President Trump as Peacemaker
And why President Trump's diplomatic gifts may be the one guarantee to ensure America’s continued relevance, if it still indeed wishes to remain relevant, into the twenty-first century.
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The world order feels like it is in a dizzying spiral under the Biden regime. To the extent Biden has a discernible foreign policy strategy at all, it is one of managed chaos – the question of whether such chaos is intentional or not is less important to the panoply of disasters, each one seemingly worse than the last, that has driven the world to really the closest it has been to global war any time since 1945.
Unlike the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the last time in which the world came to the brink of nuclear Armageddon, the Kennedy administration, unlike the Biden administration, at least attempted to put on a pretext of calm and competence to the world. This, even as President Kennedy lamented in private to his Attorney General and brother, Bobby, at the darkest moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis: we had a good life; it is a tragedy our children will not live to grow old.
Now, we cannot even take consolation in the pretext of competence and sound decision-making from our so-called “leaders.” The sequence of disasters that have defined Biden’s term would be otherwise impressive for their sheer frequency and scale if we did not have to live through their tragic ramifications. First, Afghanistan, which sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East for its slipshod and reckless execution. The need to end American intervention was well past time, and something that President Trump rightfully made a priority of his own foreign policy agenda. But when you involve yourself in a quagmire for nearly twenty years, the process of winding down must be managed diligently and delicately, like an aircraft attempting to land in very turbulent conditions. If mishandled, the aircraft can easily skid off the landing strip, to disastrous results. This is exactly what occurred to America with its Afghanistan troop withdrawal: the whole crisis, which could have been avoided, derailed beyond control – the outcome was the formerly American occupied territory sunk into enemy hands, allowing munitions to be rerouted to Hamas and other militant groups – whose downstream effects have come back to bite us with a vengeance in this latest conflict in Gaza – leaving the morale of the American military at the lowest it has been in decades.
On that score, all branches of the military are struggling mightily to enlist new recruits; those that have enlisted are struggling to gin up ample support to fight Hamas in Israel, or Russians in Ukraine, or any combatants anywhere. Speaking of Ukraine, that expedition turned out to be yet another botched job on Joe Biden’s foreign policy resume. Granted, all the responsibility lay not exclusively at Biden’s feet. The regime’s Ukrainian policy was, particularly in the first year, abetted by a bloodthirsty and financially freewheeling neoconservative coalition in Congress, who caricatured Putin as this generation’s Hitler, and, with equal hysterics, Zelensky the next Churchill, as fodder to sell their war to the general public.
Of course, nowhere in that uncomfortable arena known as “reality” where fewer and fewer members of Congress like to dwell, are Putin or Zelensky remotely in the same category as their World War II foils. But that decision of central casting is secondary to the ease with which congressmen, and their media allies, feel they can get away with such dramatic historical revisionism. To say nothing of the laxity with which moral aspersions against those who disagreed with Washington’s “official” stance so easily flowed from Jake Tapper’s pulpit. (Nobody ever seems to question why, without fail, “the bad guys” are invariably the side that goes against what is best for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s bottom line!)
Americans today are extraordinarily ignorant, and that has to do with our failure to educate. In short, we are a people who cannot think or work out the logic of abstract problems to their natural conclusions; in war, we cannot appreciate subtlety and moral nuance. Those failures, when extrapolated to a national scale, and paired with the high stakes that international diplomacy requires, become palpably evident. All morality becomes monochrome: particularly in a witheringly provincial and relativistic age like ours, where the stratum of race-based intersectionality is the ultimate arbiter, the court of last resort, for who is right and who is wrong, the right invariably being the “darker” of the two races, always seen as being closest in moral equivalence with the eternal plight sustained by America’s black population.
Except, of course, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the one exception to the dominant rule, where the side perceived as racially “less white,” i.e., the Palestinians, is cast as the villain to the Israeli heroes, who are “white,” and thereby, perplexingly, good? Bad? It depends on who you ask.
What is evident, however, is that lawmakers – in the collective – are utterly incapable of rendering sober decisions, based on sound reasoning and commonsense, in any capacity on the global stage. Instead, they traffic in discord and chaos, with seeming unending impunity. The Middle East, Russia, and China are undoubtedly on the rise; the real miracle is that they have not exploited Western incompetence to make even greater gains than they already have had over the past two years.
