Diplomacy In Trump World

First, there’s an interesting story out that claims Trump is “seriously considering” indirect talks with Iran, via Oman. That was the Iranian offer. Meanwhile, of course, the US is flooding the region with offensive military assets.

Trump seriously considering Iran's offer of indirect nuclear talks

• The White House is still engaged in an internal debate between those who think a deal is achievable and those who see talks as a waste of time and back strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

• In the meantime, the Pentagon is engaged in a massive buildup of forces in the Middle East. If Trump decides the time is up, he will have a loaded gun at the ready.

Behind the scenes: Over the weekend, Trump received Iran's formal response to the letter he sent Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei three weeks ago, a U.S. official said.

• While Trump proposed direct nuclear negotiations, the Iranians would agree only to indirect talks mediated by Oman.

• The U.S. official said the Trump administration thinks direct talks would have a higher chance of success, but isn't ruling out the format the Iranians proposed and doesn't object to the Omanis serving as mediators between the countries, as the Gulf state has in the past.

• Both U.S. officials said no decision has been made and internal discussions are ongoing. "After the exchange of letters we are now exploring next steps in order to begin conversations and trust building with the Iranians," one said.

Trust building? Holding a loaded gun to someone’s head and saying, ‘Let’s negotiate. Trust me, I won’t pull the trigger unless you disagree with my terms’—that’s some kinda trust building. You can hear lots more on this aspect of what’s currently going on in this fine half hour video with Danny Davis:

Trump's War-Driven Policy / He's sending More Combat Power to Middle East

OK, with that background, I have two partial transcripts that go into some of these issues. The first one directly addresses the whole business of the lack of actual diplomacy on the part of Trump, and speculates on the underlying reasons:

US-Russia Talks Stall, Escalation Expected - John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Alexander: I think that one of the other problems [is] I don't think the American negotiators are very experienced people. I mean Mr Witkoff is a very clever man--no doubt at all, a very capable negotiator in the world of business that he's been involved in--but he's never conducted negotiations at this level with the Russians before. He cannot possibly have got on top of this very, very complex problem, and I think the same applies to the others. I'm not saying anything against Mr Rubio and Mr Waltz in terms of their intelligence and their ability, but they also have no real experience of conducting negotiations of this kind in the past. Look at the other side. You know the Russians they are very experienced, they know this problem inside out. If we go to just a discrete example: the Black Sea initiative. It was floated on Monday, seemed to have been agreed on Tuesday, looked like it had fallen apart on Wednesday. The sanctions relief that the Russians were demanding was the sanctions deal already back in 2022, when the Russians agreed to exactly the same ceasefire deal. They agreed to the ceasefire in the expectation that the sanctions relief that they thought they were going to get would be provided, and then it wasn't provided. So unsurprisingly this time they're saying, Yes, absolutely, we'll go into this agreement again, but this time we want it reversed--we want the sanctions relief first and then we can go into the agreement.

I don't think many people understand with regard to these particular sanctions that there was talk about lifting them three years ago, but unless you have that sort of granular understanding of what you're discussing you're always going to find yourself in problems, and you're going to have all kinds of difficulties negotiating your way through. What I think the Trump Administration needs to do if it really wants peace--I'm not sure that they do, by the way, but I think perhaps what they want is this problem to go away, rather than to achieve an actual peace--but if they want a peace they need to conduct these negotiations in a much more conventional way. They need to stop thinking in terms of these very artificial deadlines that they're imposing on everybody, and they need to widen and strengthen their negotiating teams--by which I mean they need to bring in more people, not just people who have an understanding and history of the problem, but people who understand how to conduct negotiations at this level.

In the preceding paragraph Mercouris gets at the issue that has to be foremost in Russian minds, and which I’ve been harping on for the past week or so: Does Trump actually want peace? Like Mercouris, I’ve come to doubt that. I’ve come to believe that peace is, in a way, a peripheral matter for Trump. The real deal is detaching Russia, first from Iran, then from China. The point of “peace talks” regarding Ukraine is simply that America’s war on Russia stands in the way of the main goal. If that goal could be achieved while the killing continued, that would probably be fine with Trump—his actions with regard to genocide in the Middle East show he’s not averse to killing, per se—but that doesn’t appear to be possible.

