Trump’s Art of Confusion in Syria (1)

Anthony F. Shaker is professor of McGill University. He has authored a lengthy article which has appeared on Global research.org. We have chosen excerpts of the article for you.

Donald Trump has the reputation of preferring, always, to negotiate business from a position of strength. While this is hardly unusual, it takes considerably more skill to negotiate from a position of weakness.

Journalists and think-tank gurus have been watching closely to see how, after his hard beating at the hands of the media and powerful establishment forces inside the United States, he will establish himself—not as businessman but—in the international arena. The Tomahawk missile strikes on a Syrian air force base have certainly earned him accolades from inveterate enemies, even if his about-face on the Syrian president in the Rose Garden, with the Jordanian king at his side, has confirmed the worst fears about the inherent weakness of a vacillating president.

The unexpected naval attack on the Syrian airbase has revealed two even more important things. The first is the stubborn weakness of the United States’ position in Syria. Instead of cleverly unblocking the political deadlock on Syria, as he may have wished to do, his move has gravely exacerbated the preexisting fragility of the US. His equivocation and sudden militarism have boxed him in along with the other two Western powers on US’s coattails—England and France.

So far, we have only seen bombast, wild declarations, and one attack against a Syrian base from left field.

With the abject failure of his anti-immigration executive orders and Obamacare initiative, on the home front, it seems accurate to conclude that Trump has effectively been brought to his knees by the neocons and liberals alike.

But there is a side to Trump’s “negotiating” persona that we should not forget besides his infatuation with strength at everyone else’s expense. The second important, then, concerns the tactic he learned in business of throwing his opponent off balance with unpredictable, even irrational actions. It’s a classic maneuver in a game like chess. Well executed, it has the potential of abruptly changing the course of a losing streak. But chess is played with rigid rules, and interstate politics is not really a game. It is not even like running a business empire. There is a lot more at stake than can be crunched in numbers, recorded on corporate ledgers, or traded in dollars.

It was Henry Kissinger who refined unpredictability—the Madman Theory—into an art. That said, in one of the two main theatres of conflict he was involved in, he had to opt for the B-52s when things failed to go his way at the Paris negotiations—massive bombardments of North Vietnamese cities that exceeded any during WWII and earned him the reputation of a war criminal. The object was to show to what extent the US was prepared to go to secure its “interests” in Southeast Asia. We know the outcome of that conflict.

At the height of the 1973 October War, his other theatre, Israel had barely managed to recover the Golan Heights and Sinai Desert it had been occupying, but only after losing 92 warplanes and almost the entire war. The tide began to turn thanks only to Kissinger’s insistence that the US create an “air bridge” for resupply, fierce pressure on the USSR. The unprecedented idea of “peace” talks that Kissinger subsequently put on the table during armistice talks, his master stroke, effectively neutralized Egypt. He went on to extract one humiliating concession after another from a groveling Anwar Sadat eager for the US embrace. After this, the Zionist regime had a free hand to invade Lebanon in 1978 and again, even more devastatingly, in 1982 without the slightest objection from Sadat. The second invasion, which took the lives of around 24,000 Lebanese citizens, was a watershed in West Asia. Nothing would be the same again for the illegitimate regime of Israel, either, and the whole region has been writhing in despair and anger ever since.

This is the predictable outcome of the “clever” tactic of changing the rules of the game for no higher purpose than raw self-interest. Kissinger considered it the mark of a greatest statesman to keep redefining goals and to have “the strength to contemplate chaos.” This, of course, has been the tactic of choice of the neocons, who have been instrumental in the demolition of one country after another in an imperious effort to reshape Middle East according to their own image. As ingenious as it may sound, it carries its own seeds of self-destruction. It’s rather easy to point this out in hindsight, but the effectiveness of unpredictability and the air of madness has clearly been wearing off since George W. Bush’s 9-11 presidency.

Instead of allowing Trump to “negotiate” from a stronger position than the one Obama left him with, vis-à-vis a vilified adversary like Russia, the 59 Tomahawk missiles have further weakened his hand. In their aftermath, on April 6, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson immediately enshrined the assault as a presidential moment. “This clearly indicates the president is willing to take decisive action when called for. The use of prohibited chemical weapons, which violates a number of international norms and violates existing agreements, called for this type of… kinetic military response,” he said.

