How the Trump administration banished the ghosts blocking the path to peace

That was a recurring theme during the four-year run of nontraditional diplomacy: Critics constantly warned of impending war, but it was the peace agreements that materialized.

“If the primary purpose of the killing of Mr. Fakhrizadeh was to make it harder to restart the Iran nuclear agreement, then this assassination does not make America, Israel or the world safer,” tweeted Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee who is no stranger to such fits of illogic. The world is unquestionably safer with fewer nuclear terrorists and more reconciliation between old foes.

“The killing could complicate Biden’s handling of the Iran nuclear deal,” suggested the New York Times. The “sense of humiliation and apprehension in Tehran may complicate Biden’s efforts to calm tensions,” according to the Washington Post. Fakhrizadeh’s death “will also complicate any effort by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden to revive the detente of Barack Obama’s presidency,” said Reuters. The BBC opined it could “complicate an already challenging course for a new US team to re-engage with the Islamic Republic.”

Peace, in other words, is precisely the problem, according to the dominant left-of-center narrative on foreign affairs, because it “complicates” America’s ability to jettison its regional alliances in favor of empowering a rogue terrorist state on the basis of the sunk-cost fallacy: Democratic foreign policy hands have already invested so much in an Iran-centered Gulf and Mediterranean order that it has concretized into partisan dogma.

In truth, that’s only half of it. The rest of the investment is in ridiculing the idea that President Art of the Deal actually knows how to negotiate. But the fact is that while Trump and his team’s approach to negotiations are admittedly a wild mismatch for certain types of strategic diplomacy, they are a surprisingly good fit for others. He got nowhere with North Korea, Russia, and Turkey, but Trump’s bottom-line, year-zero, unsentimental approach to mutual-interest deal-making blew expectations, and most of his predecessors, out of the water in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Latin America.

That less-experienced diplomats were the ones thinking outside the box should not surprise, but it has made it harder for the bureaucratized establishment to swallow its pride and acknowledge the progress. Two of Trump’s ambassadors in particular, Richard Grenell in Berlin and David Friedman in Jerusalem, faced aggressive opposition from predecessors but turned out to be among the more effective envoys in recent years. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Pompeo joined them in that category, and their efforts were boosted by veteran foreign-policy hands such as John Bolton and Elliott Abrams, especially in Latin America.

But it’s important to understand why they succeeded where they did — not from back-patting or score-settling but because they added valuable tools to America’s diplomatic abilities and revealed a crucial piece of information about entrenched conflicts around the world. If the Biden team is prepared to turn the clock back to 2016, it will rebury a diplomatic Rosetta Stone and stop an America-led march of progress in its tracks.

This is no idle worry. Biden and his incoming national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have already said they’ll seek to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, and in 2017, Sullivan criticized Trump’s approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict as not conducive to bringing peace. John Kerry, who was secretary of state during the Iran deal talks, will also join the Biden administration. He has come in for his own (deserved) round of mockery for his 2016 comments: “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world’s in a different place now, and we just have to reach out to them, and we can work some things with the Arab world, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians. No. No, no, and no.”

We now know that Kerry, Sullivan, and the foreign-policy establishment were wrong about this. I don’t use the term “establishment” as a bogeyman; it is not a criticism to acknowledge years of experience in one’s industry. But conventional wisdom is not the same thing as accrued wisdom, and those in Washington must remember the difference.

So, what was it the conventional thinkers were so wrong about? In a word: ghosts. “The past is a foreign country,” goes the famous adage. The Trump team took this to its logical conclusion and all but excluded the past from negotiations.

Serbian business leaders “credited the Trump administration and US Special Envoy for Serbia-Kosovo negotiations Richard Grenell for focusing on ‘economic normalization’ between the sides, something that past US administrations had not done,” reported the Jerusalem Post’s Lahav Harkov, quoting Serbia’s Chamber of Commerce president as saying: “‘It’s good for talks. They’re more relaxed’ than when negotiations are focused on matters of principle and history.”

Indeed, Theodore Geshkoff wrote in a 1940 treatise for Columbia University, “The Balkans are usually reported to the outside world only in time of terror and trouble; the rest of the time they are scornfully ignored.” Events were heading that way again before Grenell achieved a breakthrough.

Much of Kosovo is ethnically Albanian, but there is a Serbian enclave within Kosovo along its border with the Serbian republic, a legacy of the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In January 2018, a Kosovo Serb leader was shot and killed outside his party’s offices in that enclave, bringing EU-sponsored talks to a halt. Soon after that, Germany reminded Serbia of its insistence that it recognize Kosovo’s independence as a condition of entry to the EU. From there, a Serbia-Kosovo power supply agreement broke down. It was an early hint that “economic ties” were more important to regional peace than they are traditionally given credit for. That fall, another reminder: Kosovo tagged Bosnia with tariffs after the latter blocked Kosovo’s accession to Interpol. The tax fights would intensify, and by the end of the year, Kosovo’s legislature had voted to create a standing army.

