A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  But, having placed all his chips on the Saudi square and the wunderkind Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, that gamble suddenly became a lot more complicated for Donald Trump with the murder of a Saudi journalist who was resident in the US and working for the Washington Post. Jamal Khashoggi went into the Saudi consulate in Turkey in October 2018 and never re-emerged. He would face torture and murder that would have made King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella during the Spanish Inquisition wince. It was barbaric and medieval. Agents from Saudi had arrived in Istanbul on private jets and gone straight to the consulate. One of them was armed with a bone saw. It seems that, after brief resistance, the writer was overpowered and cut up into little pieces. The perpetrators then flew straight back to Riyadh. The UN Human Rights rapporteur, Agnes Callamard, said Khashoggi had been the victim of a brutal and premeditated killing, planned and perpetrated by officials of the Saudi Arabia state. The CIA assessment was said to be even more problematic. They apparently concluded that this couldn’t have happened without the direct blessing of Mohammed bin Salman. Cue crisis in the relationship between the Saudis and the US.

  Despite the immense pressure, Trump wasn’t buckling. The US needed Saudi Arabia economically and geopolitically, and the President made clear from the beginning he wasn’t going to jeopardise multi-billion-dollar arms deals to the kingdom when there were plenty of other countries who would be happy to fill the void. I suspect every other US president before him – yes, even Barack Obama – would have reached the same conclusion; they would have just couched it in more weaselly, condemnatory words. Donald Trump does not do hand-wringing. Khashoggi butchered, protestors imprisoned, criticism leading to diplomatic sanctions (as happened in Canada), a disastrous military adventure in Yemen – the US administration just shrugged.

  When, early in 2019, the US declared it wanted to overthrow the Maduro regime in Venezuela because of its brutality and the way it treated protestors and stamped on dissent, it was hard not to point at US policy towards Saudi Arabia, and say, ‘Spot the difference.’

  Back in May 2017, Donald Trump flew from Saudi Arabia to Jerusalem. A small piece of history was made – Air Force One was able to fly direct. That may seem, alongside the invention of penicillin, the splitting of the atom and the ending of apartheid in South Africa, not really that significant. But in its own way it was. Saudi air traffic controllers handed Air Force One directly over to Israeli ATC. The two spoke to each other. Remarkably, that hadn’t happened before. But just so no one came away thinking this was in any way normal, the press plane on which I was travelling physically had to touch down in Cyprus for a few seconds before it could take off again and continue to Tel Aviv. The Saudis passed our plane on to Cypriot air traffic controllers for the few moments that we entered and exited that country’s airspace; and the Cypriots passed us on to their Israeli counterparts. The Israeli prime minister had planned a relatively modest arrival welcome for the US president, but having seen what the Saudis laid on, he ordered his entire cabinet to be present at Ben Gurion Airport to be there to greet their guest.

  Since Israel’s foundation in 1948, the United States has always been the country’s most stalwart friend, though again – just like the Saudis – the Likud-led government of Benjamin Netanyahu were not too enamoured with the Obama presidency, and his pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal (among other things). But American muscle has always been seen as crucial – diplomatically, militarily. To get any peace-deal over the line between Israelis and Palestinians, there is a recognition that it is going to require the input of the United States. Nearly all American presidents have given it a go – Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton made progress; most didn’t. Donald Trump talked about it as being the greatest deal that he could possibly pull off. And during his visit, President Trump went to the West Bank to visit Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, to show his seriousness about the subject.

  But then came a decision that upended decades of US policy that had been followed by successive administrations. The US embassy would be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – a decision that not only alienated Palestinians but the Arab world as a whole. The future of Jerusalem was one of those key ‘final status’ issues that would have to be resolved in any future deal, containing as it does holy sites for Judaism – the Western Wall – and holy sites for Islam, most notably the Al-Aqsa mosque. It wasn’t until the Six-Day War, in 1967, that the Israelis annexed Arab East Jerusalem. Both Israelis and Palestinians claimed Jerusalem as their capital. By moving the embassy to Jerusalem, Donald Trump was accepting that the historic city was the capital of Israel. He described it as a ‘long overdue step to advance the peace process’. But it was anything but. On one of the most controversial issues of all, the US president had put his thumb on the scales in favour of the Israelis. How could America be the honest broker when it had seemingly taken sides?

  In early 2019 came another announcement that seemed to catch the US State Department and the rest of the Arab world by surprise. With Benjamin Netanyahu facing a difficult re-election battle, and mired in scandal, Donald Trump attempted to ride to his rescue. He would tweet: ‘After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the state of Israel and Regional stability!’ This again was a seismic change in settled US policy. The future of the Golan would be something that would be negotiated in future peace talks. But at a stroke, the US president had declared in Israel’s favour. It was a dramatic change in US policy. Mike Pompeo, who was in Israel when the President put out his tweet, had not said a word about the Golan Heights. Indeed, appearing on Israel’s Channel 12, a couple of hours before the President had decided to exercise his Twitter thumbs, Pompeo had been defending American decision making, and the careful and deliberative approach taken. ‘No. I don’t think we’re seeing diplomacy by Twitter,’ he tells the interviewer. ‘It still requires thoughtfulness, it requires resources, it requires capability and determination.’ And then up popped the President’s tweet, completely undercutting the Secretary of State.

