Category: Iran

RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH WORLD WAR THREE

If you squint your eyes just right, and try very hard to look beyond and beneath the wreckage of our national politics, it’s possible to find signs of hope, of a new dawn ready to rise out of the ashes of our Trumpian despair. Really. Well, sort of. Anyway, I wanted my first blog post of 2020 to focus on the hopeful, on a vision of transcendence and progressive change. I had 16 pages of notes and was all set to make the case for optimism.  Then our president ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, and the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of the war drums quickly drowned out all aspirations of hope and change.   

Happy New Year, same as the old year. Only worse. And we thought 2019 got off to a bad start when Trump shut most of the government down.  We should be so lucky to have a shutdown right now. It might have prevented Friday’s drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.  

Instead, we woke up on the third day of this new year to a cascade of depressing news. Yes, Suleimani orchestrated the deaths of hundreds or thousands (the Prevaricator in Chief says millions) of American and Iraqi troops and citizens. He was also revered as almost a cult figure by Iran’s leaders and allies.  The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised “forceful revenge”.  

As a result, our country went into to full-scale war prep.  The State Department warned all U.S. citizens to leave Iraq immediately.  Thousands of American troops are on their way to the Middle East. U.S. businesses and government agencies were told to prepare for Iranian cyber attacks. “World War III” trended on Twitter.  The Selective Service’s website crashed after being inundated by young men worrying about getting drafted into battle.

Trump, meanwhile, took a hero’s bow at a Miami campaign rally, boasting about Suleimani’s execution-by-drone. “He was planning a very major attack,” said the president, “and we got him!” The crowd roared, and Trump took it to the next level with a single declarative sentence: “God is on our side.”  

If all this had gone down at any other time in our history, the prudent and rational course for us would have been to take a deep breath and engage in watchful waiting as events unfolded.  As unseemly as an assassination of another country’s leader might appear, we would also be mindful of how much we don’t know about the underlying facts of the kill order. The president, after all, is surrounded by military and intelligence experts who carefully weigh all available facts before advising the commander in chief.  If they all thought killing one high ranking Iranian leader would save many American lives, that would warrant a green light in many moral paradigms.  

Sadly, this is not any other time in history. This is now.  This is Donald J. Trump.  His narrative about killing the bad guy in order to save American lives can only be viewed through the lens of a pathological liar, one who, according to the Washington Post’s fact checker, made 15,413 false or misleading statements during his first 1,055 days in office.  He has also demonstrated a propensity to ignore the advice of the experts who surround him, bragging about how, due to the power of his instinct, he knows more than any general.  

Then comes Trump’s single most important behavioral characteristic, at least in terms of predicting the choice he will make in any given situation. He will, without fail, follow the impulse to do whatever he thinks at the time will make him look the strongest and the winningest to his adoring MAGA base.  As a piece of leverage, last year’s government shutdown was a dismal failure for the administration. Trump’s base, however, showered him with adoration for messing up a government they disdain in order to build a wall to keep brown people from “invading” America.  The same please-the-base decision making was responsible for putting children in cages, the transgender military ban and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty, to name but a few. 

The dynamic also explains why Trump rejected the advice of military experts last fall and announced a sudden withdrawal of troops from Syria, leaving our Kurdish allies to fend for themselves.  The president hit the campaign rally circuit in October with boasts of “No more endless wars. I’m bringing them all home.” He basked in the dopamine of cheering crowd approval. 

Not even three months later, the Trump administration is sending thousands of troops into the middle east, gearing up for an Iranian retaliatory strike in response to Suleimani’s killing. Most authorities on the middle east say we are closer to a full-blown war in that region than at any time in the past several decades.  Some say we are already at war, that the drone strike on Suleimani was an act of war.  

How is it that the same president who took bows before a cheering crowd for ending wars is now getting the same reaction for starting one?  Chalk it up to the magic of a freeze frame presidency.  This guy doesn’t do strategy, only tactics in the moment. And whatever that moment portends is all that counts.  Shortly after Suleimani was killed, Trump triumphantly announced that he had “ended a war”, even while thousands of American troops were on their way to the middle east in preparation for Iran’s retaliatory strike. In Trump Time, that neither counted nor mattered.

What makes this horrendous situation even worse is the current political atmosphere in which congressional Republicans have abandoned all moral calculus in order to march in lockstep with a president they know is, at best, unhinged, out of fear that Trump will disparage them on Twitter. These GOP leaders have spent the past few months insisting that there is nothing wrong with a president asking foreign countries to interfere in our elections, a revolting abandonment of long-held norms and values. Add to that now, the party’s acquiescence with the assassination of another country’s leader. 

This rapid and deep abdication of the moral underpinnings of our democracy will one day be laid bare in our history books.  The days we are now struggling through will be correctly portrayed as a major stain on what has been known as the “American Experiment”.  The only control we have over the content of those pages will be the length of that stain, and how we go about removing it and taking our country back.

