Saying goodbye to Donald Trump and his legacy of highs and lows
MIDDLE ISRAEL: This column, after four years of lambasting him for all the bad things he did, said, tweeted and embodied, now happily waves him goodbye with one hand, and salutes him with the other.
By AMOTZ ASA-ELUS PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s leaves the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House after speaking about the election results last Thursday.(photo credit: CARLOS BARRIA / REUTERS)
“To be somebody, you must last,” said once-actress and screenwriter Ruth Gordon, an insight which in Donald Trump’s case should be inverted: To last, you must be somebody.Trump’s defeat has yet to empty his balloon’s hot air, but his wild presidency can already be audited.His balance sheet’s red column is well known to this column’s readers, and involves all of leadership’s basics: impact, honor, and style.In terms of impact, Trump never built his anti-Mexican wall; his summits with North Korea’s tyrant achieved nothing other than humiliate America; the coal and steel industries ignored his resurrection vows, and remained stubbornly dead; and NATO is intact despite his talk of abandoning it to its devices. This is of course besides his handling of the pandemic, which was both tragedy and farce.In terms of honor, what began with the draft dodger who scorned John McCain’s war heroism now ends with an electoral loser denying his defeat.And in terms of style, the man who habitually fired people – from secretaries of state, defense, and homeland security to national security advisors, White House chiefs of staff, communications directors, campaign managers and press secretaries – just fired another defense secretary, as if to say, “I snipe, therefore I am.”Well, despite these and the rest of its red column, the Trump presidency’s balance sheet also has a black column, and ignoring it would be unfair, unprofessional, and unwise.TRUMP’S MOST important achievement was his confrontation with China for its commercial conduct.The Asian giant’s failure to play by the rules, and this behavior’s damage to the American working class, have indeed been outrageous. Someone had to tell post-Communist Beijing that capitalism doesn’t mean cheating competitors, stealing knowhow, and abusing workers. Donald Trump did that, and in a way that his interlocutors were compelled to hear and register.At the same time, Trump avoided war. As noted this week by Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Amiram Levin, Trump resisted the temptation to join Syria’s mess, choosing instead to shrink America’s military presence there. Trump did leave there a sufficient force to avoid that arena’s full abandonment to Russia and Iran, but he let them get lost in Syria’s ruins, whose reconstruction is beyond their financial means.Considering that Russia must now feed, fuel, and salary the sizable expeditionary force it has planted in Syria, time may well tell that in this particular part of the world Trump served his country’s national interest much better than Vladimir Putin served his.Yes, that is not the way all this was seen from Jerusalem. From an Israeli viewpoint, Trump’s conduct in Syria seemed like a continuation of Barack Obama’s mishandling of the Middle East in general, and Syria in particular.True, Trump did respond, immediately and sharply, to Bashar Assad’s gas attack on his people in spring 2017, as American forces rained Tomahawks on a Syrian military airbase destroying – according to then-secretary of defense James Mattis – one fifth of Assad’s air force.Still, this salvo soon proved to have been an isolated incident, and Israelis felt Trump would leave no imprint on the Middle East, or worse, abandon it to its fanatics and their manipulators.That impression proved unfounded.TRUMP’S IMPACT on the Syrian situation was profound, though his impact elsewhere in the region was even deeper.By recognizing Israel’s sovereignty on the Golan Heights, Trump dealt a death blow to the Ba’ath regime’s historic claim that Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and also the Palestinian people should all be part of a Greater Syria. For decades, this ideology helped fuel one of the region’s most potent engines of violence.Trump’s move effectively told the world that if postwar Syria is ever to become a viable state at peace with its citizens and neighbors, it is to be remapped.An even more urgent and overdue message was sent to the international community when Trump moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem.Few things in postwar diplomacy were as morally nefarious and politically misguided as questioning the Jewish people’s right to the city it has perceived as its capital since antiquity. Trump righted this wrong, in this exceptional case making good use of his scorn for convention and disregard for advice.Trump’s move stated the truth, which is that no current country’s capital was its capital when Jerusalem became ancient Israel’s capital. Beyond that, his move served as a reminder that the quest for peace doesn’t justify reducing anything to a bargaining chip, because some things are just too glaringly illogical and too obviously unjust.Still, the Golan and the Jerusalem moves dwarf in their significance compared with this year’s normalization agreements between Israel and three Arab states.What exactly happened before these were delivered will only become known decades from now, when archives are opened. Likelihood is high we will then learn that events were engineered by someone else, while Trump merely gave his nod.Even so, it happened under his watch and because of his presence.In the long term, Israel’s admission into the Gulf’s economy may produce truly brisk business. For now, Trump exposed the great lie that Israel is at conflict not just with the Palestinians, but with the entire Arab world.Finally, Trump ordered the targeted killing of Qassem Soleimani, the man who masterminded the ayatollahs’ meddling throughout the Middle East.No one ever dealt with that regime in such a straightforward and gloveless way, and no one since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 so effectively unmasked, confronted, and threw into disarray Tehran’s imperialistic designs.Donald Trump did. That is why this column, after four years of lambasting him for all the bad things he did, said, tweeted and embodied, now happily waves him goodbye with one hand, and salutes him with the other.www.MiddleIsrael.netAmotz Asa-El’s bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.
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