Tag: Abraham Accords
Colonial Project: Inside ‘Israel’s Coalition for Regional Security’ and the Role of Arab Leaders
Just hours after the Israeli aggression on Iran ended and Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of “a new Israeli-led Middle East,” a campaign began promoting the so-called “Israeli Coalition for Regional Security,” which reportedly includes 10 Arab leaders, notably from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Colonial Project: Inside ‘Israel’s Coalition for Regional Security’ and the Role of Arab Leaders
H/T: Rachel Blevins & Sarah Bils
Related:
Iran: MAGA Goes Masks Off
Trump’s remarkable Middle East tour is all about striking megadeals and outfoxing China
There has never been a US presidential visit to the Middle East like this one.
This week, success will be measured not in conventional diplomacy, peace deals, or arms sales, although Donald Trump did make some news by lifting sanctions on the Syrian leadership, urging Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to join the Abraham Accords by normalizing relations with Israel, and agreeing to a $142 billion weapons package for Riyadh.
Trump’s remarkable Middle East tour is all about striking megadeals and outfoxing China
Cuckold Europe, prop up dictators: Trump’s global plot laid bare
Cuckold Europe, prop up dictators: Trump’s global plot laid bare
A month after Donald Trump’s second inauguration and the geopolitical global upheaval that may be unprecedented, one thing is clear: The president is an American sovereigntist, not an isolationist. Once this is understood, Trump’s seemingly wild upturning of the geopolitical order actually makes sense.
Sovereigntists are illiberal internationalists. They came of age after World War I, preventing the US from joining the League of Nations (the predecessor of the United Nations). At the time, American sovereigntists regarded the league as a stalking horse for global governance, anti-colonial independence movements, black internationalists, left-wing political movements and liberal Christians.
Today’s sovereigntists aim to weaken non-Western international associations that seek a more democratic international order. They make common cause with similar forces; Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, for example. Their aim is an illiberal international geopolitical order where domestic political systems resemble “competitive authoritarianism” – multi-party elections embedded in a rigged legal and political environment. Under this model, the media and the machinery of government are used to attack opponents and co-opt critics.
Trump wants the US, not China, to write the technical standards of the global economy. Control over these standards creates lock-in effects in finance, telecommunications, space, robotics, bioengineering, nanotechnologies, and advanced materials and manufacturing methods. That means full-spectrum rivalry with China. If economic control is not possible, the plan B goal is global economic separation from China.
For Trump to achieve these goals, there are three key frontlines: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Taiwan.
Pro-Israel leaders encouraged by Brian Hook’s role on State Department transition team
As questions emerge about how President-elect Donald Trump will handle the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East during a second term, some pro-Israel foreign policy voices say they have been reassured by recent news reports that Brian Hook, a special envoy for Iran in the first Trump administration, is expected to lead the transition team at the State Department.
Hook, who previously worked in the State Department under former President George W. Bush and is now the vice chairman of Cerberus Global Investments, helped to oversee Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign toward Iran, including punishing sanctions after the U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal. He was also a key player on the team that negotiated the Abraham Accords, Trump’s signature foreign policy achievement, which the president-elect has pledged to expand when he returns to office.
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Among the candidates rumored to be under consideration for secretary of state are Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a former ambassador to Japan; Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security advisor; and Ric Grenell, who served as the former president’s ambassador to Germany as well as his acting director of national intelligence.
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But conservative foreign policy experts surveyed by JI said they did not envision ideological tensions between Hook and Grenell emerging should they serve together. “Grenell mirrors Trump in being a champion-level supporter of Israel and Iran hawk,” said a former official on Trump’s National Security Council, who was granted anonymity to discuss the transition. “There would be no reason for friction.”
Pro-Israel leaders encouraged by Brian Hook’s role on State Department transition team
Previously:
Making Excuses for Trump: Where Does the Buck Stop?
But Trump’s seemingly aimless foreign and national security policies are only part of the problem. More to the point, the president keeps appointing people to senior level positions where they have a hand in shaping the policies ranging from hardline on civil liberties issues to complete interventionism vis-à-vis America’s role worldwide. The list is long and includes John Bolton, Rick Grenell, Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, James Jeffrey, Robert O’Brien, John Ratcliffe and Gina Haspel. And one might suggest that the latest move might very well be the worst of all, naming Eliot Abrams as Special Envoy on Iran.
On the Record with Hamas
The past nine months of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza have spurred an unprecedented global awakening to the plight of the Palestinian people. At no point in the 76 years since the formation of the state of Israel and the unleashing of the Nakba has there been such sustained and open anger at Israel and such widespread solidarity with the Palestinians. The massive demonstrations in cities across the globe, the severing of diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, the recalling of ambassadors, rulings from world courts against Israel, and mounting demands for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state—none of this would have taken place without the impetus of Hamas’s armed insurrection on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war of annihilation in Gaza.