His declaration would have been nothing out of the ordinary had it not been made in the wake of a baffling series of contradictory statements by Trump officials in Washington and at the UN. The media had been reporting the all-round confusion and consternation that resulted right up to Trump’s odd change of heart. The strikes came on the heels of two sets of declarations by American officials. Tillerson’s, to the effect that the fate of President Assad will be decided by the people of Syria; and US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley’s broadside against the Syrian president and Russian support for his government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused her of sabotaging the Geneva talks, a charge that has been repeated several times. But she persisted, at one point claiming that “regime change is going to happen.”

But then after the strike, Tillerson emphasized,

“I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a change in our policy or our posture relative to our military activities in Syria today. There’s been no change in that status. But I think it does demonstrate that President Trump is willing to act when governments and actors cross the line … in the most heinous of ways.”

While falling short of a rectification of Haley’s intemperate diplomacy, this view was reiterated later even by the Secretary of War Mattis, who is anti-Iran.

Despite this the escalation continued. The White House spokesman let slip the idea that “barrel bombs,” a militarily undefined concept, may constitute grounds for another US assault, only to clarify later, “Nothing has changed in our posture. The president retains the option to act in Syria against the Assad regime whenever it is in the national interest, as was determined following that government’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens.”

Well, is the US government concerned to protect the national interest or the innocent victims? Is the policy ambiguity painted by all those persons by design, part of Trump’s tactic of unpredictability to throw opponents off balance, or a sign of disorientation?

Whatever Trump may once have been entertaining, it failed to materialize at the G7 summit into anything usable for pushing Putin around. In fact, the very idea of forcing Russia “into a corner” was expressly rejected there. While his Secretary of State was busy assuring the world that Bashar al-Assad will not be part of Syria’s future, Trump appeared singularly incapable of parlaying the impact of the missile strikes, which basically reshuffled the cards, into a tangible gain for use against Russia. Despite the high hopes and affirmations of a unified stand, not to mention UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s rant about Assad being “toxic” and about the need to sanction both Russia and Syria, the Italian Foreign Minister, Angelino Alfano, was forced to admit at the end of the summit, “At the moment there is no consensus on new sanctions as an effective instrument.”

All they could muster was enough agreement to have Tillerson relay an ultimatum-like demand to President Putin to turn away from Assad and join the West’s own—dreadfully ineffectual—strategy for a political solution. This obviously sidelined the indispensable efforts undertaken by Russia with its Astana initiative, which basically saved the Geneva talks. But the most tangible effect was to leave Tillerson waxing poetic about crimes against innocents “anywhere.”

“We rededicate ourselves to holding to account,” he announced at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, the scene of a Nazi massacre in Italy, “any and all who commit crimes against the innocents anywhere in the world.”

Moralizing about victims is the last resort for the weaker party when the going gets tough. It’s cheap and it’s the oldest trick in the world, designed to avoid rational argument or a more sensible path in the face of a rout. In a longer statement, he took pains to scorn Russia’s “alignment with Iran and Hezbollah.” Self-importantly, he urged Putin him to abandon his important ally Iran and to waste no time aligning himself rather with the US.

Translated, all this loud talk—in place of quiet but more effective diplomacy—ensured that he had to fly off to Moscow with an emptier hand than he had before the summit and the strikes. This is precisely what he was made to understand before the cameras upon sitting down in his chair opposite Lavrov’s team. As he was sitting down, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov fired off that

“primitiveness and loutishness are very characteristic of the current rhetoric coming out of Washington. We shall hope that this does not become the substance of American policy.”

Flanked by his own team and facing icy expressions from the Russian side of the table, Tillerson calmly said, “I look forward to a very open, candid, frank exchange so that we can better define the U.S.-Russian relationship from this point forward.”

But Lavrov sternly told him, “I won’t hide the fact that we have a lot of questions, taking into account the extremely ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ideas which have been expressed in Washington across the whole spectrum of bilateral and multilateral affairs. And of course, that’s not to mention that apart from the statements, we observed very recently the extremely worrying actions, when an illegal attack against Syria was undertaken.”

RM/MG