All of us have heard Donald Trump’s idea of creating a riviera of the Middle East for Gaza. I thought he blared it out immediately after a wet dream, since even the eyes of his Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles and State Secretary Marco were screaming in disbelief when they heard it. Surprisingly, though, several commentators argued that he was in fact serious. They relate it to his desire to repossess the Panama Canal. Their thesis, the Suez Canal is just below Gaza; controlling Gaza is as good as controlling the Suez Canal when the situation so requires.
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| Riviera Gaza de Trump |
Or
maybe he is indeed a genius or extraordinarily foresightful. He wants to make
sure that all the strategic waterways in the world – the English Channel, the
Malacca Strait, the Hormuz Strait, The Suez Canal, and the Panama Canal – are the
US fleets’ playground. And by incorporating Canada and Greenland into the
United States, he will also make the US into the biggest country in the world. He
also needs to add the Baltic and Artic shipping routes into his equation.
Knowing Trump’s shallowness in history and geopolitics, I am inclined to say that a night before this outrageous statement of his, his son-in-law has just whispered the real estate potential of Gaza to him and as a through and through real estate man, the idea just clicked. He envisions a riviera complete with a Trump Tower, marinas, casinos, theme parks, and maybe its 360 sq.km can also house a 36-hole golf course.
But this man is so callous; he just does not care about the fifty thousand people – most of them women and children – who have been killed and the 1.6 million refugees the war has created since 7 October 2023. Trump personifies the worst of human nature. His unscrupulousness stinks to high heaven.
He is happy to see Gaza cleaned of the debris and the refugees by the Israelis so that he can mobilize America to create the riviera. How sick can this man be?
He is an emperor who does not care for his people. Everyone can be dispensed with, even if you are a court jester.
Elon Musk has been tasked with wielding a big axe to cut down the size of the federal government. Several departments will be closed and heavily downsized. Tens of thousands of workers will lose their jobs in the next couple of months. His 8-month voluntary severance package is already on the table for anyone to take. This severance will be particularly painful for those in mid-level positions. How many can get a decent job when you are in already your forties or so? And what about your mortgage, children’s college fees, etc?
MAGA is not about Making America Great Again; it is about making Donald Trump being remembered by Americans as a great president even though he has delivered or will deliver little in substance.
His policy is clear: He is the absolute emperor; other leaders should kowtow to him. And every country’s interest must be subservient to the US’s. No other way.
His weapon: Tariffs!
Can it work? Only those who did Economics 202 think tariffs can help him accomplish the MAGA mission!
Strangely, though, he has yet to make any harsh statement on Chinese President Xi Jinping or China, save the tariff stuff. However, he has allowed his State Secretary Marco Rubio to spew venom on China during his recent South America tour. His national security Michael Waltz is another China hawk; it is unlikely that he will hold his tongue either. I suppose Trump is using them to test waters. But when it is time to test the pudding, they will not be allowed to cross the line. I suspect they will be reduced to glorified Secretaries. Few doubts Rubio can last more than 12 months. By that time, his political career is also gone. Come to think of it, maybe this is the way Trump is plotting to finish him off, since he has spoken against Trump previously.
We all know Trump is a racist through and through. Yes, he does have a soft spot for a few exceptions, like the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas who is Black. (Maybe it is because his white wife Ginni has been a strong Trump supporter.) But Vivek Ramaswamy could not last more than a month in DoGE; I bet Trump’s FBI pick Kash Patel will have to quit once he has finished Biden and the remnant skeletons in his closet. He is simply too “South Indian” to Trump.
Readers must have read or heard about the Chinese classic Journey to the West (西遊記, Xīyóu-Jì) where Monkey King Sūn Wù Kōng (孙悟空) went straight to the heaven to wreak havoc (dà nào Tiān Gong, 大闹天宫). Musk is Trump’s Sūn Wù Kōng. Trump is using him to shake up the federal bureaucracy. Musk has handpicked a team of six young, highly skilled tech experts to help him unravel its state of complacency, starting with the Office of Personnel Management and then spread out to the Justice Department, Environmental Protection Agency, the Education Department, the offices of the various Inspector-Generals, CIA and USAID. Even the judges are not spared. The Fed is also in the crosshair, spared for the time being, thanks to its “beyond-the-President” status.
I seem to detect two conflicting objectives in this pursuit. Trump is driven by his desire for vengeance; however, Musk may genuinely believe in driving efficiency. There is an unintended consequence arising out of Musk drive: He has shaken a big part of America’s “Deep State” – from the records he has obtained from the CIA/USAID operations. The names of some 5,000 journalists in 30 plus countries are now at risk of being exposed! Watch out for those on-the-take journalists in our region, your name may appear soon!
Can an American leader who is without much principle and philosophy bring the world to a better place?
The answer is obviously NO. He has pulled the US out of WHO, ICJ, the Paris Climate Agreement, Human Rights Council and halted all US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). He has also threatened to withdraw from the United Nations.
Trump can bully all these helpless peoples – starting with the leaders of Columbia who had to eat his humble pie, followed by Mexico and Canada who had to submit to his demand, and Panama who suddenly lost his balls on the country’s BRI position. And Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba is now crawling to the emperor to ask for Trump’s baptism. (If not for shooting his own foot at home, Korea’s Yoon Suk Yul would also be hard practising his golf to lose a game or two to Trump just in case he got summoned by the emperor. Ditto Ferdinand Marcos Junior, who is still trying to stir shit in the South China Sea hoping that he could get whacked so that he could gain some sympathy from the emperor too.)
The takeover of Canada, Greenland and Gaza may be outlandish contemplations of his to ordinary mortals like us, but these wild ideas will in fact help him to generate more possibilities.
But tougher leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will just give him their middle fingers. (He has to backtrack on his ending “the Ukraine War in one day” and “Visiting China within 100 days” shouts.) (According to today’s South China Morning Post, Trump says he loves to talk to Xi. 😅)
There is an unintended consequence, though. He might be happy to leave Taiwan to China to decide. William Lai Cheng-te, you better watch out too!
And can Trump and Musk survive the "clicks" of the Deep State snipers?
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ReplyDeleteBecause this will be his last term, Trump wants fast and decisive solutions to everything - manufacturing returned, trade deficit cut, illegals evicted, costs and prices reduced, deep swamp drained, and strategic overseas assets obtained.
However, he is finding out every executive order he pushes attracts negative reactions. His DOGE is facing legal and other pushbacks; one agency firing eliminated nuclear safety staff, now untraceable.
He will also have to think hard how to wriggle out of the 25% tariffs he had promised to level on neighbours Canada and Mexico without first looking at how dependent his US economy is on imports from them; China has reacted to his additional 10%, and other countries which trade with the US will likely as well come April 2nd when he brings his bazooka to the global trade carnival after lobbing tariffs on steel and aluminium (again).
In his (literally) jaundiced mind, he thinks his USA has been stiffed by other countries; thinking so would however be an effrontery on his global MNC CEOs who choose to manufacture overseas wherever better labor is more readily available and their capital is more fruitfully deployed to bring bigger and faster returns; to them, the US is sunset for manufacturing but still ripe for stock market plays.
That he persists in saying others pay for the tariffs only shows a one-tracked mind which won't admit he and his Navarro, Lighthizer and now Luttnik have been saying the wrong thing to their American peoples. Maybe it's sheer cowardice to try and save one's ego.
Or, he thinks he can use the tariffs collected from his fellowmen to cover any reduction of their income tax but since most don't have superlative incomes relative to costs, the reduction will only benefit the super-rich while raising seller prices and price-gouging that blight the poorer majority.
Or, as he told Davos'25, if countries want to avoid his tariffs, they should manufacture in his country. But they can retort his country already has full employment while theirs are increasingly below par so why should they be any less nationalistic towards their own fellowmen?
While these are already ponderous matters, what he and his administration have of late been saying to the world has undoubtedly rumbled geopolitics. To annexative threats on Canada, Panama, Greenland and Gaza now come the dismissal of Europe and Kyiv in the negotiation in Riyadh with Russia to end the Ukraine war.
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ReplyDeleteIn effect, the US 'soft power' so trumpeted by Nye, jr has in a few strokes been reduced to putty. Furthermore, Musk's exposure of USAID used to influence and subvert other governments has flattened that to chapati.
Modi must insist those promised US F-35s his India can't afford must come with valid flying/firing codes - but how will he ever know they will work when needed? If, as with Ishiba, he is next asked to buy huge amounts of Alaskan fuel, then China can be relieved from doing so as she already has contracts with Saudi Arabia, Russia, Australia and Iran. It is incredulous how India has to buy fuel from the US when it has had to abort building a nearer port in fuel exporter Iran.
It goes to show the US is just one big bully run by a unilateral analog seeing everything only as black-n-white but still trying to push its weight around in an n-dimensional multilateral digital world tweaked to international hyper-efficiency by globalization. Even Rubio the cuban with dead eyes and Legseth the scandalized with hand in jeans pocket are reduced to mumbling polemics before foreign leaders.
But Vance the appalachian takes the cake for telling off the Europeans they don't practise freedom of speech; weren't they within memory accusing others the same without proof?
The US VP (and his boss) did Europe and the world a good thing. By so burning the Transatlantic Alliance and stopping the Democrats' Ukraine Nato expansion towards the Russian border , it will force Europe to face-up to its own defense but since that will still take about ten years even at full throttle, it will force Kyiv to accept a settlement with Russia. And US-sycophant Poland to start sweating bricks from installing US nukes.
In sum, Trump may turn out to be positive for world peace and rejuvenation of his US within its own borders.... and triumphant for China as leader of the Global South, friend of Europe, Russia and Asia, pantheon of innovation, and voice of conscience for most of humanity, its socialist root nothwithstanding.