The Postwar Vision That Sees Gaza Sliced Into Concentration Camps
The Postwar Vision That Sees Gaza Sliced Into Security Zones
A plan that is gaining currency in the government and military envisions creating geographical “islands” or “bubbles” where Palestinians who are unconnected to Hamas can live in temporary shelter while the Israeli military mops up remaining insurgents.
Other members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party are backing another, security-focused plan that seeks to slice up Gaza with two corridors running across its width and a fortified perimeter that would allow Israel’s military to mount raids when it deems them necessary.
The ideas come from informal groups of retired army and intelligence officers, think tanks, academics and politicians, as well as internal discussions inside the military. While Israel’s political leadership has said almost nothing about how the Gaza Strip will look and be governed after the heaviest fighting ends, these groups have been working on detailed plans that offer a glimpse of how Israel is thinking about what it calls the Day After.
The plans—whether or not they get adopted in full—reveal hard realities about the aftermath that rarely get voiced. Among them, that Palestinian civilians could be confined indefinitely to smaller areas of the Gaza Strip while fighting continues outside, and that Israel’s army could be forced to remain deeply involved in the enclave for years until Hamas is marginalized.
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According to people familiar with the effort, it aims to work with local Palestinians who are unaffiliated with Hamas to set up isolated zones in northern Gaza. Palestinians in areas where Israel believes Hamas no longer holds sway would distribute aid and take on civic duties. Eventually, a coalition of U.S. and Arab states would manage the process, these people said.
Ziv, who oversaw Israel’s exit from Gaza in 2005, proposes that Palestinians who are ready to denounce Hamas could register to live in fenced-off geographic islands located next to their neighborhoods and guarded by the Israeli military. This would entitle them to reconstruction of their homes.
The process would be gradual, and in the longer term, Ziv envisages bringing the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority back to Gaza as a political solution, with the whole process taking roughly five years as the military fights Hamas insurgents. Under his plan, Hamas could be part of Gaza’s administration, if it frees all the hostages held there and disarms, becoming purely a political movement.
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Northern Gaza, under the plan, would remain without reconstruction, and Palestinians there wouldn’t be allowed back to their homes until Hamas’s miles-long tunnel network was destroyed. Like the bubbles plan, it promotes the notion of de-escalation zones where aid can be delivered by the Israeli military or by international forces, but stops short of articulating an idea for governance.
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Another plan published by the Washington-based Wilson Center* also advocates a coalition-style approach to the conflict but refrains from calling for Israel to consider the adoption of a Palestinian state. It says the U.S. should establish an international police force to manage security in Gaza and over time hand the job to a yet-to-be-defined Palestinian administration.
Robert Silverman**, a former U.S. diplomat in Iraq who is a co-author, said his team discussed the plan with Israeli officials for months, even changing parts of the proposal to make it more agreeable to Israel’s war objectives and political dynamics, but it stalled with the prime minister’s office.
“He believes we finish the war first and then plan the postwar,” Silverman said of Netanyahu. “All the people who have done this before say that’s a huge mistake.”
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Another document, drafted by Israeli academics, that has made its way to the prime minister’s desk draws on historical precedents in rebuilding the war zones in Germany and Japan after World War II, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. It considers how to tackle Hamas’s Islamist doctrine by learning from the defeat of ideologies such as Nazism and that of Islamic State.
Related:
The Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP; Vietnamese: Ấp Chiến lược) was a plan by the government of South Vietnam in conjunction with the US government and ARPA during the Vietnam War to combat the communist insurgency by pacifying the countryside and reducing the influence of the communists among the rural population through the creation of concentration camps.
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The Strategic Hamlet Program was unsuccessful, failing to stop the insurgency or gain support for the government from rural Vietnamese, it alienated many and helped contribute to the growth in influence of the Viet Cong. After President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a coup in November 1963, the program was cancelled. Peasants moved back into their old homes or sought refuge from the war in the cities. The failure of the Strategic Hamlet and other counterinsurgency and pacification programs were causes that led the United States to decide to intervene in South Vietnam with air strikes and ground troops.
The *Wilson Center plan isn’t much better. 👇🏻
Related:
Read More »Biden Offers to Turn U.S. Military Personnel Into Saudi Royal Bodyguards
President Joe Biden has made a habit of putting the interest of foreign governments before that of the American people. Like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Biden Offers to Turn U.S. Military Personnel Into Saudi Royal Bodyguards by Doug Bandow
Flashback (has he forgotten?):
[2019] American Soldiers Are Not Bodyguards for Saudi Royals by Doug Bandow
President Donald Trump believes in America First except when it comes to the Saudi royal family. Then it is Saudi Arabia first.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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