Can Donald Trump actually do good as president?

Middle Israel: The president-elect can deliver historic breakthroughs on three fronts

By AMOTZ ASA-EL NOVEMBER 15, 2024 16:41

US PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump and his secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio appear during a campaign event in North Carolina, ahead of last week’s US elections. (photo credit: Jonathan Drake/Reuters)

‘Never make predictions,” said baseball legend Casey Stengel, “especially concerning the future.” 

True for the future of anything and anyone, it is doubly so for Donald Trump, whose second coming now has pundits predicting what America’s most unpredictable leader might do once back at its helm. 

This column has no such predictions. It does, however, have a wish list of good things Trump, warts and all, might actually make happen: one in his native New York, another in distant China, and the rest in our sorry Middle East. 

FRED TRUMP and Mary Anne MacLeod were cradling four-month-old Donald in their six-bedroom Tudor house when another baby, the United Nations, emerged in nearby Flushing Meadows, a 10-minute car ride from the Trumps’ abode in well-to-do Jamaica Estates. 

Both newborns would later move from Queens to Manhattan and become pillars of its iconic cityscape. 

Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump gestures as he holds hands with his wife Melania during his rally, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, US, November 6, 2024. (credit: REUTERS/BRIAN SNYDER)

Both would also become wellsprings of scandals and lies, but only one would become an engine of anti-Western abuse. 

Back when they conceived the UN, its American masterminds envisioned an accelerator of tolerance and peace. 

Alas, once it matured the UN has made a fool out of the American people, taking its money – more than one fifth of the organization’s budget – and in return fighting America’s values, undermining its interests, and ganging up on its friends. 

Trump, because of his America First commitment and impulsive personality, can put an end to the farce by withdrawing from the UN and evicting it from the Tower of Babel in which it nests. 

The same attitude might lead him to do something right vis-à-vis Beijing. 

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CHINA’S ECONOMIC resurgence after Mao’s departure can generally be split into two eras. The first was about making China prosper at home, the second was about making it lord abroad. 

China’s industrial accomplishments have been impressive, but its commercial practices have been unfair – subsidizing industries, dumping exports, obstructing imports, and manipulating the yuan’s exchange rate. 

In recent years, this interventionist economics was coupled with naval bullyism toward a host of neighbors around the South China Sea. 

The same attitude then proceeded to the Middle East, when Beijing hosted a Hamas delegation, disregarding its violent record, antisemitic agenda, and Islamist zeal. 

No one in the West, until now, has figured out how to make China treat the outer world with greater fairness and respect. 

Impulsiveness comes in handy 

That is why here, too, Trump’s America First commitment and impulsive personality might come in handy. 

Yes, the president-elect’s vow to impose tariffs of 60-100% on all Chinese imports runs against libertarian values, capitalist principles, and all modern economic experience. 

Still, politically it might actually work. Maybe what China’s leaders need is an encounter with national egoism and diplomatic audacity on par with theirs. 

Surely, if Trump humbles China and also handles the UN, millions will applaud him, setting aside, at least momentarily, their revulsion with the rest of his baggage. 

Then again, even such breakthroughs would pale compared with what he might achieve in the Middle East. 

SADLY, TRUMP’S isolationist inclination does not bode well for the Middle East.  

The America First attitude means letting our region’s patchwork of nations, tribes, faiths, republics, monarchies, princedoms, sheikhdoms, and militias bleed each other white while Americans take care of America. 

Then again, in Trump’s case, personality trumps conviction. And in terms of his personality, the president-elect may well be eager to hand Iran’s ayatollahs the defeat that they deserve, and a war-torn Middle East begs.

Trump already has effectively declared war on the Islamic Republic when he killed Qasem Soliemani, the general who conceived, built, and cast Iran’s network of subversive militias in multiple Arab lands. 

Since then, reasons for Trump to pick up from where he left off have only multiplied. 

Iran’s proxies have attacked international trade, damaging global shipping in general, and in particular the economies of Egypt and Israel, two major American allies. 

This is besides effectively occupying and paralyzing Lebanon, historically a European outpost in the Levant, and now a battlefield in a war that Iran fomented, and the Lebanese people loathe. 

Now, following Trump’s return, the mullahs appear to be shivering. 

That is why, as of this writing, they have yet to respond to Israel’s aerial attack last month outside Tehran. They know that one wrong move of theirs can make Trump forget about his isolationist rhetoric, and deal their regime a blow it will not endure. 

From Trump’s viewpoint, such aggressiveness is all the more tempting, because it will invert the American humiliation that animated the birth of Iran’s Islamist revolution back in 1979. 

If he brings an end to the regime that has bludgeoned the Iranian people, torched Saudi oil fields, bombarded Israeli towns, and strangled the Egyptian economy, Trump will go down in history as the man who repaired the damage of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. 

The ayatollahs – who transformed Iran from America’s ally to its sworn enemy while humiliating 52 American hostages in 1981 with impunity – will be gone, and Trump will be a hero.

Potential for Israeli-Palestinian peace 

Lastly, and even more dramatically, Trump might deliver an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty. 

The 47th president’s motivation on this front does not need to be speculated. It’s a project he already launched when he delivered the Abraham Accords, by far the most impressive achievement of his entire life so far.

The deal would deliver a demilitarized Palestinian state based on the plan Trump presented in January 2020. It would, no doubt, displease many in our current government, but it might bring peace with the entire Muslim world, especially if Trump involves his friend Vladimir Putin in this. 

Obviously – like the UN’s dissolution, China’s transfiguration, and Iran’s redemption – this is not a prediction. 

It’s just a wish, voiced before telling the man whose troubled relationship with truth, morality, and justice this column has repeatedly attacked: good luck, Donald. 

www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.