‘The Election is Now’: Trump’s ‘Campaignization’ of U.S. Foreign Policy
Trump camp rolls out UAE Israel normalization deal and push to collapse Iran deal amid realization the ‘election is now.’
U.S. President Donald Trump has made little secret that he has been looking for photo opportunities to play statesman for the cameras in recent months, and that he wasn’t particularly choosy about what foreign policy breakthrough was available for the role.
Thwarted by the covid-19 pandemic and German Chancellor Angela Merkel from hosting a G-7 summit this summer, Trump’s former envoy to Germany/Balkans envoy/briefly acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell tried to engineer a White House summit with the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo in June, but was jilted again. (Trump—reportedly at Grenell’s suggestion—subsequently punished Merkel for declining his G-7 invite by ordering the Pentagon to withdraw some 12,000 US forces from Germany.)
Trump’s National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien said Sunday that Trump had rejected the idea for a possible summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the US election.
“We've rejected that," O'Brien told NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday about a possible Trump Putin meeting before Nov. 3 US elections. “No, we're not doing a meeting with Putin in the United States."
"We'd love to have Putin come here, hopefully, to sign a terrific arms control deal that protects Americans and protects Russians," O’Brien later said.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted Sunday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had discussed in a phone call with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Putin’s idea for an online summit of the permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, UK, France, China, Russia) plus Germany and Iran about Iran and Persian Gulf Security.
Trump, however, on Saturday had expressed disinterest in Putin’s idea for a P5+1 video summit on Iran.
“Probably not,” Trump said at a press conference at his Bedminister, New Jersey golf club on Saturday, when asked if he would participate in Putin’s idea for a video summit on Iran, after indicating that Putin had asked.
“No, I think we want to wait until after the election,” Trump continued, adding, “Look, Iran wants me to lose so badly...Iran would love to have me defeated.”
Trump said the US would be introducing its measure to try to reimpose “snapback” sanctions on Iran at the UN this coming week.
But Richard Gowan, UN expert at the International Crisis Group, said the timing of the U.S. action may be driven by Trump seeking to claim reimposition of Iran snapback sanctions when he addresses the UN General Assembly the last week of September. After the US says it has introduced snapback (and the other UN Security Council members are likely to contest that the United States has the right to do so), there are 30 days before the U.S. would say it has gone into effect.
“The last week of September, Trump gives his final [first term] address to the General assembly, either in person or by video,” Gowan told Diplomatic. “I am pretty sure the entire goal is to have Trump on stage, giving his speech to a domestic audience, that he’s achieved snapback, as that would be a few days after the thirty day process is over.”
“The timing suggests they want this done before the General Assembly,” Gowan added.
Over the next few months through the U.S. election, we will likely “live in two parallel universes,” Gowan described, where the bulk of UN Security Council members are likely to sit back, and say, ‘sorry, guys, we don’t believe this claim is legitimate,’ while the US says, ‘we are on the road to snapback,’ and the rest of the Security Council says, ‘no, we’re not.’ And after thirty days, the US will say, ‘snapback happened,’ and the rest of the Council will say, no, it did not.
“The vote all the UN ambassadors are looking at is in November,” Gowan said. “The diplomatic hive-mind has looked at the polls, and concluded two things: Trump is going to lose, and the fallout from ‘snapback’ will last three or four months, and then there will be time to rebuild.”
Trump, in addition to planning to trumpet his reimpositon of snapback sanctions on Iran in his UN General Assembly address in late September, is rumored to be mulling a White House ceremony and photo opportunity in the coming weeks to promote the agreement announced last week on plans for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
The announced agreement for a roadmap for diplomatic normalization between the two non-enemies who had already been coordinating behind the scenes for several years was heralded by Trump’s son in law and advisor Jared Kushner as the triumph of a “strategic policy shift undertaken by President Trump 3 1/2 years ago that laid the foundation for the breakthrough the world witnessed this week.”
But one might be forgiven for seeing the agreement both as a legitimate foreign policy achievement that advances the interests of the three nations, and one whose announcement was also meant to try to benefit Trump’s reelection campaign.
“There is nothing wrong with trying to promote a larger peace between Israel and the UAE, generally,” a former Obama administration State Department official told Diplomatic. “The problem is when you grab foreign policy as an implement for reelection. US foreign policy is often not corresponding with campaign interests, which are fleeting.”
“My view about this deal...is these two guys [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed] want to make sure Trump is around in 2021,” the former State Department official said. “They did something aligned with their interests in the short term in their desire to see Trump reelected.”
Trump’s estranged former national security advisor John Bolton recently said that he did not think there was a foreign policy or national security decision that Trump took that was not motivated primarily by his efforts to win reelection.
Trump was of course impeached last December for one example: withholding US military assistance for Ukraine to pressure Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations of Trump’s 2020 election rival Joe Biden to benefit his domestic political reelection prospects. But Bolton said the examples of Trump’s use of foreign policy to benefit his reelection were far more pervasive, from his move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, to his courting of hardline Cuban and Venezuelan American voters in Florida with his anti-Castro and anti-Maduro posturing, to, according to Bolton, Trump’s cajoling of Chinese president Xi to increase purchases of US agriculture to benefit Trump’s reelection.
“I think he was so focused on the reelection that longer term considerations fell by the wayside,” Bolton told ABC’s Martha Raddatz in June. “So if he thought he could get a photo opportunity with Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone in Korea, or he thought he could get a meeting with the ayatollahs from Iran at the United Nations, that there was considerable emphasis on the photo opportunity and the press reaction to it and little or no focus on what such meetings did for the bargaining position of the United States.”
So this past week, with just under three months before the November 3 US election, and with Trump trailing in the polls, we got another seeming glimpse of foreign policy as Trump campaign theater, when Trump, in typical exaggerated fashion, announced a UAE-Israel agreement to normalize relations as an historic peace deal.
“My guess is they rushed it out now, because they had an epiphany, ...that the election does not take place in November,” the former State Department official said. With mail-in balloting and early voting beginning in some states in September, the punditry class and Trump’s advisors suddenly came to the realization, the former official said, that, essentially, “the election is now.”
(Photo credit: AP photo, by Andrew Harnik. Caption: President Donald Trump, center, accompanied by U.S. special envoy for Iran Brian Hook, Avraham Berkowitz, assistant to the president and special representative for international negotiations, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House national security adviser Robert O'Brien, and others, in the Oval Office on August 13, 2020.)