Trump Gets It Right, but Can He Stick with It?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

 

Donald Trump responded to the news that another U.S. citizen was killed at the hands of Islamist terrorists like an American president should — not in sorrow but anger:

The all but universal acclaim Trump’s muscular posture produced among political observers on the right betrays the degree to which the GOP’s McGovernite wing has ill-advisedly bought into its own hype. Republicans are not longing for a GOP-coded Joe Biden — halting, insecure, and resolved only to keep Americans comfortable amid the nation’s inexorable decline. It seems Republican voters did not lose their taste for a confident, extroverted American presence on the world stage. We’re all bloodthirsty neocon warmongers now.

 

Encouragingly, the language to which Trump appealed in this post is auspicious. He has issued direct threats to the Hamas terrorists who continue to hold Israeli and American citizens captive before, but this latest missive is broader in scope. Opening the aperture of the conflict to include “the Middle East,” where there will be “all hell to pay” should the remaining hostages still be in Hamas’s custody by inauguration day, is the only serious way to talk about this war.

 

Hamas is not going to be intimidated by the threat that American military force may soon be brought to bear against them if they don’t acquiesce to Trump’s demands. The Israel Defense Forces are skillful warfighters, and the Israeli Air Force is formidable. Hamas will not be brought to heel in Gaza. Nor will Hezbollah be defanged in Lebanon, or the Houthis degraded into docility in Yemen. The war that erupted in the Middle East on October 7 and today rages from the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant is Iran’s handywork.

 

The Iranians understand the cold logic of hard power. Iranian regime elements tend to get very nervous when confronted with the prospect of outright hostilities with the United States — a war from which the Islamist theocracy has every reason to believe it would not emerge intact. Tehran has pared back its escalatory behavior in the past when that behavior was met with a Western response the regime could not painlessly absorb. Trump’s brawny talk could have its desired effect, but he has to mean it.

 

During the campaign, Trump and his allies spent a lot of time previewing diplomatic initiatives designed to tame the world’s proliferating armed conflicts. Occasionally, those overtures are peppered with oblique promises to turn the screws on our adversaries should they continue their menacing activities. Overall, however, the emphasis has been on the provision of carrots to our enemies in lieu of sticks. But there will have to be sticks. And America’s enemies in Tehran will be watching foreign theaters closely for indications of just how earnest Trump is.

 

Ukraine is one of those theaters. There, Iran’s chief strategic ally is engaged in a war of territorial conquest, and the incoming Trump administration’s early gestures toward a negotiated settlement to that conflict have been rebuffed. On Monday, a Kremlin intermediary told the Financial Times that Vladimir Putin will reject a peace plan (that was quite favorable to Moscow) co-authored by Trump’s nominee to serve as special envoy to Russia and Ukraine. And he wasn’t diplomatic about it.

 

“Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don’t like any of it. That’d be the whole negotiation,” said Russian businessman Konstantin Malofeev. “For the talks to be constructive, we need to talk not about the future of Ukraine, but the future of Europe and the world.”

 

This is a standard Russian tactic. The conflict Russia started and is aggressively prosecuting isn’t about that conflict at all. Rather, it’s about the global geopolitical architecture that is so unfairly arrayed against Russia’s interests and the great tide of humanity for whom Moscow presumes to speak. Trump would be wise to dismiss this offhand. Iran, too, would love to blur the lines of the conflict in the Middle East, and China would surely like to cast its own irridentism as a species of high-minded geostrategic rebalancing. But that dismissal should also trigger the response to which Trump and his team have so far only alluded.

 

Trump himself has said that, if Putin turns out to be a bad faith negotiator, the U.S. would be willing to provide Ukraine with “more than they ever got.” Trump’s nominee to spearhead counterterrorism on the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, put a finer point on it: “He will say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian federation, ‘you will negotiate now or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.’” Incoming national security adviser Michael Waltz displayed similar confidence. “We have leverage [over Russia],” he said in November, “like taking the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine as well.”

 

Do they mean it? We’ll soon find out, and America’s enemies will be watching closely. A threat issued with no intention to follow through with it is worse than no threat at all. And because repetition is a sign of resolve, the Trump administration will have to continue to telegraph to America’s enemies that catastrophic consequences will accompany their continued aggression. More importantly, they will have to be prepared to act on their ultimatums should the time for talk subside.

 

But those signals may succeed in reimposing some sobriety on America’s enemies. Our competitors abroad do not fear Joe Biden. They might fear Donald Trump. And if he keeps talking like a president who does not believe America’s best days are behind it and its prohibitive power is fading irreversibly, they should.