An American president doesn’t get to campaign on a platform of non-intervention in foreign affairs and a pulling back of our military forces overseas and then suddenly float an idea about a massive deployment of U.S. troops — in Gaza, of all places — and then expect a pass from the American people and the opinions of world leaders about the wild contradiction.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump said this week, apparently to the surprise of even his closest aides. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.”
We’ll own it? Gaza? Why would we want to own that? How can you criticize past administrations for their bad habit of nation building and then literally propose creating some new nation and … building it?
How could you claim you will remove the 2.2 million people who still live there after the cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and then create a “Riviera of the Middle East” and say it with a straight face, as Trump did this week, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, managing not to laugh, standing by his side?
“This is the most foolish idea any American president has put forth in the modern history of the United States,” Fawaz Gerges, a veteran Middle East expert and professor at the London School of Economics. told NBC News. “It is beyond any kind of rational thinking, any kind of policy feasibility.”
In the chaotic aftermath of floating this plainly ridiculous proposal, administration officials and to an extent Trump himself tried to walk back various aspects of the lunacy, especially the part about U.S. troops getting involved in the most volatile powder keg in the Middle East.
As part of his walk-back, after claiming that “the Palestinians. people like Chuck Schumer” — who happens to be a Jewish American — would somehow be “resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities,” Trump changed his tune Thursday about military intervention: “The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed!” he wrote on social media.
And then, as we have come to expect after outlandish suggestions by the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, Trump loyalists have to scramble to explain that what everyone from his friends to his enemies considered a crazy idea wasn’t really serious in the first place but was part of an elaborate negotiating scheme to bring The Art of the Deal into play and pressure other nations into … something.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, at first apparently taken entirely by surprise by the original Riviera scheme, now says Trump’s proposal to “take over Gaza” was never serious in the first place, but was meant to get Arab neighbors to pick up the slack and rebuild Gaza.
“It’s going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions,” he says.
Is it?
If this is a negotiating tactic — say or do something extreme, such as, for instance, slapping 25% tariffs on our closest trading partners — how can it possibly be allowed to work if the president immediately declares it to be a ploy, as he did in the case of the tariffs and Gaza? Where’s the gamesmanship in that?
We realize, with all Americans, that the president has a way with words, and that we should pay more attention to what he does rather than says. But the American people have to continue to call him out when he threatens to spill our blood and spend our treasure and then claims it was never a serious suggestion.