In this next passage, Mearsheimer tries to get into the reasons behind some of the ineffectiveness of Trump’s “diplomacy.” In the process, he hits on another point that I’ve stressed for a long time: The same people people who are behind the war on Russia are also behind the war on the rest of the world, and especially on the non-Jewish parts of the Middle East. There’s no coincidence here, and that played out in the now famous Signal chat session with Jeffrey Goldberg. What Mearsheimer terms “Neoconservatives” and “Superhawks” are simply Zionists and their stooges—we are living in Zionist Occupied America (ZOA), after all:

Mearsheimer: Let me come at this from a slightly different angle, but just to reinforce what you said Alexander. You want to remember that inside the Trump Administration there are a lot of Neoconservatives, a lot of Super Hawks. What I believe Trump has done is, he's brought in Steve Witkoff because he doesn't trust people like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz. He knows he needs them for certain political reasons, but he doesn't trust them. So who is his main negotiator on Russia? It's Witkoff. Who is his main negotiator on the Middle East? It's Witkoff. So you bring in this guy who is very smart and he's a great negotiator in the context of the real estate world in New York City but, as we all know, you have to know these cases like the back of your hand if you're going to be the lead negotiator. You have to know the Ukraine case and the Israel case backwards and forwards--and Steve Witkoff doesn't know hardly anything. He hasn't spent his life studying these issues and, again, not only is he dealing with the Ukraine issue, he's dealing with the Middle East issue as well! And that one is maybe even thornier than the Ukraine issue.

Now, I’m not at all sure that I agree with Mearsheimer here, for the same reasons I voiced above with regard to whether Trump actually cares about peace. Instead, I agree with Mearsheimer’s initial point—Trump has people like Rubio and Waltz in his administration, not because he wants them there, but because he knows he has to fill those vacancies. Having done so, he simply does an end run by appointing a “special” envoy whom he believes he can trust and who isn’t a clown like his other appointees. It’s not that he disagrees with Rubio and Waltz in any fundamental way, it’s that they don’t come from his world and he regards them as clowns. He doesn’t trust them not to screw up. “Special” in this context of envoys simply means that Trump thinks he’s on the same wavelength with Witkoff.

So he's pulled in two different directions and, furthermore, Trump and Witkoff are surrounded by people who fundamentally disagree on what Trump and Witkoff are doing. It's no accident that Mike Waltz had Jeff Goldberg on his list of phone numbers, because Jeff Goldberg is a Superhawk on Ukraine and on the Middle East and Waltz is a Superhawk on Ukraine and the Middle East, and I'm sure that Waltz has talked to Goldberg before. This is what Trump is up against. This is the problem Trump had the first time around, from 2017 to 2021. He has said this on many occasions and he's not going to let it happen again, but he brought these people into the administration who think about the Ukraine crisis differently than he does. So we basically have a situation here you have Steve Witkoff, who just doesn't know a lot, doesn't have a lot of experience in these kinds of negotiations, is pulled in two different directions, and is surrounded by people like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz who were Superhawks on Ukraine. It's hardly surprising that the Trump Administration is getting nowhere on trying to solve the Ukraine war.

Now, with regard to what follows, here, again—what Mercouris says is quite reasonable, but the real problem is that Trump is not fully in control and faces a short deadline. We’ve gone into multiple times.

Mercouris: There are people Trump can talk to--there are people who are no longer in government but they might be able to help him so that you can get a proper negotiating team together and start to move this thing forward. It's not as if he doesn't have some support within his administration as well. His Vice President does seem to want to see an end to this conflict. I suspect—we talked about Tulsi Gabbard—I think she probably does, too, but he has to build on what he has and set himself a more realistic objective and a much much more realistic time scale. This isn't going to be ended in a 100 days or 10 days or one day—it's going to take a long time to do, but if it is done properly it perhaps can be brought to an end. Not get thrown off because there's problems at the beginning. There often are in negotiations. Commit to the negotiations, continue with them, but try to do so from now on in a more organized and conventional way. Trouble is, I don't know whether Trump really understands that or whether he thinks like this. He has this idea of himself as this great deal maker and negotiator—which in the world of real estate perhaps he is—but in terms of superpower negotiations he isn't

Mearsheimer: If you look at how Putin has waged the war since February 24th, 2022, and then you think about how the Americans or the Israelis would have waged the same war--in other words, if the Americans or the Israelis had been in Moscow running this war--I don't even want to think about what they would have done to the Ukrainians. So it's really quite amazing to me that Putin has this reputation in the West of being the second coming of Adolf Hitler--this ruthless and highly aggressive dictator who's bent on murdering as many civilians as possible. Any time a country wages war it's a horrible thing and lots of people get killed, but the Russians have been remarkably restrained--at least, to me, given my study of war over a long period of time, the Russians have not been especially aggressive or barbaric given how many other militaries have behaved in the past.