  Back to Donald Trump’s first overseas trip. From Israel he flew to Rome (briefly to meet the Pope) and then on to Brussels for his first appearance at a NATO summit. Here, too, he seemed intent on overturning decades of US policy. No, I am not talking here about the diplomatic faux pas of the new US president’s determination to barge out of the way the hapless prime minister of Montenegro who had dared to stand in front of the US president as he pushed through to get to the front of the ‘family photo’. A truly comedic moment. Instead I am talking about his general disposition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – what it was set up for, what it was doing, and in particular Article 5, the doctrine that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. Collective security is the underpinning of the treaty, and the warning to an aggressor who might think about picking off an individual member.

  In public the President had limited his expressions of unhappiness to talking about how the US was shouldering too big a burden of the NATO budget, and that other European nations needed to pony up more. But in private he and his aides were questioning the very existence of NATO itself and whether the US should leave. Several times over the course of 2018 the President said privately that he wanted to withdraw; that he didn’t see the point of the alliance. All he could see was that it was a drain on the US, and that America put in far more than it got out. This utterly terrified Europeans, particularly the former Soviet bloc countries whose nations abutted a Russia growing more aggressive and more expansionist in its actions.

  We had been briefed ahead of his speech in Brussels that the President would commit the US to Article 5 and collective security. When he came to deliver his remarks, that bit was strangely missing. Officials travelling with the President sought to play down the significance, stressing that of course the US stood fully behind Article 5. Yes, but not for the first time a nagging question returned which has gnawed at p
olicy makers since Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House – whose voice should be listened to: the administration’s, or the President’s? Too often they were badly out of kilter. A disjunction that must have had them celebrating with an extra shot of vodka in the Kremlin. Sowing discord has been a central part of Russian strategy.

  The NATO summit a year later was equally fractious. Trump called an emergency meeting to address his grievances over the financial contributions made by other countries. The president was mad with the other leaders. I’m told the prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, took him aside and pointed out that actually over the past couple of years other NATO countries had increased their military spending – it was in fact an agreement reached at a NATO summit in Wales when Barack Obama was still US president, but Mr Rutte didn’t dwell on that part of it. He suggested to Donald Trump that rather than carping, he should go out and claim the credit for these increased contributions. And that’s exactly what the President did. He called a news conference at which he took ‘total credit’ for NATO members increasing their budgets ‘like they have never done before’. To Donald Trump’s US audience it looked like he had gone in, read the riot act, and squeezed a lot of extra cash out of those recalcitrant Europeans. The Rutte ruse had worked a treat – in spite of nearly being undermined by the French and Italian leaders coming out and saying ‘What spending increase?’

  Meanwhile in Europe faith that the US under Donald Trump was still a dependable ally of other NATO members was plummeting. A poll conducted in Germany found that only 10 per cent of those questioned felt the US could be relied on. And from his tweets it appeared that he wasn’t relying much on his allies. There were barbs at different times aimed at Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron. At the G7 in Quebec in 2018 – another bitterly divided summit – one photo, beautifully composed, captured the tension. Donald Trump sits arms crossed looking defensive at a table, while around him are the other members of the rich nations club berating him. I had left the Quebec summit early to make the long journey to Singapore, where the world’s most unlikely summit was about to take place – that between the US president and the North Korean leader.

  Before we come to that, let’s just finish up with what happened at the G7. I had flown from Quebec to Toronto and then on to Hong Kong, where I had a three-hour layover. News of the agreement came just after we landed in Hong Kong. My newsfeed was full of stories of success-against-the-odds in Quebec. I had a shower, got some breakfast – and before I took off on the last leg of the journey, Donald Trump, who was on Air Force One on his way to Singapore, withdrew his signature from the communiqué. Boom. The President was watching on the plane the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, at his news conference. In it he said that he found the US decision to impose tariffs on Canadian aluminium and steel by invoking national security ‘insulting’ to all Canadians. ‘Canadians are polite, we’re reasonable,’ he said, ‘but we also will not be pushed around.’

  That, apparently, was beyond the pale for the President. From his office suite on the plane as it was going over the top of the world, the President was arguably going over the top on Twitter. ‘Based on Justin’s false statements at his news conference, and the fact that Canada is charging massive Tariffs to our U.S. farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our U.S. Reps not to endorse the Communique.’ In other missives he called Trudeau ‘very dishonest’ and ‘weak’. In G7 history had a communiqué ever been as short-lived?

