The Proof of Trump’s Ignorance of the Middle East Is in the Pudding of Mistakes |
There is a familiar political pathology in America: the belief that a sufficiently loud man, armed with enough self-regard, can bully history into obedience. Donald Trump is the latest and most flamboyant specimen of this disease. He has never merely claimed to understand the Middle East; he has acted as though his ignorance were itself a form of genius, as though instinct, bluster, and a talent for television could substitute for intelligence, memory, discipline, and judgment. The tragedy is not simply that he misunderstands the region. It is that he mistakes his misunderstanding for mastery.
The Middle East has a special way of exposing frauds. It does not care about branding. It does not care about poll-tested phrases or reality-show swagger. It does not care how many times a leader declares himself “strong” or “smart.” The region has humiliated kings, presidents, generals, and diplomats who arrived convinced that they alone had cracked the code. Trump belongs to that long and embarrassing procession of men who imagined that certainty was a substitute for knowledge. It never is.
The old saying is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In Trump’s case, the proof of his grasp of the Middle East is in the outcomes he leaves behind: confusion dressed up as dealmaking, vanity dressed up as strategy, and improvisation dressed up as doctrine. Every misstep reveals the same thing: this is a man who wants the prestige of statesmanship without the discipline of statecraft. He wants the applause of hard decisions without the burden of understanding what those decisions actually mean.
If there is a single historical comparison that should haunt Trump, it is not some flattering businessman’s tale, but the cautionary example of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain also........