Costas Iordanidis
cior@otenet.gr
In 2015, during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said of the foreign policy he intended to pursue that “there’s something unpredictable about Trump, and that’s wonderful.” He was obviously referring to himself in the third person and suggesting that leaders should never reveal what they are about to do.
For the past two months, the US president has issued daily statements that often contradict one another, to the point that a veteran British journalist, writing in The Spectator, wondered whether in Mr Trump’s case “there is some method in the madness, or whether it is simply madness.” Naturally, he left the question unanswered.
According to some observers, if there is one constant in the American president’s policy, it is the creation of chaos and uncertainty, especially among Washington’s allies in the Arab world and Europe. Still, this is hardly the first time Europeans have viewed American military interventions with skepticism. The war launched by President George W. Bush against Iraq in 2003 also exposed serious disagreements, particularly from France.
The criticism directed at Mr Trump is that he started a war based on fantasies that collapsed on the battlefield, without having any clear exit strategy. But as boxer Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” It really is that simple.
When Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 to regain control of the Suez Crisis after it had been nationalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser, they had certainly prepared a detailed plan. Yet they still failed, and the “punch in the mouth” came not from the Baathists who had seized power in Egypt, but from American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had no desire to be associated with the “colonial powers” of Britain and France.
Commenting on the humiliating defeat of British prime minister Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill, who never embraced appeasement, once remarked: “I would never have dared to start the Suez war, but neither would I have dared to stop it.” Today, a cornered President Trump is searching for a way out of the war he launched alongside Israel against Iran, a country where the world’s two other major nuclear powers, China and Russia, both have strategic interests.
In 1969, when John Lennon was spending his honeymoon with his wife in a hotel in Montreal, a journalist asked him what he hoped to achieve by lying in bed all day. Lennon answered spontaneously: “Just give peace a chance.” That simple phrase became the greatest anti-war song of the last century. But times have changed since then.