  For the rest of the journey to Singapore, I am told, the President was fixated on one thing, and one thing only. No, not the details of what any denuclearisation deal would look like with North Korea; nor what confidence building measures would need to be agreed on both sides to measure progress. And not much thought was given to when the US would lift sanctions. No, Donald Trump wanted to see mock-ups of the stage where the first handshake would take place between him and Chairman Kim; what the backdrop would be (alternate US and North Korean flags); who would enter from which side; where the cameras would be; whether there would be cameras in elevated positions as well as at eye level.

  Indeed, when he got to Singapore the President was frustrated to learn that a day had been set aside for prepping before his historic meeting. Trump was impatient. He spent the morning tweeting about a whole range of topics that had nothing to do with the summit. He even tried to persuade his chief of staff, John Kelly, to ring the North Koreans to see if they could just get on with it, and bring the summit forward a day. The President was told that wouldn’t be possible.

  If that was unorthodox, everything about this coming together defied orthodoxy. And that is where credit needs to be given to Donald Trump. I don’t believe any conventional US president would have dared go ahead with a summit with the leader of a pariah nuclear state when so little groundwork had been done – and when in all likelihood it would result in a major PR victory for the North Koreans for simply turning up and sounding normal (as indeed it did).

  Only a few months before this summit, all the talk was of the likelihood of nuclear war between the North Koreans and the US; now it was about what the prospects were for peace. At the United Nations General Assembly the September before, the US president had talked about totally destroying North Korea – not the sort of language one normally associates with speeches at the UN. But no longer was the US president talking about weapons being locked and loaded and of raining down fire and fury onto North Korea. No longer was he calling Kim ‘little rocket man’. And conversely Kim Jong-un wasn’t calling Donald Trump a ‘mentally deranged dotard’, as he had been. More importantly, North Korea had stopped its highly provocative missile tests.

  For all that foreign policy experts in Washington predicted the summit wouldn’t go ahead, and shouldn’t because of the sheer unpredictability, it did – and was in a limited way a success. Yes, there was a whole pile of unanswered questions, but the two sides had opened lines of communication. What politicians of all stripes agreed was that the single most serious national security issue facing the United States, which had been in a state of impasse for years, was seeing progress under the presidency of the most unorthodox and inexperienced commander in chief the US had ever had.

  Their second summit in Hanoi, though, showed the limitations of that approach. The months of talks beforehand hadn’t narrowed differences sufficiently; what would a communiqué look like? The questions that could be ducked in Singapore by simply saying it was a ‘get to know you’ summit, could not be avoided in Hanoi. We were given a White House schedule of the day – after the talks there would be a lunch and then a signing ceremony, before the President would come to the Marriott Hotel on the outskirts of the city to hold a news conference. I was on a White House bus awaiting security clearance to go into the hotel when one of the Secret Service guys said timings were shifting. The presser was going to be two hours earlier than had been scheduled. In other words, no lunch and, more importantly, no signing ceremony. The whole thing had imploded. Kim Jong-un had overplayed his hand in demanding all sanctions be removed; Donald Trump had over-estimated his persuasive powers. A summit that most definitely shouldn’t have gone ahead had ended in failure.

  At the news conference after the Singapore summit, it was Donald Trump who made all the concessions; this time he had been more cautious. In Singapore he suddenly announced to the press that the US would stop military exercises with the South Koreans on the peninsula, describing them as provocative. Seeking to justify the decision the president used talking points that were straight out of the Chinese playbook. It was hard to see what he had got in return for this major concession. Not only did that halt to exercises come as news to the South Koreans, it came as a total shock to the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary General James Mattis.

  This wouldn’t be the final straw for Mattis in his troubled relationship with the President. That would come eventually over Syria. The President was keen to stay out of the civil war; his principal concern was to erase the I
slamic State caliphate from the map. But with the Damascus regime’s use of chemical weapons that would change. He wasn’t going to ‘do an Obama’ and let a red line be crossed with no repercussions. The pictures of children choking to death, foaming at the mouth, eyes bulging, led Trump to order action. Firm action. And immediately. Even targeting the Syrian ruler Bashar al Assad. According to Bob Woodward’s book, the President said: ‘Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.’ And with the firepower that US had, the decapitation of the Syrian leadership was well within US capabilities. General Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense, told the Commander in Chief that he would get right onto it. And apparently put down the phone and said to his senior staff, ‘We’re not going to do any of that.’ He told them to prepare a more measured response. And sure enough, that’s what came to pass. A volley of cruise missiles was fired at the Al Shayrat airfield where the Syrian jets had taken off from to deliver the chemical weapons. Fighter jets, the runway, radar installations, hardened aircraft shelters and ammunition bunkers were hit. No other action was taken. General Mattis had done things his way. The President’s order had been heard, but not acted upon. If one of the common themes of the Trump presidency has been the chaos and noise, don’t be gulled – there are areas where the state is still operating with cold efficiency, as I would discover.