Donald Trump and maga Republicans are enabling failed incompetent foriegn policy, They have fallen in Iran and cannot get up!

Trump’s extended ceasefire shows his desperation to exit his failed and illegal Iran war — but he doesn’t know how. Americans are endangered by Trump's inability to conduct a foreign policy that goes beyond threats and military force. Echo opinion published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Trudy Rubin.

In 1966, the famous American psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with a description of a mental bias that became known as “Maslow’s hammer.”  “If the only tool you have is a hammer, I suppose it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail,” Maslow contended. Or, as some have reworded his theorem: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This is a good diagnosis for how Donald Trump has trapped us all in his unnecessary and illegal war with Tehran. A war from which he can’t find a good exit.

It also explains why he indefinitely extended an April 21, ceasefire deadline with Iran, announced on Tuesday evening, even though he’d just threatened to resume bombing if there was no nuclear deal by then.  (Like Douglas Shields from Pittsburg wrote in a letter to the New York Times: "seen more stable direction from a weather vane — and at least it knows which way the wind is blowing. At this point, the only consistent policy is inconsistency, and even that seems subject to revision.") 

As Maslow would no doubt have diagnosed, Trump is a bully whose modus operandi is to browbeat, insult, and threaten opponents and allies (especially those who respond with timidity). He is impatient and seeks quick hits and big headlines.

Overseas, the military hammer has become his preferred tactic so long as the strike is quick, as in Venezuela and the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

But, when an adversary is tougher and the fight more complex, with a strategy that outflanks his erratic tactics, POTUS is flummoxed. The illegal Iran war has laid bare how Trump’s strategic and cognitive weaknesses endanger Americans, as well as the entire world.

“Trump did not know what he was getting into,” I was told by Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon, and one of the smartest Mideast analysts in the field. “This is the first real foreign policy crisis he has faced, and he has no idea what he is doing. It’s scary 😱😰😧.”

POTUS swallowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pitch that Iran’s Islamic regime could quickly be toppled by U.S.-Israeli bombing and replaced by more malleable secular leaders. 

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) Director John Ratcliffe called such regime-change scenarios “farcical,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them “bullshit,” according to a New York Times investigation. But given his lack of knowledge about Iran and his conviction that his instincts trump expertise, the president picked up his military hammer.

Trump underestimated Iranian leaders’ tolerance for pain and determination to salvage their Islamic republic (even though their numbers were decimated and their country’s economy was in shambles).

But, most importantly, said Crocker, Trump failed to foresee (even though he was warned) that the Iranians had a critical card to play: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz through which about 20% of the world’s energy resources flow. Iran had never tried to close the strait before, but U.S. and Israeli bombs convinced its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that this was a necessary option.

“Iran now knows they can close the strait,” Crocker said. “Every day that the strait is closed adds to the economic pain of the U.S., Europe, and Asia. This has terrible consequences globally. They have turned the Strait of Hormuz into the Strait of Iran.”

Even Trump, with his unfettered verbosity, has referred to it by that name.

Last week, Iran offered to reopen the strait, but made clear its military would still control traffic in and out and charge tolls to passing tankers. Unsatisfied with this unpleasant option, Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to blockade Iranian ports so its oil exports were also halted.

But, Iran’s current leaders are betting, probably correctly, that they can withstand that pain longer than Trump can, with his eye on rising gas prices and midterm elections. Tehran says it won’t return to talks until the U.S. blockade is lifted.

Faced with this standoff, and the choice whether to resume bombing or extend the ceasefire deadline again,👀 Trump blinked.

Let me be clear, I am glad he backed down. But it revealed his desperation to exit the mess he has made.

“Iran has won the first round,” Crocker contended. “This is not going well.”

Trump’s problem is that he now has only bad options to reopen the strait.



Some right-wing hawks are advocating that he pick up the hammer. Fox News’ Hugh Hewitt actually recommended Trump go “full Sherman,” recalling the famed Civil War general’s scorched-earth march to Atlanta, and proposing POTUS destroy all of Iran’s oil and energy infrastructure.

Not only would this be a war crime affecting civilians and a further blow to global energy prices, but it would be unlikely to move the survival-intent hard-line IRGC, which now appears to be running the show.

Moreover, the worst possible option — which would be totally insane — would be for Trump to launch a land war in Iran to try for real “regime change.”

