Trump’s diplomatic genius

Friday-weekend blog

I’ve just finished reading ‘Catastrophe: Europe goes to war 1914‘ by Max Hastings. One of the issues that struck me was that leading politicians in several of the countries which went to war were actually quite keen of starting a war. Each country had its own objectives and leaders of several countries felt that a short sharp war with a quick victory would inject energy and spirit into their populations who had become idle and dissolute following years of peace. And, of course, many politicians were keen to leave their mark on history. What better way to do that than through a military victory?

Unfortunately for tens of millions who would die or be maimed in WWI, European politicians didn’t learn the lesson from the American Civil War (1861-1865) in which over 650,000 soldiers were killed. The main lesson was that war was no longer a matter of brilliant Napoleonic outmanoevring the enemy and heroic cavalry charges. Instead war was turning into industrialised slaughter. And as the Italian diplomat and political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli warned “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please“.

Hold on, you may be thinking, what’s that got to do with the price of bread?

Now fast-forward to the Blair/Bush attack on Iraq designed to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMDs. At the time I couldn’t help wondering why an invasion killing tens or even hundreds of thousands was necessary. It seemed to me that all the US and UK needed to do was make contact with a few of Saddam’s top military and offer them a deal. The deal could have been something like this: If you help us get Saddam, his ghastly sons and a few other top Iraqis whom we don’t like and if you give us free access to your country, then we’ll let you keep your looted billions and palaces and whores and fleets of luxury cars etc etc. But if you don’t work with us to topple Saddam, we’ll bomb your cess-pit country back to the Stone Age and we’ll obliterate you. Have we got a deal?

This brings us to Trump. Trump wasn’t too pleased with Venezuelan mafia boss, Nicholas Maduro. He could have done a Blair/Bush and invaded the country thus getting the US involved in yet another grinding, seemingly never-ending war. But Trump is a businessman, not a politician. For him most issues can be solved by making a deal. With Venezuela the deal was something like: We’re taking Maduro to rot in a US prison for the rest of his life. If you work with us by selling us your oil, throwing out the Cubans, Russians and Chinese and spending some of your oil revenues on your people instead of stealing everything, then you can stay in power. If it’s no deal, we’ll bomb your pathetic little military into dust and either kill you or let your own people lynch you. Do we have a deal?

Of course, this was not perfect for freedom and democracy in Venezuela. But it was a step in the right direction and also gave Trump a ‘double whammy – without Venezuelan oil, tottering Cuba would collapse and then he could offer a deal to Cuba’s leaders. Trump may thus get indirect control of both Venezuela and Cuba without the loss of a single American life. Pity Blair/Bush didn’t try this approach with Iraq.

Now it’s Iran’s turn. From what little I understand (mainly from watching ‘Tousi TV’ on YouTube) Trump has offered the mad mullahs a deal: stop killing your people, stop all nuclear development, get rid of your ballistic missiles, stop threatening Israel, stop funding terrorism and release all your political prisoners. If you don’t agree, we’ll destroy your lousy regime and then help the Iranians hunt you down and lynch the lot of you.

Of course, the mad mullahs are not as sensible as the Venezuelans. So they have rejected the deal and stopped all negotiations with the Americans. Hopefully the US will soon attack and annihilate the IRGC and the mad mullahs.

But what I wanted to bring out in this blog is Trump’s genius in applying business dealmaking to international diplomacy. And I wanted to suggest that such an approach could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had this been used in the last 20-30 years of local wars instead of the politicians’ approach of assuming invasion and war were the only option.