United States President Donald Trump brought his own peculiar bellicosity to the United Nations this week, threatening North Korea and Iran, and ignoring the human rights abuses of Saudi Arabia and Israel. He proclaimed that each nation should have the right to pursue its own goals, and that the U.S. had no interest in forcing its brand of democracy (such as it is) on any other nation. Then he criticized the socialist governments of Cuba and Venezuela, and harshly condemned both North Korea and Iran.
It is interesting that he seems to lump North Korea and Iran together. The former is a repressive, totalitarian regime with nuclear weapons, and the latter, with a democratically-elected president, has actually signed an international agreement saying its nuclear program is entirely peaceful. The U.S. is a signatory to that agreement, which Trump calls “the worst deal ever”.
This appears to be quite a contraction in the confused rhetoric of the U.S. president. He proclaims that Iran must never have nuclear weapons, and then wants to nullify the agreement that prevents that nation from creating them. What, one wonders, could be his motivation?
While it is next to impossible to determine at any given moment just what is happening in that pumpkin-like head, we will attempt to make some sense of this apparent contradiction.
At present, there are only a handful of countries in the Middle East that wield any great power: Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran.
The U.S. has full diplomatic relations with the barbaric, repressive Saudi regime. And it must always be remembered that oil trumps everything else: human rights, international law, even common decency take a back seat to sacred oil. The bottom line here is money.
Next is Israel, with whom the U.S. also has full diplomatic relations. But it is not oil that motivates this alliance, but powerful pro-Israel lobbies in the U.S. Israel’s barbaric occupation of Palestine, and its unspeakable treatment not only of Palestinians, but of any non-Israelis within its own dubious borders, is condemned worldwide. Even the U.S. pays lip service to condemning it. But once again, the bottom line is money, and almost all U.S. government officials benefit from the largesse of pro-Israeli lobbies. In return, they jump through whatever bloody hoops Israel chooses to hold. Regard for human rights? Bah! International law? Israel makes its own laws! Common decency? Upheld stringently, as long as it applies to Israelis; all others need not apply.
Israel and Saudi Arabia have been growing ever more cozy with each other, and that is fine with the U.S. As long as Israel has no objection, Saudi Arabia can continue doing whatever its leaders want it to do.
Now we get to Iran. This nation chooses not to share its natural resources with the U.S., and has no diplomatic ties to Israel; it fully condemns that regime’s cruel and illegal activities in Palestine. And thus we have the crux of the U.S.’s problems with Iran.
Increasingly, Israeli politicians see themselves as major forces of influence in the world, even as the reality of the occupation of Palestine is more fully recognized and condemned. Iran must not threaten Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East; no, any nation that has a human rights record superior to Israel’s (and it would be hard to find a worse one), cannot gain the upper hand. Such an event may only increase Israel’s growing international isolation, and provide support to those uppity Palestinians, who have spent decades demanding the most basic human rights, of which Israel denies them.
How fair, one might ask, is the U.S. assessment of the Middle East situation? It must be remembered that everything that U.S. government officials see in the Middle East is viewed through an Israeli lens. And U.S. reaction to anything Israel does is based on that skewed view.
One telling example occurred in 1988.
President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, had created a three-part plan to resolve the Palestine-Israel ‘conflict’. This included: 1) the convening of an international conference; 2) a six-month negotiating period that would bring about an interim phase for Palestinian self-determination for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 3) a date of December, 1988 for the start of talks between Israel and Palestine for the final resolution of the conflict.
The response from Israel was not unexpected. Then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir immediately rejected this plan, saying, incredibly, that it did nothing to forward the cause of peace. The U.S. response was puzzling; the U.S. reinforced economic and security agreements with Israel, and accelerated the delivery to Israel of seventy-five F-16 fighter jets. An Israel journalist expressed the message this sent to Israel: “One may say no to America and still get a bonus.”[1] Things have only gotten worse since then.
So as the Great Pumpkin plied his bizarre trade at the U.N., he succeeded in pleasing his racist, ignorant U.S. base, which for generations feared Communism and now fears Islam (Iran, it must be remembered, has a majority Islamic population). He also satisfied Israel, with that nation’s leader, Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, in his own speech later, lauding the U.S. president, as he condemned the U.N.
What can we take from all this? What conclusions can be drawn from Trump’s words that not only threatened North Korea and Iran, but also criticized the United Nations?
If anyone anywhere on the planet feels reassured by these words, they should not be allowed to handle sharp objects unsupervised. With Trumps words, the threat of nuclear war increased; experts agree that even a ‘limited’ nuclear war, if such a thing is even possible, would result in a global catastrophe, with up to a billion people dying from the war itself, and the years-long nuclear winter that would follow. Even short of a nuclear war, Trump’s words troubled many of the U.S.’s longest allies, which could have severe economic impacts on the U.S. And oppressed people around the world, striving for the basic human rights and dignity that so many people take for granted, could only be discouraged by the absence of any allusion to human rights in Trump’s address.
This is the leader of the free world. This is the man with the nuclear codes. This is the future of the U.S., which, with a deeply sordid past, cannot look to any change in the foreseeable future. It must be hoped that, at least, there is a future.
[1] Suleiman, Michael W. U.S. Policy on Palestine from Wilson to Clinton. Association of Arab-American Graduates, 1995.Page 185.
Originally published by Counterpunch.