Archives des Gaza - Le site de Bernard Guetta

Donald Trump never stops singing his own praises. He probably really does believe he is truly brilliant, but apart from having caused global chaos in just seven weeks, what has he actually achieved?

The answer can be summed up in one word: nothing, absolutely nothing, while his failures are as numerous as they are spectacular.

Twice already, he has announced the imposition of 25% customs duties on Canadian and Mexican imports and twice he has immediately backed down, postponing these decisions to calm the stock markets that were beginning to spiral downwards all over the world.

Investors and industrialists are clearly not convinced by the benefits of these customs barriers, which Donald Trump himself says, and believes, will reindustrialise the United States by bringing jobs and wealth to the country. They have made this known, and since this president and his friends hate to see their wallets go thin, the United States will be waiting for their miracle cure.

Not exactly glorious and even less honourable, but what can we say about Gaza? As a visionary, Donald Trump had come up with a plan for this coastal strip that had become a pile of ruins still largely controlled by Hamas. A very simple plan: after emptying it of its two million inhabitants, it was going to be turned into a Trump Riviera dotted with hotels and casinos and now controlled by the United States.

No one had thought of this before. Well done, remarkable, but neither Egypt nor Jordan want these two million Gazans who would have had to be evacuated with their feet chained, and this plan, which constitutes a crime against humanity, is… How can I put it?

It is a shipwreck, as is the credibility of this man, who has already had to disown his right-hand man, that other genius Elon Musk, who had antagonised the ministers by reducing their numbers without asking their opinion. They came to no other place but the Oval Office to protest, which they did so vehemently that Donald Trump has now decided that layoffs should be performed with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw.

Well done, Mr President, we could not have put it better ourselves, but what is the state of Europe, this European Union that you have just said was created only to ‘screw the United States’ and that you obviously want to dismantle?

Well, it has exceeded all your expectations since it has unanimously, including Hungary, decided to adopt a common defence policy to ensure its ‘autonomy’, Great Britain has rallied to this ambition, London, Paris and Berlin are now united in a common desire to do without you and the Europeans have never been as united as they are today.

There, your success is frankly dazzling, but there is still Ukraine. You have shown the whole world how you could treat, in the person of its president, a people who have been fighting for three years to face up to a colonial aggression. Compared to Volodymyr Zelinsky, you and your vice-president were nothing more than gang leaders of appalling vulgarity, but now?

You have deprived Ukraine of weapons and intelligence. You have closed the doors of the Atlantic Alliance to it. You have stabbed it in the back but how are you going to demilitarise it, a condition set by Vladimir Putin for the signing of an agreement?

You will not be able to. You will not be able to prevent the Europeans from helping and arming Ukraine, and it is therefore far from certain that you will reach a deal with your friend in the Kremlin or that this deal will last for long.

You have caused so much damage and accumulated so many failures in seven weeks that you have already earned your nickname: Nero, the grotesque and devastating emperor who also thought he was a genius.

(Photo: ChatGPT)

Emmanuel Macron was not wrong. When Joe Biden called for the fighting in Gaza to stop, ‘coherence’ would dictate that he no longer supply the weapons that sustain the fighting. Even a child would understand this, but where is the coherence when this same Emmanuel Macron postpones the recognition of Palestine until who knows when, even though France has always defended the idea of coexistence between two states, Israel and Palestine, and he has himself endorsed this idea?

The French President is showing no more coherence here than the US President, and the tragedy is that incoherence has become the rule on both sides of the Atlantic. The best example of this is Ukraine. Americans and Europeans are unanimous in their view that Vladimir Putin must not emerge victorious from his aggression, as he would then be in a position to pursue his ambition to reconstitute the Russian Empire. The West is therefore providing the Ukrainians with enough weapons to meet the challenge, but prohibiting them from using them to strike military targets on Russian territory.

The reason for this is that they fear that a defeat for Vladimir Putin would plunge the world’s largest country into chaos and its nuclear arsenal out of control. In short, the Americans and Europeans do not want to see Ukraine win any more than they want to see it lose, because a Russian defeat would be just as dangerous, in their eyes, as a Russian victory. They know what they don’t want, but they don’t know what they do want. It is the same inability to make up their minds and take action that they are demonstrating in the Middle East.

For three decades, the United States and the European Union have been jointly advocating a two-state solution in the Middle East, but have never been willing to compel the two parties to really accept it. For fear of building against themselves a front of Arab countries, of Iran and of Turkey, they have always refrained from telling the Palestinians in black and white that there would no longer be a Western veto on the annexation of the occupied territories if they persisted in refusing a permanent partition. For fear that the Sunni Islamists and Iran would prevail throughout the region, they also never threatened to deprive the Israelis of economic and military aid if they continued to do everything they could to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Europeans and Americans have condemned themselves to powerlessness, and now that the Israelis have responded to the 7 October massacre by smashing Hamas and decapitating Hezbollah, they are refusing to let them bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. Of course, the West is well aware that the Islamic Republic is now going to acquire the bomb, but it forbids the Israelis to prevent it from doing so for fear of a long and uncertain period of indiscriminate terrorism.

In the Middle East as in Ukraine, Americans and Europeans are paralyzed by the fear of the unknown. Their pervasive obsession is to preserve familiar frameworks, even though the world no longer has either common rules or frameworks, and the only way to ensure international stability is to formulate and enforce clear objectives that are likely to impose on everyone.

In Ukraine, the West would make a great deal of progress if it made it known, firstly, that it would be in favour of political and territorial compromises between Kiev and Moscow and, secondly, that it would lift its veto on the use of its weapons on Russian territory if Vladimir Putin refused to recall his troops and negotiate the terms of a modus vivendi. In the Middle East, you only have to look at the panic with which Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to Emmanuel Macron’s remarks about stopping delivering arms which are used for striking Gaza to understand that the Americans and Europeans could quickly force him to create a Palestinian state by threatening to cut off their aid.

Only the European Union and the United States are powerful enough to block the rise of international disorder, but to do so they must relearn what it means to speak out.

(Photo: Ted Eytan, Creative Commons)

Tag: Gaza

Five failures, not a single success

Westerners must relearn what it means to speak out