carrot/stick negotiations with other global players.

It’s not always the stick, either, as we’ve seen in the arrangement he struck with El Salvador. They struck a deal for something they wanted to make their country better — commercial nuclear reactors.

In his own words, the President’s entire M.O. throughout his life has been that of negotiator. He used his tariff talk not to destroy the other countries, but to gain public statements by his neighbors that they would take his core border issues more seriously… those tariffs are still on the table if their promises have no substance backing them up.

We at ClashDaily didn’t take the bait that so many others did on the tariff question. We figured the entire process had more to do with negotiation that it did about punching a whole in the economies of his closest neighbors. Those instincts were proven right, here: Trump Makes Good On Tariff Threat… Here’s What Panicking Canadians Don’t Understand

Is it possible this entire Gaza position is something similar?

What Had He Done In The Past?

It’s obviously an understatement to say Trump is unorthodox in his approach to Foreign Policy. But, unlike his first term in office, we have a track record to look at. Against all conventional wisdom, he moved the Embassy to Jersualem. We were told by experts the world would burn as a result. It didn’t.

Trump set about looking for some model of durable peace between Jews and Palestinians in Israel, if you recall. He even proposed a 2-state solution. With pockets of opposition on both sides, it never came to fruition. But it shows a genuine attempt to seek a brokered peace between both parties.

Beyond the local conflict, he managed what had been called impossible since at least the Carter years: his administration hammered out the Abraham Accords, and reestablished peaceful relationships between several Muslim nations and their neighbors… beginning with a longstanding dispute in the former Yugoslavia.

As the first president since the Cold War to NOT open a new conflict, Trump has proven himself as a President who looks for ways go negotiate peace. If nothing else, that’s reason to pay attention to what he’s up to with some interest.

Contextual Clues For The Region

Complex negotiations — as any international deal involving interconnected interests would inevitably be — involve multiple moving pieces of negotiation.

It’s easy to miss in in the flurry of activity, we’ve seen over the past 2 weeks, but Trump has not been ignoring the Middle East.

He’s been talking to Qatar, who has been critical in the hostage negotiations and has allegedly indicated that Trump needs to keep the bellicose rhetoric turned up if the 2nd phase of the agreement is going to hold up.. He’s restarting the Maximum Pressure campaign on Iran — the one that left the world’s leading state sponsor of terror so cash-strapped that Hamas and Hezbollah were seeing layoffs. Whether that plan was leveraged in any way to persuade Oil-rich Venezuela to agree to returning American hostages is anybody’s guess. That might explain why he wanted Saudis and others to ramp up oil production.

What Do We Know At This Point?

Before today, we knew that the hostage release is a work in progress, but American hostages have not yet come home. Going all the way back to Otto Warmbier, repatriation of Americans has been a priority for Trump.

We know that he wants some kind of a resolution to this conflict — because other regional peace deals with the Saudis in particular, will be contingent on this conflict resolving.

We know he’s not a.big fan of boots-on-the-ground when other alternatives are an option — and with the stated goals of Hamas explicitly embracing unending hostility with America and Israel, and a rejection the validity of any deal involving an Israeli or Western nation, US operations there have a high likelihood of being targeted with violence… even if it’s just by rogue actors.

We know that Israel has a reputation of being hostile to the Palestinians for entirely unjust reasons, but few questions are asked about the reluctance of nearbly friendly states like Jordan, Egypt, or Lebanon to take them in even in situations where war has reduced entire communities to rubble. Egypt has recently gone through a revolution sparked by radical Islamists. Inviting a militant population that idealizes martyrdom is a dangerous game for them to play, just as it is for Israel. How else do you explain elaborate security at the Egyptian border every bit as rigid as Israel’s attempt to control unwanted border crossings.

This is Trump’s opening bid. He always goes big for the opening bid.

The question is… what is he willing to negotiate down to?

Will it be Egypt and Jordan overseeing the rebuilding projects in lieu of taking the refugees in where they are now? Saudis taking a protectorate role of the Palestinians and helping to build a stable society and (hopefully) de-radicalize them, neutralizing Iran’s ability to fund their war machine? Maybe their big spenders could arrange to get first crack at local investment opportunities… say building shopping disticts, business towers, or yes, even resorts?

Time will tell. The only thing we can say for sure is that this story is just beginning to unfold, and is a long way from its conclusion.

Wes Walker

Wes Walker is the author of "Blueprint For a Government that Doesn't Suck". He has been lighting up Clashdaily.com since its inception in July of 2012. Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck