President Trump has landed on a fresh target for his Twitter attacks in the new year, shifting away from his near-disastrous provocation of North Korea and its nuclear-armed regime to a possibly-disastrous provocation of Pakistan and it’s nuclear-armed regime.
While American-Pakistani relations are a dangerous tightrope wire to walk for any president — with the foreign nation widely suspected of funding and providing matériel aid to terrorist organizations like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network — one would be hard-pressed to conceive of a worse platform than Twitter through which to conduct international diplomacy.
One gets the distinct sense that Trump finally glanced at one of the intelligence briefings his aides have been trying to get him to read all year, finally learned about some of the underhanded efforts of the Pakistani intelligence services, and ran to Twitter to rant about his newly acquired knowledge.
Yesterday, out of the blue, he tweeted that he would no longer support providing aid to Pakistan, getting in an oblique jab at President Obama by saying the Pakistanis have thought of our leaders “as fools” for years now.
The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 1, 2018
CNN reported earlier today that the tweet set off immediate concerns in Islamabad, and the Pakistani government convened an emergency national security meeting to discuss the sudden social media attack, clearly demonstrating that Trump’s tweets have a real potential to increase tensions and destabilize the world.
Today, he decided went after Pakistan again, this time dragging the Palestinians into the fray for no apparent reason other than that perhaps he sees all of the Middle East and South Asia as one monolithic Islamic culture to be attacked and feared.
He also referenced his recent decision to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move which was widely seen as a needlessly risky move that inflamed tensions in the region.
Trump added that the capital move took an important part of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations off the table, something which one would expect a “master dealmaker” to recognize as a bad thing. The president should be finding new tools to forge a lasting peace, not taking away the few tools we already have.
The entire debacle is compounded by the glaring fact that Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner has been assigned the historically difficult problem of Middle East peace, a task for which he woefully unqualified. The president tweeted:
It's not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries, and others. As an example, we pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
…peace treaty with Israel. We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
In addition to the obviously innately reckless nature of Trump’s Twitter diplomacy, Murtaza Mohammad Hussain of The Intercept also pointed out that the president didn’t even get the details right in the first place, and that much of the money the United States military is paying to Pakistan is to lease access to the port of Karachi to help with the NATO war efforts in Afghanistan.
Someone should tell him that the U.S. military is paying money for access to the port of Karachi and their supply lines to conduct the war in Afghanistan, the money isn't a gift as he seems to think. https://t.co/Vp2Fc54PnO
— Murtaza Mohammad Hussain (@MazMHussain) January 2, 2018
It should be apparent to every American at this point that Trump lacks the temperament to lead the world’s most powerful country. That’s not yet the case yet as he still maintains bastions of support, but hopefully, Trump’s fanatical supporters will eventually recognize at the very least that the president should curb his dangerous Twitter habits. The world will be a safer place if he stops using the website to gain attention and distract from his failures.
