It is 80 days since Donald Trump declared: “We think within the next week we’re going to get a ceasefire.” He was talking about Gaza. Since the US president uttered those words on June 27th, Israel has slaughtered thousands more Palestinians, starving many of them to death with a man-made famine, and launched its endgame land-clearance operation. Trump’s sadistic cruelty in fabricating false dawns is infinite. He repeated his promise of imminent peace on July 6th.
“I think we’re close to a deal on Gaza,” he teased. “It could happen this week.”
It was obvious by then that what he really wanted was for the genocide to continue, thus allowing Israel to level and deracinate Gaza. Trump’s war trophy will be his fantasised Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Med.
Being president of the United States is not a sufficiently heady power trip for him. He presumes to rule the whole world and he is busy remaking it to his liking. He wants Denmark to sell him Greenland. He wants South Korea to give him the land occupied by an American military base there. He wants control of the Panama Canal. He wants Canada, full stop. He extorted rights to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals by intimidatingly suspending Washington’s aid to the invaded country. He has walloped India with 50 per cent tariffs, ostensibly for buying oil from Russia but, actually, for not buying it from the US; unlike the obedient EU. He is King Gimme and he reigns rampant because most other countries have given the White House too much power.
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The US is rapidly acquiring the characteristics of a belligerent state – starting trade wars; withdrawing from the World Health Organisation and the Paris Agreement; cancelling donations to the UN Population Fund; shutting down USAid life-saving programmes; ordering illegal deportations; attacking science, education and press freedom; brazenly flouting the law. In the past, a country exhibiting such behaviour would have been targeted by an American president for regime change.
The harm Trump is inflicting on the world calls for a redistribution of global power. The meticulously choreographed spectacle in Beijing this week has added to the urgency. Even the narcissist sulking in the Oval Office could see Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un were laughing at him behind their nuclear arsenals.
As a first step in rebalancing global power, the headquarters of the United Nations ought to be moved out of the US. Trump’s government has repeatedly used its Security Council veto – the five-member prerogative that is making the Irish Government dismantle this State’s triple-lock neutrality policy – to stymie UN attempts to curtail Israel, while he plots his post-conquest plan for Gaza.
The so-called Gaza Reconstruction, Acceleration and Transformation Trust envisages bribing Gazans with $5,000 get-lost payments if they agree to seek exile in other lands so that a ferry port, an airport and a motorway can be constructed to bring dollar-rich spenders to his envisaged playground for tourists. Who knows, maybe he will seize Shannon Airport as its aviation hub seeing as it is already operating as a US military channel. Rebuilding Gaza is a family business with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner prominent among the planners; as he was prominent in the president’s entourage for his tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where – by happy coincidence – the family has Trump-branded ventures.
But there is a fly in his honey jar. France, Australia and Malta intend officially recognising the state of Palestine at the UN general assembly, which starts in New York next week. Canada, Britain and Belgium say they will do so too, subject to certain conditions. The response from Trump’s America is to prevent the 80-strong Palestinian delegation from attending by refusing to issue visas. Ergo Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority who is scheduled to address the assembly, cannot take part. In effect, the US, as landlord, is holding the UN’s 193 sovereign states to ransom. Palestinian statehood is already recognised by 147 member countries. The US, the staunchest of Israel’s dwindling allies, is not one of them.
Washington has no right to dictate who can and cannot attend UN meetings. The United States needs a sharp lesson in the boundaries of its jurisdiction. By moving the UN headquarters out of New York and out of the US entirely, the lesson would be sorely felt. The HQ’s presence in midtown Manhattan generates billions of dollars for the United States with huge local employment, permanent embassies and visitors filling its hotels and restaurants.
Symbolically, the UN has been lending the Big Apple prestige as a beacon of peacemaking since 1952. Now, with Trump rounding up and deporting immigrants while siding with international warmongers, the USA has come to symbolise the antithesis of UN values. Unifil is in its final year of keeping peace in Lebanon because Israel, backed by the US, does not want it there.
Trump’s reshaping of his own country is a horror show of armed soldiers illegally patrolling the streets of Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago; the redistricting of states to skew them in favour of the Republican Party for next year’s midterm elections; the penalisation of universities for cultivating open minds; the rewriting of its history by censoring inscriptions on public monuments and withholding funding from museums whose exhibits are perceived to “divide Americans based on race”. Slavery? What slavery?
Other than staying well away from the place, there is not much ordinary mortals looking on from outside can do to help the good people of America. For the next three years and four months – and indefinitely, if he is not joking about a third term – King Gimme will be on his throne lording it over the planet. European leaders’ suck-up strategy is making Dear Donald, as the head of Nato insists on addressing him, ever more convinced of his omnipotence. They should contemplate Shakespeare’s wise words in King Lear. “Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak when power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound when majesty falls to folly.”
The plain-speaking His Majesty needs to hear is: “We’re moving the UN’s headquarters to Africa.”