Things would continue to fray into 2019, until Trump sent Grenell, who was ambassador to Germany, to the Balkans. “Before long, Mr. Grenell offended and alienated European diplomats who had worked hard on Kosovo for years,” the New York Times reported, embracing the EU side of the turf war. “They accused him of ignoring their own, more evolved peace initiatives, of undermining democracy in Kosovo and of turning a blind eye to budding authoritarianism in Serbia, a Russian ally.” Yet by June, Grenell had announced a breakthrough. Grenell had shaken up talks by no longer reflexively taking Kosovo’s side and pressuring Kosovo to drop its tariffs on Serbia. This past September, the two sides inked an economic normalization agreement at the White House.

Exorcising demons was also a key element of the administration’s intervention in Latin America in 2018-2019. But this time, it was America’s own demons.

The culminating event of that intervention was in early 2019 at the Organization of American States’s building in Washington. There, the U.S. and 15 other countries signed a statement saying they recognize and express “full support to the President of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, who has assumed the role of Interim President of the Republic of Venezuela, in accordance with Venezuelan constitutional norms and due to the illegitimacy of the Nicolas Maduro regime.”

Maduro is the dictator-successor to Hugo Chavez, and the statement was the body’s decision, with American backing, to acknowledge that according to the proper Venezuelan constitutional process, Guaido was the rightful acting president. The announcement was delivered not by the U.S. but by Argentina, and the process led by the organization and a former foreign minister of Uruguay, Luis Almagro. American support was crucial but only promised once it was clear what Latin American leaders were willing to put on the line so it didn’t reprise the heavy-handed history of U.S. involvement in Latin American affairs. Senior OAS officials told the Washington Examiner at the time that this was structured deliberately so as to avoid reviving “all the historical demons.” At the same time, Colombian Ambassador Francisco Santos told the Washington Examiner, it enabled the greatest act of Latin American consensus “probably since the Cuban missile crisis.”

Pompeo, Bolton, and Abrams brought a mix of hands-on experience and new thinking and may have solved one riddle of U.S.-Latin American relations by striking the perfect balance between restraint and power politics. Most of all, they weren’t afraid to act out of the fear of ghosts. Instead, they banished them.

Nowhere was this ghost-busting more significant or surprising than in the Middle East. Neither was there any theater more in need of fresh thinking.

To say Kushner’s assigned role as Middle East peace coordinator was met with skepticism would be a gross understatement. His expanding portfolio in the White House became a running punchline on social media. The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri wrote a satirical column titled “I have just read 25 books and am here to perform your open-heart surgery.”

Petri’s entry in the mocking-Jared industry is especially notable because she laid out statements by Kushner at the beginning of the piece that she considered particularly humorous. One was: “What I would encourage people to do is try to divorce yourself from all of the history that’s happened over the years and read this plan.” This statement was widely derided as ignorant, but, in fact, Kushner was right and would soon prove himself so in a Middle East already adjusting to changes in U.S. policy brought about by Trump and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

In July 2009, President Barack Obama met with Jewish leaders at the White House. America, he told them, had been mistaken in trying to adhere to its goal of “no daylight” with Israel. During the previous eight years of the George W. Bush administration, Obama told Jewish leaders, “There was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.” Obama wanted to put some space between the U.S. and Israel, and proceeded to do exactly that. His experiment was a flop: He was the least successful president regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict since the end of the Cold War.

Trump sought to correct this. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the U.S. Embassy there. Trump also had the U.S. recognize Israeli sovereignty over its Golan Heights in the north. When Friedman was announced as the pick for ambassador to Israel, liberal figures insisted he was too pro-Israel and too supportive of what they viewed as the Israeli Right. But success followed.

Kushner, thus, began his push for peace with the wind at his back: Pundits and so-called “experts” had all promised there would be bloodshed from Trump’s Jerusalem moves, but none had materialized because they fundamentally misunderstood the region’s politics. The Palestinians rejected Kushner’s “economic peace” model out of hand, just as they have rejected every peace plan before it. But it turned out he had some surprising takers.

The Palestinians’ legitimate drive for statehood and self-determination had taken on an outsize role in the region’s affairs. Ramallah effectively was given a veto over Arab normalization with Israel. But when Trump called their bluff over Jerusalem, it shattered the myth that you had to go through the Palestinians if you wanted public cooperation and reconciliation with Israel. Trump’s decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal also showed America’s Sunni Gulf allies that he could be trusted to restore the bonds broken by Obama’s attempts to favor Iran over traditional allies.

Much like the ancient ghosts of ethnic conflict that haunt the Balkans, the Middle East was a place where the Palestinians didn’t hold the only veto; history had one too. But the Trump administration approached it with an unsentimental proposal: Don’t be ruled by inherited rivalries and the trauma of the past; if you have the chance to make your lives better right now, take it. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain did, striking recognition deals that include trade and civil aviation plus joint efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Sudan joined the party, agreeing to normalize relations with Israel and having the U.S. remove it from a list of terror-sponsoring states. On Dec. 10, Morocco entered the normalization-with-Israel parade in return for the U.S.’s recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony.

None of this is to say this tack will always work — it won’t. But in several fraught regions weighed down by the bloodshed of history, it offered a path out of the desert. Future administrations, very much including the incoming Biden White House, should study these lessons carefully, adding one more tool to America’s diplomatic arsenal.

Seth Mandel is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.