If the Trump administration has learned anything this week, it’s that diplomacy is difficult.
The White House’s 181-page Middle East peace plan — a product of over three years of meetings, strategy sessions, and trips to the region — landed with a thud this week. Within an hour of its release, the plan sank like a rock into the deep, watery grave where the bodies of numerous previously proposed Israel-Palestine peace plans lie wasting away.
Despite angry denunciations by the Palestinians, a lukewarm response from Arab governments, and strong criticism from former Middle East negotiators in Washington, the White House is trying to make the best out of a bad situation. But no spin can change the fact that the Trump administration’s plan is almost predestined to fail. There’s a simple reason why: The maximum the Israelis will contemplate conceding falls far short of the minimum the Palestinians will accept.
President Trump’s diplomatic struggles extend to the conflict in Yemen as well.
In Yemen, the civil war ravaging the poor country continues shows no sign of ending any time soon. While the Saudis and the Houthis have been engaging in back-channel discussions on ways to reduce cross-border violence, the conflict continues to be defined by an endless list of war crimes, disproportionate attacks on civilian infrastructure, and widespread poverty and hunger.
The United Nations has long called Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, helped in large measure by an utter lack of accountability for the combatants. The World Food Programme reports that nearly 16 million people begin each day with an empty stomach. Half of the country’s already meager health facilities have been forced to shut down, with many the targets of Saudi airstrikes.
The State Department may be calling for a political resolution to this more than five-year war, but the Trump administration’s continued support for the Saudi-led military coalition has destroyed the United States’s ability to act as a legitimate mediator.
And then there’s the crisis in Venezuela, a once proud and wealthy South American country whose population is suffering from every calamity mankind and nature can conjure up: kleptocracy, corruption, nepotism, state-sponsored violence, political persecution, crime, disease, poverty, and, in some parts of the country, quasi-anarchy.
The political crisis ravaging Venezuelans, millions of whom have fled their own country in desperation, has taken the form of a slow but steady burn. U.S. economic sanctions on Nicholas Maduro’s regime have replaced nose-to-the-grindstone diplomacy, a maximum pressure strategy that is complicating the Venezuelan regime’s finances but is not having the intended effect of forging through a resolution.
We sure could use a leader familiar with “the art of the deal” right about now.
Trump ran for office as a dealmaker, somebody who would sit down with the devil himself if it was necessary to strike a better deal for America. Many in Washington take strong issue with Trump sitting down with dictators, authoritarians, and adversaries, but it was nonetheless a large part of the president’s appeal. We don’t, after all, live in an ideal world.
Talking with your enemies is an indispensable part of good statecraft. Trump claims to understand this and be a master negotiator. It’s time for him to finally get some real results.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