Iran was not an immediate threat to the United States before Trump started this war, and even he knows that sinking into such a bloody quagmire would probably set him on the path to bipartisan impeachment.

The only way out, said Crocker, is to try to swap a simultaneous end to the U.S. blockade against Iran’s ports for a full Iranian opening of the strait. Ideally, this would mean no IRGC control of shipping or tolls on vessels entering or leaving.

“This will be harder for Trump to do now, when he is weaker,” Crocker said. Especially when the Iranians know he is eager for an offramp, after he extended the deadline.

“But it is pretty apparent to everyone, except Donald Trump,” Crocker added, “that he’s not going to bomb Iran out of anything. The only way he can leave [the war] and save face is to get back to the status quo ante on the Strait of Hormuz.”

As for a return to talks on eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, Crocker believes that “at some point we will go back to the table.” However, he noted, the nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama — which would have halted Iran’s nuclear program for 15 years had Trump not withdrawn from it — took two years to complete.

For future negotiations to have a chance, Trump would have to abandon his “I win, you lose” approach to diplomacy. He would finally have to assemble and listen to an expert team instead of sending his ill-informed real estate buddy and son-in-law.

Hope springs eternal, but this hope requires a suspension of disbelief.

True, Trump is desperate to end his misbegotten Iran venture, but he seems to believe he is winning. On Truth (Fake❗ ) Social, he was posting New York Times clips from 2004, citing the top ratings of “The Last Season of My Apprentice Juggernaut.” In other words, how can such a winner be wrong❓

The best we can hope for is that fear of higher gas prices will keep Trump’s hammer in abeyance — and that he will find a way to negotiate the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, declare a fake victory, and bring the troops home.

Perhaps after this Iran debacle, the U.S. public will grasp the danger of leaving a one-tool 🔨president in charge of foreign policy and the nuclear button when they vote in November — and choose legislators who are willing and able to rein him in.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stand with European allies to support Ukraine

Thanks to the Philadelphia Inquirer for publishing this article. Main stream media (MSM) are neglecting this important story about the Ukranian resistance against Russian aggression. 

Echo report published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Trudy Rubin and an appendix by David Remnick*: 

Elite units from Ukraine’s intelligence agencies hit key Russian sites

Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the military sites from which Russia launches its attacks.

EASTERN UKRAINE — Slava’s appearance had changed dramatically from a year ago when we last met in Kyiv. His eyes were weary, and his deep black beard was now grizzled with gray.

The Ukranian 43-year-old former commercial director and journalist had volunteered early in the war, and now commanded an elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s military intelligence service. His unit conducts some of the country’s most dangerous missions. And those missions never end.

Operating from the zero line, his men are called in to launch long-range drones that attack sites deep inside Russia. Their goal is to destroy Russian military logistics at the source.

Before an assignment, they return to home base, pack up every conceivable drone and piece of equipment they may need, and head for the front lines to reinforce or assault.

“We do R&D in the trenches when we find a problem we didn’t expect,” he tells me.

The United States never gave the green light for Kyiv to use its longest-range U.S.-made ATACMS missiles to target Russian aerodromes or military production sites, so the Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the specific locations from which Russia launches bombs, missiles, and Shahed drones.

Drones can’t substitute for ATACMS, which can cover a huge area and pack a much more powerful explosive payload than unmanned aerial vehicles, as Slava told me while we bumped along over a dirt road to a HUR testing site, somewhere heading east. “You need 20 to 30 drones to cover the same area as one of the missile systems,” he continued, “but in terms of the economics of war, the drones are much cheaper than a missile.”

The most stunning drone success story was Operation Spiderweb, which destroyed or damaged around 40 Russian warplanes, including supersonic bombers, worth billions of dollars. It was conducted by Ukraine’s chief internal intelligence agency, and HUR’s friendly rival, the SBU.

Two days later, an SBU sea drone hit the base of the Kerch Bridge from Russia to Crimea, which can no longer handle heavy trucks or rail traffic because of a previous Ukrainian strike.

“The main task is to make Crimea a big burden so army logistics can’t work, because for the Russians as well as us, logistics is crucial,” said Slava. “They reconstruct quickly, but even spotty hits increase the difficulty for them.”

“Sea drones pushed out the whole Russian fleet from the Black Sea,” he recalled with relish. Sea drones (which look like large covered rowboats) with hidden missiles shot down two Russian helicopters and a warplane in a single day.

In new developments, drones are starting to hit the Iranian-designed Shaheds, he told me, and, of key importance, “anti-Shahed interceptors are almost ready.” In another breakthrough, hitting a swarm of 30 FPV drones is now “nothing at all,” when last year the technology for that was just emerging.

The June attack, at five different military airports, was done with 117 cheap FPV drones smuggled deep inside Russia within wooden containers on commercial flatbed trucks driven by unwitting Russians.

Less noticed in the West, however, on the very same day as Spiderweb, ❗HUR (aka Ukraine Intelligence) hit two trains and a newly built part of a railway in the occupied Donbas region that “blew up a whole Russian logistical supply chain.”

“But the Russians learning quickly,” he added. “We always have to create new technology. Every three months, technology becomes obsolete.”

Nevertheless, like every drone expert I met with, he believes U.S. war doctrine hasn’t caught up with the new era of drone warfare, which demands military decentralization and bottom-up initiative.

“The Russians are learning from us, but the U.S. is still based on old doctrines of war,” he said. “You should be more flexible. What America needs to understand is the need for decentralization. Not the generals’ world vision.”

In direct conflict with Russia today, the U.S. would be in trouble, Slava said. “If not speaking of deep strikes, but in direct contact, they could do nothing. Their tanks, armor, all would be hit by drones because their doctrine of war is obsolete. The reason we weren’t seized in first three days of the war is because Russian doctrine was still like in WWII.”

Europe, he said, grasps the shift because it sees Russian aggression up close.

“The Europeans are not just open, but ready to do whatever they can to learn from us. They are afraid, because they fear the future. The Poles have a fresh experience of war, transferred from generation to generation. They understand that if the Russians come, they will kill them just for the fact they aren’t Russians.

“The Europeans have plenty of training centers and invite our specialists to come there. War is constantly changing so they need to invite us to share our experience because we don’t have anything stable. Everything is constantly changing here.”

But Slava too bemoans the lack of resources that prevent Ukraine from pushing new technologies much further and faster. “Holding Russians back is a function of money for R&D. Either we get certain technology or someone sitting in the trenches.”

And either the Pentagon pays attention to Ukraine’s drone advances, or it falls behind Russia in hands-on knowledge of how to fight new wars to come.

*Appendix echo published in The New Yorker by David Remnick:

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. 

Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.”

















New Yorker Favorites

Ukrainian civilians suffer death and injury as much as the military

Echo commentary published in the Orlando Sentinel by Trudy Rubin

As we celebrated our independence in July, the Ukrainians fought and died to keep theirs.

As we celebrated the Fourth of July with hot dogs and fireworks, mourners gathered at Kyiv’s famous St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral. They were paying last respects to one of Ukraine’s most noted young writers.

Viktoriya Yuryivna Amelina) (b. 1986 -d. July 1, 2023), later known as Victoria Amelina, was a Ukrainian novelist.
Victoria Amelina*, 37, was killed by a Russian missile strike on July 1 at a large, well-known pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. At the time, it was filled with journalists, humanitarian aid workers, local families, and probably some soldiers taking time out from the front lines. How like the Russians to bomb a pizza place.

I didn’t know Amelina, but have several Ukrainian friends who did, including one who was at her hospital bedside as she lay in an irreversible coma.

Ukrainians honor award-winning writer killed in Russian missile attack on restaurant - (Hawaii Tribune-Herald)

I’m writing about her, not to guilt-trip those who enjoyed their backyard barbecue this week, but because she inspired such admiration from her peers. She had paused her successful literary career to investigate and document war crimes in areas liberated by Ukrainian forces from Russian occupation.

We should look to Ukrainian heroes like Amelina for inspiration every time we get queasy about the possibility that a certain Putin-admirer might be re-elected in 2024. Her struggle to protect Ukrainian democracy was far more existential than ours, but she never gave up.

“Victoria Amelina's death was a profound shock to everyone in the literary community,” I was told on WhatsApp by Tetyana Ogarkova, a Ukrainian literary scholar and journalist. “Victoria was very loved, very modest, and independent. She could have stayed in Canada (where her father lived) but she chose to come back.”

Originally an IT specialist, Amelina could also have left Ukraine for lucrative work in Europe, but she stayed to battle the occupiers with the written word and with her investigations. 

Also, she joined up with the Ukrainian human rights organization Truth Hounds, which has worked for the past eight years to document human rights violations in Ukraine, and elsewhere in areas once controlled by Moscow.

Putin has already gotten away with the huge ecological war crime of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka Dam, also occupied by Russian troops. While there is no conclusive proof that Russia is to blame, the evidence overwhelmingly points to Moscow.

In order for war crimes cases to eventually be legally prosecuted, painstaking documentation is needed. In occupied areas, such as the dam, that evidence can’t be collected right now.

However, in liberated territory the work of documentation is endless. “With Viktoria’s work for Truth Hounds, she never stopped travelling,” Ogarkova recalled, even to places still under shelling. “She was very brave.”

In one famous case, when investigating the disappearance of her colleague, the celebrated children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, Amelina travelled to his parents’ village to search for his diary. He had managed to bury it near a cherry tree before the Russians dragged him away. She and his father unearthed it. (Vakulenko’s buried remains were eventually found with two bullet holes).

Thanks to Amelina, the diary is now housed in the Kharkiv Literary Museum. His final entry ends, “Everything will be Ukraine! I believe in victory.”

“She died on July 1 which was his birthday,” Ogarkova told me. “This links two writers assassinated by the Russians.”

Yet even as Amelina investigated war crimes, she found time to write moving poetry about the war and also had plans to write a book about women at war writing about war.

She made a spontaneous trip to Kramatorsk to accompany three prominent Colombian writers and was dining with them when the missile cut her down. Twelve others died, including several young restaurant staff and twin 14-year-old girls out for pizza with their dad.

On the weekend before her death, Amelina read from her works at an international literary festival in Kyiv. Ogarkova’s husband played piano accompaniment in the background.

Some of her lines: “At night I looked at fireballs in the sky from my balcony in Kyiv and listened to explosions. I went to sleep without checking the news. The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbors who died instead of you a couple of miles away. till, I want to not forget to learn the names.”

Remember the name Victoria Amelina. It should inspire us all.

*This is from her poem "About A Crow," translated by Uilleam Blacker:

In a barren springtime field

Stands a woman dressed in black

Crying her sisters' names

Like a bird in the empty sky

She'll cry them all out of herself.

The one that flew away too soon

The one that had begged to die

The one that couldn't stop death

The one that has not stopped waiting

The one that has not stopped believing

The one that still grieves in silence

She'll cry them all into the ground

As though sowing the field with pain

And from pain and the names of women

Her new sisters will grow from the earth

And again will sing joyfully of life

But what about her, the crow?

She will stay in this field forever

Because only this cry of hers

Holds all those swallows in the air

Do you hear how she calls

Each one by her name?

"About A Crow." (Maine Writer- Certainly seems appropriate to learn how a group of crows is referred to as a "murder".)

The name of the writer is Victoria Amelina.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Immigration facts- population growth is at the lowest level since 1937

Trumpziism stigma with immigrants is getting worse:

An echo opinion by Trudy Rubin published in the Inquirer Philadelphia Daily News Philly.com Trump immigration disgrace: Not just at the border, but blocking legal arrivals, too.

MaineWriter- Donald Trump and his personal ghoul Stephen Miller are terribly wrong to suppress immigrants because America needs their talents.

“Our country is full.” (Not true!)

That claim by President Trump as he visited the southern border was directed at migrants seeking asylum. It was both false and foolish.

False because America is not full (although Trump capitalizes FULL in his obnoxious tweets). False because Trump’s message was clearly a trial balloon for his 2020 election campaign that had nothing to do with solving immigration problems.

And foolish because Trump’s demonization of legal, as well as illegal, immigration sets the country for big economic problems in the future. It also undermines the values on which America was built.

Let’s start with some facts.

First, America is not full, nor can it thrive without new immigrants, as demographer William H. Frey points out. Population growth has hit its lowest level since 1937, and would be declining even more quickly were it not for immigration. “By 2035, there will be more seniors than children for the first time in the nation’s history,” writes Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

What gives America an advantage over graying nations in Europe, Japan, and even China, is the population boost from immigrants. That youthful infusion is essential to provide workers whose taxes will support the aging U.S. citizenry.

Even now, the U.S. economy is experiencing a serious shortage of both skilled and unskilled workers.

As for where the immigrants should go, a sane immigration policy could direct some of them to where they were most needed, including the revival of smaller cities that are suffering from depopulation.

Stephen Miller is the Donald Trump immigration ghoul
"puts American to shame...."

Instead, Trump has reportedly handed the reins on immigration policy over to aide (ghoul!) Stephen Miller, the godfather of the Muslim ban who wants to revive the family separation policy at the border. Miller has made no secret of his desire to slash legal immigration.

“This viewpoint is anti-American, without focusing on the central role immigration has played in the creation of this country,” says Rep. Brendan Boyle (D, Pa.) whose father immigrated to America at 19 and worked as a janitor to support his family. “When Trump and Miller talk about immigration in such a hateful way, it shows a tremendous ignorance of American history.”

Moreover, the White House attack on legal immigration displays a shameful level of immorality. Nothing illustrates this better than my recent conversation with former Army Reserve Sgt. Peter Farley about an immigration injustice I’ve followed for some time.

Farley has been trying for eight years to help obtain visas for the family of two Iraqi brothers, both translators he worked with in Iraq. The Al-Baidhani brothers risked their lives to work with the U.S. Army (one was later shot by an anti-American militia) and entered the U.S. on special visas for translators; they are now working, paying taxes, and well settled.

Their immediate family members, under death threat in Baghdad, are also entitled by U.S. law to visas. But the family is stuck due to the administration’s attack on legal immigration, including visas for Iraqis and Afghans who helped Americans, as well as refugees, asylum seekers, and others. The Iraqi program has a backlog of more than 100,000 people, and, according to the State Department, only 48 were admitted in a ten-month period in fiscal year 2018.

The Baidhani case illustrates the bizarre, bureaucratic maze that the Trump administration has established to block legal immigration. After five years of security vetting, under the President Obama administration , the family were granted visas nearly three years ago, only to be told the day before they left for America that they needed to undergo another security check. By then, they had sold all their possessions.

The family appealed, and in an almost unheard of reversal, immigration officials granted them conditional entry in June 2017. But by then, the Trump administration had tried to ban all Muslim immigrants, and made slashing immigration its signature issue. Despite backing by multiple congressional members and 135,000 signatures on a change.org petition, the Baidhanis have still heard nothing.

Meantime, constant rule changes and the massive turnover at the Department of Homeland Security, whose top officials Trump has just forced out, plus the decimation of State Department staff dealing with refugees, makes obtaining visas nearly impossible.

Just as a supportive congressman was set to send yet another letter to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, she was fired. “We didn’t even know who to send it to,” Farley told me. "This is not what our country was supposed to be like. Where are we living?”

We are living in a country where Trump’s constant labeling of immigrants as rapists and murderers makes it impossible to craft a rational immigration policy. Where Miller’s slashing the number of refugees (who get legal visas) puts America to shame.
The Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill in 2013 but that will never be repeated so long as Trump plays the immigration card for political reasons. Nor will Peter Farley succeed in helping the Baidhanis get their visas so long as this obscene game goes on.

Making Israel less safe again- an echo opinion

This is the road to a form of apartheid.

Trump and "Bibi"- creating uncertainty where there had been stability

This echo opinion is critical of how Donald Trump has deliberately played into the Evangelical playbook, just because he could. In so doing, Trump has created an incendiary situation in an politically combustible area of the world where people need calm leadership, rather than political posturing based on extremist religious ideologies.

Trudy Rubin writes an opinion published in the Madison Wisconsin State Journal newspaper. She is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Donald Trump wanted to give Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu a boost in hotly contested Israeli elections, set for April 9.

So, Donald Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy, by tweet of course: He posted that the United States should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a rocky plateau that Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 Arab–Israeli war.

This was a purely political gesture to solve a problem that didn’t exist. There was no pressure on Israel from any quarter to return the Golan to Syria, a country wrecked by civil war and penetrated by Iran. Nor will U.S. recognition of Jerusalem’s 1981 annexation of the Golan make Israel any safer.

On the contrary, Trump’s political boon for Bibi will prompt unnecessary new threats to the Jewish state.

To understand why, a little background is helpful. Driving along the western edge of the Golan Heights one can look directly down on towns and villages of northern Israel, practically into the windows of some residential homes. Syrian artillery regularly shelled Israel from the heights between 1948 and 1967.

Since 1974, U.N. observers have patrolled an armistice line on the heights between Israel and Syria. In 1999-2000, Israel offered to return most of the Golan. But peace talks foundered because Syria wanted every inch back.

On my most recent trip to the Golan, 15 months ago, it was apparent why Israel could never return the entire territory in the foreseeable future. Driving along the Israeli side of the armistice line, one could see smoke rising in the distance. The same Iranian-backed militias that helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad essentially win the civil war were trying to seize turf along the Syrian side of the armistice line. Pro-Iranian Hezbollah fighters were joining that fight, arriving in Syria from Lebanon, just to the north of the Golan. Syrian civilians were crossing daily into Israel for medical treatment.

Yet -- let me emphasize again -- there was no pressure on Israel to return the Golan, not from Syria, not from Arab states, not from the international community. Indeed, life on the Israeli side of the Golan was, and still is, relatively prosperous and peaceful. Israeli troops, and Israeli planes had the area under control.

At least 20,000 Israelis have moved to the Golan, many in prosperous agricultural settlements, featuring apple orchards and high end wineries. The bulk of the Syrian population on the Golan are Druze, a small religious sect that was able to reconnect with many of their brethren who live in northern Israel. With heavy investment, the Druze capital Majdal Shams was booming with restaurants and cafes, and young women shop in western-style dress.

I was told by then Majdal Shams mayor Dolan Abu Saleh that, since the Syrian civil war, Druze had change their attitude toward Assad, perceiving him as a puppet of Iran and Russia. 

They were not eager, he said, to return to Syrian control and Russian hegemony -- or to a simmering civil war.

But very few were willing to take Israeli citizenship (as Saleh had done), because of the negative impact that would have for their Druze relatives on the Syrian side of the border.

So to summarize: before Trump’s tweet on the Golan, the internal situation in that region was stable. Assad had no chance to get the heights back, nor were Sunni Arab states raising the issue. Moreover, Russia, in understandings worked out with Israel, had pressed Iran to keep its proxies far back from the armistice line. The Russians, who control much of Syrian air space, were also letting Israel bomb many Iranian military targets in Syria.

All good for Israel.

U.S. recognition of Israel’s annexation of Golan would upset this positive scenario on several fronts.

First, by formally recognizing Israeli annexation, Trump would raise the issue of Israeli violations of international law. 

Most of the world protested Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a part of Ukraine, so how to avoid chastising Israel for annexing land that is a sovereign part of Syria. Nobody was raising the issue before Trump’s tweet, but now Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia may see an opening (or feel the need) to challenge Israel.

The Syrian Druze on the Golan, caught in between, may be forced to protest.

All for no practical Israeli gains.

Equally adverse, a U.S. nod to Israel’s annexation of the Golan has already emboldened Israeli right wing parties that want Jerusalem to formally annex much or all of the West Bank. Knesset (parliament) speaker Yuli Edelstein told a huge crowd in Tel Aviv last week that U.S. shift on Golan was a first step toward U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty there.

Down this annexation path lies a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem in which Israel winds up ruling permanently over a majority of disenfranchised Arabs. 

Forget about any Trump-led peace “deal of the century.” 

This is the road to a form of apartheid.

Trump’s tweet indicates this would cause him no heartburn. His only goal is to help reelect his scandal-plagued counterpart in Israel. Or perhaps to please his evangelical supporters.

Collapse of Trump's hypnotized personality cult begins: Vietnam failed summit

An echo opinion published in The Mercury News, a San Jose, California newspaper; written by Trudy Rubin, who is a colmnist who writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

HANOI, Vietnam- Here is the most glaring takeaway from the collapse of the North Korea summit in Hanoi: You can’t negotiate with a wily dictator as if he were a real-estate mogul in New York.

Donald Trump has famously touted his personal relationships with autocrats as the prelude to great deals. “We fell in love,” he said of the half-dozen or so “beautiful letters” he received from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Clearly, love was insufficient.