THE REAL ART OF THE DEAL: NEVER EMULATE TRUMP’S NEGOTIATING STYLE

If Donald Trump were a car, he could be immediately disposed of under the lemon laws of most states. Not only is he congenitally incapable of functioning as president, he sold himself to America on the blatantly fraudulent claim that he would be the best deal maker to ever occupy the White House. As it turns out, this guy couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag.

Forget about The Art of the Deal, Trump’s ghostwritten ode to his delusional prowess as a master negotiator.  With this one-trick pony, it’s all about the art of the threat. His singular approach to conflict resolution is to fire off a volley of threats at his opponents, like something out of the Godfather movies.  The only difference is that most Mafia dons are adept strategists. Trump is not.  He simply huffs and puffs and indiscriminately hurls threats with all of the dexterity of an angry drunk denied bar service at last call. 

Rarely a day goes by without this president lobbing a new threat at a perceived adversary.  He’s threated both North Korea and Iran with economic sanctions and/or nuclear annihilation but is nowhere close to an agreement with either country.  He threatened immigrants with an array of Draconian retributions for entering the country illegally and they have continued to storm the borders in record-breaking numbers.  He threated Mexico with all sorts of mayhem if didn’t pay for the wall, which it steadfastly refuses to do.  After first threatening to close the Mexican border as leverage to get that country to stop the flow of immigrants, he backed away and threatened to slap tariffs on imported goods from our neighbor. Then he dropped the tariff threat in exchange for an agreement that merely codified the status quo. For all of his verbal fire and fury, he got nothing he didn’t already have.

The list, of course, goes on and on.  He threatened former FBI director James Comey with releasing tapes that didn’t exist. He threatened to:  end the NFL’s tax cuts;  impose a tax on European cars; cut off aid to countries he doesn’t like; stop health insurance payments for members of Congress until they pass an Obamacare replacement; pull NBC’s licenses because he doesn’t like their coverage of him. In some cases, he actually made good on his threats, like shutting down the government to get his border wall funding. None of these threats, executed or not, delivered the outcome Trump was looking for.  

He does, however, reap a valuable dividend: love and adoration from diehard supporters who worship their action hero president for having the alpha male fortitude to man-up and take on a political system they have grown to despise.  The more Trump threatens and bellows, the more his base loves him.  Yet, remove the smoke and mirrors from the Trumpian bargaining process and you will find nothing resembling a serious, effective negotiation. Just an agitated old man braying at the moon. 

Donald Trump is a cartoonish stereotype of what many people think of when they hear the word “negotiator”, an angry, red-faced, table-pounding blowhard barking demands and hurling insults at the other side. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

“The world’s best negotiators,” said Marty Latz, a well-respected conflict resolution trainer, “are also empathetic, as they deeply listen, understand and appreciate their counterparts’ needs and interests without necessarily agreeing with them.”  Trump, according to Latz, “has undermined (his) effectiveness for years with his lack of preparation, spontaneous gut-level moves, threats, name-calling, an adversarial win-lose approach, and an extremely aggressive and often mean-spirited tone.”

Of course Trump and his merry band of MAGA voters offer a far different narrative of the all-powerful deal maker, one that reflects illusions created by theater of the mind. Take North Korea, for example. The president would have us believe that his bellicose threats to destroy that country with the “fire and fury” of his nuclear button brought North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to his knees, begging for a negotiated peace.  With grandiose visions of the Nobel Peace Prize dancing in his head, Trump has spent the past two years in repeated photo ops with Kim.  To hear the Donald tell it, he is now “in love” with Kim and the two are endowed with a “very special relationship” that, of course, ensued directly from Trump’s threats to bomb Kim and his country into oblivion.  Just yesterday, Trump made front page news by becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in North Korea.  

Yet, we are not an inch closer to a deal ending North Korea’s nuclear capabilities than we were when Trump was threatening to blow the country up.  Kim may be a brutal, murdering dictator, but he, unlike our president, is an effective negotiator. Kim knows his opponent and he is giving him what he needs right now: political cover through the illusion of peace.  Without making a single concession, Kim has elevated his own status on the world stage. More amazingly, he has transformed his relationship with Trump from one of threatened annihilation to that of a bumbling bromance. 

A number of law school professors who specialize in conflict resolution have expressed concern that their students will be influenced by Trump’s approach to deal-making, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything they teach, namely listening, empathy, relationship building and problem solving.  Andrea Kupfer Schneider, director of the Dispute Resolution Program at Marquette University Law School, said she emphasizes to her students, that Trump’s objectives in a negotiation are aimed singularly at his political goals, not at the interests of his client, namely the American people. 

“Although the president might appear to be engaged in negotiating with a counterpart, his goal does not appear to be changing that particular counterpart’s mind,” she wrote. “Instead, his negotiation behavior is often calculated, not necessarily to result in successful negotiations, but to boost his political ratings.”

Remember those days, when America was truly great, and the president was seen as a role model for students?  They have been replaced with a new warning:  If you want to be an effective negotiator, pay no attention to Donald Trump. Alas, there is no art in his deals.