Though now, things appear to be picking up at a breakneck pace – with the trifecta of dominos in Afghanistan to Ukraine to Israel toppling one after another, damaging America’s international standing with each occurrence, the opportunity for other geopolitical actors to make predatory mincemeat of our leaders’ weakness becomes greater than ever. Taiwan, the next potential theater for war that neocons have been long agitating for, will be the next domino to fall. A deathly precarious US-Mexico border, rife with drug cartels and an explosive human trafficking crisis, already reached a boiling point given the tens of thousands of illegals that cross over every single month, might be counted as the fifth. Add to that staggering figure the pressure to absorb Palestinian “refugees,” perhaps numbering in the millions, and the real miracle becomes: how, on earth, has the country not already yet bottomed out?
As we move further away from the twentieth century, and further into the twenty-first, we observe the world becoming palpably more multipolar – which is to say, less American-dominant. Different governing approaches, some having been dormant for years now, reawaken and rise to the fore. The more primitive ones, based on blood and religion, as we are seeing all across the Middle East, which have been long sublimated by the false eternal peace of the twentieth century, may well contain the key, oddly enough, to preserving national traditions and identity in the West in the not-so-distant future.
The governing philosophies of Eastern strongmen – Putin, Xi, Assad – may (in some cases, rightly) seem anathema to American values. But it is they, not we, who seem poised to have the final word of how the chips will fall this century. Recourse, especially on foreign policy, must be taken to these models – not as reason to plunge headlong into autocracy, but as a reminder of the power of one exceptional leader or statesman who can indeed be the difference between war and peace.
As Richard Nixon famously said in his first inaugural, “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” America had a President much more recently than Nixon who was, truly, a peacemaker – in every sense of the term. No major new wars started, while older ones wound down.
For the first time in decades, the unthinkable happened: a president crossed the 38th parallel and stepped foot into North Korea; he also disinterred art of diplomacy from its decades-old crypt, and exhibited all its forgotten powers to a would-be Russian aggressor, who in the four years of President Trump’s now-woefully missed first term, proposed what had been unthinkable: détente. Or, something that seemed impossible for the 45th President’s predecessor, and seems somehow even more impossible now with his successor.
There is a concept in Christian eschatology referred to as the katechon, a Greek word that derives from St. Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (2:6-7). Though the Biblical passage is shrouded in mystery – being the subject of scholarly debate literally since the age in which it was written – the term roughly translates to “he who holds back,” and has been over the centuries interpreted to mean that force, either an emperor or king or even president, that prevents the world order from collapsing into world chaos. In other words, that which prevents Armageddon from being reality. In the past, that role was often seen as a Roman emperor. In today’s global world, it belongs to the individual who might keep and maintain peace.
Whatever its greater theological significance, as a concept in political theology in our times that withholding force between chaos and stability is best personified by not Putin, Xi, Biden, or any other world leader, as is evident based on the events of the past two-plus years, but Donald Trump, and he alone. The formula is simple: with him, the world was at relative peace, without, chaos.
Geopolitics is a very messy business. And while it is certainly unbecoming to boil complex and centuries-old conflicts down to such readymade solutions – after all, it is that kind of reasoning and moral simplicity that goes a long way towards explaining the gravity of our current crisis in the first place. But there is also an important lesson here about the power of true statecraft, even in an age that believes itself too good for any need of the concept, in maintaining global order. No other politician, and certainly none among the lot now running for president, has Donald Trump’s talents for deal making – gifts which, as it turns out, were readily transferable to geopolitical diplomacy – proving just as effective in getting Moscow to come to the table, as it they were in Manhattan’s real-estate scene in a previous life.
President Trump used to quip that his two favorite books were “The Art of the Deal” and “The Bible.” Ironically, maybe prophetically, we find ourselves in a situation slipping towards Biblical prophecy whose only remedy might be the honed skillset of a Manhattan negotiator, in essence, combining the main precepts of each work. Outlandish as it may sound, that combination may be the only solution we have left to prevent what Thomas Hobbes termed bellum omnium contra omnes – war of all against all, where tribal loyalties have begun to make a roaring comeback – and manifest themselves in the ancient ethnic and religious-based conflicts that have reignited with a vengeance in the wars now observable the world over. This is a return of politics, at its most pure and primitive.
This is also even more reason why President Trump, who understands the contours of political deal making at a gut-instinct level which few others possess, is needed more than ever. His skillset may be the one guarantee for ensuring America’s continued relevance, if it still indeed seeks to remain relevant, into the twenty-first century.
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Paul Ingrassia is a Law Clerk at The McBride Law Firm, PLLC. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022 and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club. He is also a two-time Claremont Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, and Rumble.
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