The president and his team appeared blindsided by the gap between the U.S. and North Korean positions at his second summit with Kim. Trump stated at a news conference that Kim wanted all sanctions removed against his country in return for dismantling a key nuclear complex at Yongbyon. But that deal would have left North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, missiles, and other production facilities still standing.

Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un abruptly cut short their two-day summit in Vietnam as talks broke down and both leaders failed to reach an agreement. In my opinion, this failure of the Trump personality cult, being that Kim Jung Un was not impressed, is the first crack in the Trumpzi's hypnotic veneer. 

North Korea’s foreign minister later claimed that North Korea only sought partial sanctions relief, but the gap was still clearly unbridgeable. With all or most sanctions lifted, U.S. leverage to eliminate Pyongyang’s arsenal would have shrunk.

So, no matter how much Trump may have wanted to distract attention from the Michael Cohen hearings in Washington, he had no choice but “to walk” away from Kim’s offer. The gulf between him and the North Korean leader was wider than the 6,800 miles that separate Washington and Pyongyang.

How could Trump have gotten his expectations so wrong?

The answer clearly revolves around Trump’s deep belief that his personal relationships and “brilliance” are sufficient to outwit tough autocrats. The president was reportedly warned about Kim’s insistence on major sanctions relief, but believed he could persuade the dictator to shift positions.

“This entire diplomatic process is distinctive because of President Trump and North Korea’s decision-making at the top level,” says Scott Snyder, the Council on Foreign Relations expert on North Korea. “The North Koreans (hoped) to go to the top and get what they want from Trump.”

As the Hanoi debacle displayed with such drama, personal diplomacy couldn’t budge the North Korean. 

Less clear is whether Trump grasps the need to revamp his negotiating approach.

That approach had already proved lacking at Trump’s first summit with Kim, in Singapore in June 2018. Despite the hoopla, that summit failed to produce any concrete results on or road map toward denuclearization. The two sides have not even agreed yet on the meaning of that term, or whether it requires the elimination of all of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.

As recently as the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence claimed that Kim had committed to complete denuclearization of North Korea. That statement was false.

Yet, even with lowered expectations for the Hanoi summit, the White House assumed some kind of deal would be reached. The U.S. side had already scheduled a goodbye lunch and signing ceremony. (Both were canceled.) U.S. officials had leaked reports to the media that Pyongyang would pledge to close the Yongbyon complex in return for a modest relaxation of some economic sanctions — and the signing of a peace declaration between the U.S. and North Korea.

Even that deal would have involved large concessions to Kim, since a peace declaration would have relaxed pressure on Pyongyang to make further moves toward denuclearization.

However, in Hanoi, Kim’s demand for lifting of all or most sanctions in return for inadequate concessions revealed that the two sides were operating in totally different worlds.

Under any previous presidency, a U.S. negotiating team would at least have worked out a basic framework before a president traveled all the way to Asia. But Trump devalues experts and detailed preparation. As he’s said, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

The limits to that approach became painfully clear in Hanoi.

Perhaps the North Korean leader thought Trump’s yen for a deal would impel him to accept a wildly insufficient offer. Kim made clear he preferred dealing with Trump than meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Moreover, Trump’s chief North Korea negotiator, Stephen Biegun, is a businessman who had no prior experience with complex North Korea dealings. The North Koreans, on the other hand, have been running rings around U.S. leaders for years.

The question now is whether Trump will revise his approach, broaden his team, and recognize the difference between geopolitical deals and real-estate manipulations. The president’s effusive praise of Kim has already lowered global pressure on Pyongyang for nuclear concessions.

Having expended enormous political capital on two summits, the president now faces a long slog of U.S.-North Korea talks that may never lead to full denuclearization of that country. His personal relationship with Kim may help keep those talks alive. But unless he realizes the limits of personal diplomacy, he will continue to get played.

Anything but Stormy ~ Trumponian headlines: Echo opinion

Stupid Donald Trump will do anything to remove Stormy Daniels and Vladimir Putin off the headlines.  Now, he's announced a grandiose meeting with Kim Jung Un. But he has no idea what he's doing because there aren't many experts who he trusts to advise him. Consequently, he'll make a fool of himself but, worse, our international allies will be embarrassed by the visuals.

Echo opinion published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by columnist Trudy Rubin.

Where was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson when Trump announced his "Stormy" meeting with Kim Jung Un? He was in Africa.

