Sliding Deeper

No progress and more terror. From Ukraine to Israel to Iran to the streets of Boulder.

Over the weekend I listened to this podcast with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson who wrote a book about Biden’s cognitive decline and the resulting chaos in the White House. It was mind blowing stuff and it sort of tells us why Trump could walk, relatively easily, into the presidency last year. He was helped by a bold agenda on the domestic side, while on foreign policy hopes were raised by an equally ambitious series of plans and peace initiatives. Yet now that we are some four months into it all, one begins to wonder what progress has actually been made and what is left of the groundbreaking plans of a new America on the world scene. Let’s recap.

A settlement or even a basic ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine is still years away. Yesterday’s talks in Istanbul ended with a Putin driven proposal that essentially would turn Ukraine into a Russian dependency with little if any sovereignty left for president Zelensky and his people. And that is, and has been Putin’s position all along: a prolonged degradation of Ukraine as a national entity to the point that Moscow can pick up and devour the remaining pieces. Trump has been in no position to force meaningful peace discussions, it has quite frankly been a delusional project from day one, and he will have to come to realize that for the war to end : (a) Ukraine needs to score some decisive wins on the battlefield; or (b) the Putin regime will have to collapse in order to create a window for a new and enlightened Russia. Both are unlikely to happen anytime soon and with only a Europe struggling to unite and define a new approach towards this war, the US has failed. Putin has emerged as the winner for the time being and he has continued the daily carnage in the heart of Europe. As the young Ukrainian woman here correctly puts it is ‘not normal’:

Where many were expecting a decisive blow to be dealt to a weakened Iran - following Israel degrading Tehran’s air defences - we are now witnessing a resurrection of the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement that Obama concluded with Iran in 2015 and which Trump threw in the wastebasket in 2018. Although Iran so far appears to be rejecting the proposed terms of a new nuclear arrangement, the peaceful overtures of the Trump administration reflect to some extent the wants and needs of America’s Middle East partners, Saudi Arabi and Qatar. Nethanyahu’s hope of a joint military operation in which a US-Israeli effort would have obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities, is off the table. Gone. If instead this new agreement moves forward there are no guarantees that Iran will actually slow its enrichment activities and the road to a nuclear armed Iran may well remain open, as was the case with the JCPOA. Much like Russia, regime change in Iran is the only feasible way to not only avoid a nuclear Iran, but also to remove a regional destabilizer (think how they support the Houthis who keep firing missiles into Israel) and open the doors to a democratic entity replacing the mullah regime. As of today however that goal is solidly out of reach.

So without anything resembling fundamental progress with Russia and Iran while ramping up a dollar induced love fest with the Saudis and Qataris, Israel is left out of all the action. Despite months of negotiations the remaining 58 hostages (of whom 23 are believed to be alive) remain stuck in Gaza where the war continues unabated. By any historical measure Hamas should have put down its arms and be given a free escort out of this disaster zone, but for some reason the US has been unable, even working through its partners Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to bring this war to an end. And in doing so the Trump administration is also not helping its ally Israel achieving its objectives for safety and stability. Changes in the president’s foreign policy team are now believed to further reduce the influence of pro-Israel officials in Washington.

Taken together - and if you want you could add the setbacks in the tariff game with China - it appears that America’s opponents have been able to benefit from an administration that seeks some coveted short-term wins while losing the longer term strategic game. Israel stands increasingly alone, Iran is recovering from last year’s setbacks while Putin gleefully recycles the most bizarre peace plans while randomly killing Ukrainian citizens, night after night.

Hostages

So I actually listened to the Biden podcast when driving into town to attend the weekly hostage rally in downtown Vancouver. A location as we found out - I arrive usually about an hour ahead to help organize things - had now been staked out by the ‘Free Palestine’ movement who had visited the site earlier and left their marks. And during the actual rally the ratio of ‘pro-Hamas’ to ‘pro-Israel’ drivers shouting at the rally has increased in favour of the former. When I asked a good friend who is a Holocaust survivor during last week’s rally if she is worried about her safety she told me that she lived through and survived the war and that there is not a lot that could faze her.

Yet, as soon as we had wrapped up our gathering the news of a violent attack on a similar event in Boulder, Colorado reached us. Twelve people were burned, two seriously, after an illegal immigrant attacked the event with Molotov cocktails. After his arrest and according to court documents the man declared that his goal was to “kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead”.

Apparently the attack had been in the works for over a year, but it is not hard to see how the perverted and one-sided way in which news from the Middle East is being reported is activating the most deadly instincts. The movie is familiar by now: the media (BBC, CNN, Reuters etc.) report an alleged Israeli atrocity in Gaza, the world erupts and then when all of it is seared into people’s minds these very media, usually 24 hours later, walk it back. But by then the damage is done.

So forgive me, but with many reversals on the foreign policy scene that appear to benefits authoritarian regimes and an ever widening war on the streets at home, things are looking bleak. Western democracies are under pressure and on the defence. And we lack the political leadership to turn the tide. Not good.