ArcaMax

For a president who has long described himself as a peacemaker (and openly yearns for a Nobel Peace Prize), Donald Trump has proved to be a reliable harbinger of war. His delusional pronouncements and dithering incompetence have failed to resolve the conflagrations in Gaza and Ukraine, despite many promises -- and now he bears substantial responsibility for the outbreak of a very dangerous war between Israel and Iran.

Ever flattering himself, Trump often boasts that he is a smarter strategist than all of America's generals and a better dealmaker than any of our diplomats, but what the world sees is an amateurish bumbler surrounded by useless lackeys.

His disdain for experience and expertise led him to name his crony Steve Witkoff to direct U.S. negotiations over Ukraine and Gaza, as well as Iran's nuclear program -- an overwhelming portfolio for a real estate executive with no relevant knowledge or skills. (He does possess one unique qualification: Witkoff and his sons are involved in various business enterprises with Trump and his sons, including those blatantly corrupt crypto transactions with Gulf oil sheiks.) As a former senator, Secretary of State Marco Rubio knows something about foreign policy, but he has two or three other jobs, and Trump seems to pay little attention to his views.

Witkoff demonstrated his own mind-boggling lack of judgment when he walked into a session with Russian President Vladimir Putin alone -- no U.S. translator, no aides to take notes -- as if he could manage the wily Kremlin dictator by himself. Trump's arrogance may be contagious. So far the results in Ukraine and Gaza are unimpressive, to put it far too politely.

By now it is painfully obvious how little actual thought or planning are valued in this administration's foreign policy process, or if there is any process at all beyond the next post on Truth Social. On a superficial level this clown show is darkly amusing, like so much about Trump. Who can laugh when the cost in human lives, wasted resources and environmental destruction is so vast and growing every day?

Assigning blame to the president for all the world's disasters would be just as unfair as his own tendency to castigate Joe Biden and Barack Obama whenever anything goes wrong. The catastrophes that Trump now confronts in Gaza and Ukraine resulted from decisions in other capitals. Still, he has contrived to make matters worse on both fronts, by dismantling the Western alliance behind Ukraine and by encouraging the most extreme and belligerent parties in Israel's far-right government.

And while Benjamin Netanyahu and the Iranian mullahs are now most at fault, the erupting hostilities between Israel and Iran were made far more likely by Trump's petty and destructive acts during his first presidency.

The Obama administration's diplomatic breakthrough in 2015, when the U.S. and its allies signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Tehran is the only initiative that has ever succeeded in forestalling Iran's nuclear weapons program. That deal, which took years to achieve, succeeded in eliminating 97% of Iran's nuclear fuel, dismantling most of the centrifuges that produce enriched uranium, and imposing strict regulation on Iranian nuclear facilities. Those measures lengthened the "breakout time" required for Iran to build nuclear bombs to more than a year.

Trump's spiteful and foolish decision three years later to abandon the JCPOA speeded up Iran's progress toward a nuclear arsenal and brought the world closer to war -- all because he envied Obama and kowtowed to the Israeli hawks. His recent attempts to negotiate his own version of that agreement failed completely -- and that failure is more perilous than he could ever have imagined.

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