I STILL Have A Little Hope For Trump
Despite A Dreadful Spring, Stability Might Yet Emerge If The President Truly Wants It
I gave half a cheer when Trump won the 2024 election and another in that first six weeks when he seemed to be making good on his promise to end the “forever wars.”
Trump’s team took major steps towards deescalation. General Keith Kellogg cut off support to Ukraine and began negotiations with Russia. Special envoy Steve Witkoff read the riot act to Benjamin Netanyahu and finalised a ceasefire deal on Gaza, deliberately forcing Israel’s vile Prime Minister to work on the Sabbath. Adam Boehler met directly with Hamas and actually called them “pretty nice guys”.
Trump even defunded USAID, an arm of American soft power doing naff all for peace and security. With little media fanfare, the President also proposed unprecedented cuts in nuclear weapons and military spending, in negotiation with Russia and China.
Frankly, Donald Trump was looking like a genuine peace President.
But then… yikes. By March, Israel was back to massive US-endorsed airstrikes in Gaza. The West Bank deteriorated. Trump imposed radical tariffs in opposition to world opinion. Ukraine talks stalled. Trump killed numerous people in Yemen - simply based on its plans to resume a blockade of shipping over Israel’s broken ceasefire - including their innocuous-sounding “top missile guy” who was last seen walking into a house with his girlfriend.
Queasy, sickly stuff. Biden #2. Even a lot of libertarians abandoned ship and called Trump a “big disappointment”.
Then… Trump threatened Iran with “bombing the likes of which they have never seen”, with this crucial issue due to come to a head next month.
To be clear, if Trump bombs Iran, I will have nothing but repulsion for him and his adminstration. I’d consider it an act not just of mass murder but of sheer madness. An attack on Iran could well be the unravelling of everything - the nuclear taboo, millions of lives, and of course the entire global economy. And there is a risk they’ll do it, in part because Iran has seemed weaker lately, following the fall of Assad in Syria and its - admirable - reluctance to escalate in the face of Israeli aggression last year.
But I think Trump is going to do the sane thing.
Look at Netanyahu’s face when Trump announces he’s having direct talks with Iran this weekend. The man is livid. Direct talks are important - the Biden adminstration did technically have direct talks with Russia and Iran but they were always sketchy and limited. Trump is talking widely and often with all the West’s supposed enemies and it’s been working out soooo much better.
Trump’s imminent deal with Iran might end up being no better than Obama’s 2015 agreement that The Donald himself scrapped. But it’d still be welcome news.
In all, the Trump administration sometimes seems more pro-war than it is, due to its leading three foreign policymakers. Undoubtedly, Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense), Mike Waltz (National Security Advisor), and Marco Rubio at State are all hawks.
However, when you drop down the list beyond these top three, Trump’s people are a lot more open to negotiations. In the Signalgate leaks, Vice President JD Vance opposed striking Yemen, asking if the whole thing could be put off for a month. He had already stared down President Zelensky in the Oval Office. Keith Kellogg and Elon Musk oppose entanglements in Ukraine. Tulsi Gabbard, now Director of Intelligence, has always been an anti-interventionist. Witkoff and Boehler have been good, as above. A huge voice, albeit technically outside the Trump administration, is Tucker Carlson - a major anti-interventionist.
Health Secretary RFK Jnr is, like the rest of them, a Zionist, but otherwise strongly opposed to military interventionism, always echoing the rhetoric of his father and uncle who are both celebrated icons for world peace. At a crucial point in Biden’s escalations against Russia last Autumn, RFK collaborated with Trump’s own son to write a no-nonsense article to Congresspersons called “Negotiate With Moscow To End The Ukraine war And Prevent Nuclear Devastation”.
Even on tariffs, Trump’s plan seems to be manufacturing instability to eventually eliminate tariffs altogether. God only knows if he can control such a risky strategy but if it works then the market volatilty we’re experiencing this Spring will be a footnote by Christmas.
If Kamala Harris had become President, we’d likely have been facing much greater danger. Biden’s team was more neoconservative than Trump’s, with Antony Blinken (State Dept), Victoria Nuland (Undersecretary of State), Jake Sullivan (NSA), and Lloyd Austin (Secretary of Defense) among those pushing for escalation in multiple conflicts.
The future is a foreign country. I can’t be sure where Trump will go. But I’ve been less scared of nuclear war this past three months than at any time in the last three years - and then some. Yes, yes, I know - Trump has also threatened to shake things up in Panama, Greenland, Canada but, honestly, who seriously thinks a single drop of blood will be spilled over any of that argy bargy?
It is reasonable to hope that over Trump’s second term, Russia will be brought back into the community of nations, that relations with Iran will become the most stable they’ve been for at least a decade, and that the US might multilaterally slash spending on the weapons of war. The fact that this could so easily and so spectacularly go sideways is no reason to stop demanding it.