Well, that’s one way to shift the attention from payoffs to porn stars and potential trade wars.

I refer, natch, to Trump’s stunning announcement Thursday that he’d accept Kim Jong Un’s snap invitation for direct talks over North Korea’s nuclear program – which may be held within two months.

Gone (for now) are the mutual threats and insults that had the world worrying whether Trump would unleash a preemptive war on the Korean Peninsula. The president deserves credit for the tough sanctions policy that pushed Kim to shift gears.

But Trump’s disdain for expertise, and conviction that he is all-knowing, make him supremely vulnerable to Kim’s manipulations. Trump’s tweets already show his slim grasp of North Korea’s wiles and intentions.

So, when (or if) Trump and Kim meet, we can expect a great photo op of two men with impressive hairdos. 

More than that, if the president’s ego trumps acumen, the summit won’t end well.

When Trump meets North Korea's Kim, will he know what he is doing?

The main problem is not that the summit is being convened too quickly. If Trump had a capable team that he listened to, and if he set clear, attainable goals, he could manage the risk.

At minimum, the two leaders could take each other’s measure and probe each other’s positions.

Unfortunately, Trump disdains expertise and his Korea bench is depleted. 

A high-level summit would ordinarily be carefully prepared, with a special emissary doing advance work. 

 Instead, the U.S. point person on North Korea, special envoy Joseph Yun, just announced his retirement (as have many top State Department officials) and has not been replaced.

The administration has yet to nominate an ambassador to South Korea, having inexplicably nixed a terrific choice, Victor Cha. 

The Senate has yet to confirm the top diplomat handling East Asia.

Trump didn’t even bother to give his own secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, a heads up about the summit. 

Only hours before the announcement, Tillerson was dismissing the likelihood of talks. (Trump publicly chastised Tillerson in the past for talking about diplomacy with Pyongyang.)

Who in Asia can take Tillerson seriously when the president humiliates him so carelessly? Not Kim.

Clearly all this is irrelevant to Trump. When asked by Fox News in November about vacancies at the State Department, the Trump famously retorted: “I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be.”

With his unshakable belief in his omniscience, the president may ignore preparation. This would be hugely risky, says the Brookings Institution’s Robert Einhorn, a key negotiator with North Korea in the Clinton administration.

“This can’t be a free-flowing encounter. You can’t go in and wing it,” says Einhorn. “The North Koreans will have thought this through, will have a game plan. Trump doesn’t know any of the details.”

Trump’s lack of grasp was clear when he tweet-bragged Thursday that Kim “talked about denuclearization” with the South Koreans, “not just a freeze.” The president was referring to the U.S. demand that North Korea must completely denuclearize, not just freeze its program at current levels, which would leave it with dozens of weapons and delivery systems.

However, South Korean officials told the New York Times that Kim is proposing the same formula that scotched previous negotiations: In return for supposed denuclearization, Kim wants U.S. forces removed from South Korea and an end to the U.S. nuclear shield that protects South Korea and Japan.

Such a proposal is a nonstarter. Ending the U.S.-South Korean alliance would leave the peninsula vulnerable to Pyongyang’s military. Especially since North Korea has lied before about dismantling its nukes.

So it will be vital that Trump enter the summit with a realistic grasp of its prospects and limitations.

If Trump were a normal president, one might assume he would aim for a limited outcome: Take the measure of Kim, exchange views, put down certain markers – and probe exactly what Kim means when he says he will denuclearize if North Korea’s security is guaranteed.

Then Trump could judge whether or not complete denuclearization is a realistic U.S. goal. Serious negotiations might follow.

But Trump is not a normal president. He thinks diplomacy means going mano a mano with autocrats. Never mind that he has been played by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, both of whom have his number.

And Trump has made clear he doesn’t want drawn-out talks with Pyongyang. Yet he has failed to demonstrate – whether in trade, in Israeli-Palestinian peace, in Syria, or elsewhere – that he has mastered the art of making international deals.

So, at best when Trump and Kim meet, we can expect a great (MaineWriter ~ or maybe not so great....) photo op. 

At worst, Trump may be flattered into giving away leverage for nothing. Or the talks might deteriorate into new insults.

If we are really lucky, the president might wise up, listen to his briefers, and jump-start serious negotiations. 

Sadly, that seems about as likely as Trump giving up his tweets.