In this closing segment Mearsheimer gets at the fundamental obscenity—I can’t think of any other word to describe it—of Trump’s approach. Trump’s indecency in this cannot possibly be lost on either the Ukrainians or the Russians. Who would ever trust a person who doesn’t hesitate to make such proposals out loud, in front of the whole world?

Mearsheimer: And, by the way, Alexander, if you look at the mineral deal that's now been rewritten--Oh my God! I mean, what we're doing to the Ukrainians! Here you have all these people who are saying, ‘Let's just throw more Ukrainian bodies into the meat grinder so that we can bleed the Russians white--we'll sit back in Europe, we'll sit back in the United States, they'll do the dying. And, oh, by the way, we're giving them a lot of money but we're going to get it back because we've concocted this mineral deal that's basically going to rape their economy.’ This is, like, hard to believe! Talk about leading them down the primrose path! My God!

We talk about Putin trusting the Americans too much. It's the Ukrainians who really trusted the Americans too much! Boy! They are paying a godawful price for trusting the Americans!

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This will be much briefer but, in a way, gets at the same issues. Trump is actively waging war on free speech in America. For now it’s a war on criticism of Zionism, but there’s no guarantee that it will stop there. Do follow the link and read up on Trump’s friend Friedman. He’s a rabid supporter of ethnic cleansing and of the “settler” movement. If you’re not, then, in his view, you’re and anti-Semite—and he wants to make your life miserable. This man qualifies as a “high powered” lawyer in New York, but that Trump should consider nominating him for anything should shock anyone with a sense of decency. Note that this highly educated lawyer is openly talking about jailing and making life miserable for Americans.

Phil Giraldi : DoJ and Free Speech.

Judge: Here we have Benjamin Netanyahu telling us what to do--oh my God! Well, as if to make things worse, here's David Friedman. Now Mr Friedman was the United States ambassador to Israel in Trump's first term. He's a longtime New York City friend of Donald Trump's. He is now the leading candidate to be nominated to--ready for this?--the United States ambassador to the United Nations. Here's Mr Friedman on: We can deport them, we can put them in jail, we can make their lives miserable--for speech.

Friedman: A government can do in two months more than any organization can do in its lifetime. And so when we talk about the importance of a bipartisan fight against anti-Semitism--which of course I endorse and I, as my predecessor said, I condemn anti-Semitism on the right and on the left, I'm an equal opportunity condemner of anti-Semitism--

Q: You are alluding to Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson?

Yeah, none of them are any good. On the right, on the left, I don't like any of these anti-Semites and I'm not shy about it. But the United States government, or the government of France, or the government of any other country, has the power to rein in anti-Semitism in a much more effective way. You know, people say, 'Well, you know, the governments are not in the business of changing the way people think. That's true, but, you know, to my thinking most people who are, you know, anti-Semites, most of these people running around we're not going to win their hearts and minds--because they don't have hearts and they don't have minds. So, you know, how are we going to? There's no reason to think we're ever going to convince them, but we can deport them, we can put them in jail, we can make their lives miserable, we can cut off their funding, and that's what the Trump Administration is doing for the first ...

Judge: So the Trump administration of which this man was once a part and yearns to be a part again, is in the business of evaluating speech and punishing the speech it hates and fears--or [the speech] its benefactors, like Mr Friedman, hate and fear. As simple as that.

Giraldi: We have to recall that David Friedman was the clown who was running around under Donald Trump in his first Administration and was giving the Israelis everything they wanted--including a green light for them to basically expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and and kick the Palestinians--who have been living in that country for 2,000 years--completely out of their homes and completely out of the area. That was David Friedman.

Judge: Right. Well, he may be back, Phil. which of course will be horrific for the reputation and representation of the United States at the UN.