Following a series of foreign policy blunders in 2019, Anne Applebaum wrote a piece for The Washington Post with a memorable summary of how Donald Trump approaches international challenges. “There is no plan; there is only whim and instinct,” she explained. “There is no international orientation either, just a series of hasty unplanned, unexamined decisions, followed by Twitter tantrums.”
Nearly six years later, the assessment continues to ring true. Take the president’s plan — I’m using the word loosely — to acquire the Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday afternoon, at a White House press conference, Trump announced that he wants the United States to take a “long-term ownership position” over Gaza. As he described it, Americans would both “take over“ and “own” the area, and when asked about the possibility of deploying U.S. military forces to Gaza, the Republican added, “We’ll do what is necessary.”
Experts in international law wasted little time in explaining that his plan is illegal, while on Capitol Hill, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia described the proposal as “deranged” and “nuts.” There was no shortage of international reactions along the same lines.
As for how, exactly, the president arrived at this idea, The New York Times reported that Trump “shocked even senior members of his own White House” on Tuesday afternoon:
[P]rivately, Mr. Trump had been talking about U.S. ownership of the enclave for weeks. And his thinking had accelerated, according to two administration officials, after his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, returned from Gaza last week and described the horrific conditions there. While his announcement looked formal and thought-out — he read the plan from a sheet of paper — his administration had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
In a normal, functioning U.S. administration, such a monumental decision would go through months of intense scrutiny, led by experienced national security and diplomatic officials. There would be working groups. And negotiations. And detailed analyses on costs and consequences.
Officials wouldn’t take these steps as mere formalities. Rather, administrations would want to do all of this in order to make sure that a plan makes sense and would work in the real world.
Trump — a leader whose foreign policy decisions are “just a series of hasty unplanned, unexamined decisions” — skipped all of these steps and just blurted out one of the most radical foreign policy positions in a generation. According to multiple reports, the Defense Department wasn’t notified in advance. Neither was the State Department. According to the Times’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Trump hadn’t even briefed Israeli officials on his vision.
The easy observation is that this isn’t how responsible presidents are supposed to try to govern, but that’s incomplete. This also isn’t how responsible presidents who want their plans to work are supposed to try to govern.
It also served as a timely reminder about the degree to which Trump, after having learned nothing after his first failed term in the White House, still appears wholly incapable of avoiding shambolic chaos of his own making.
The Times report went on to highlight a series of related questions about the president’s Gaza plan: “How would this work? How many U.S. troops would be required to clear out Hamas and the mountains of rubble, and defuse all the unexploded ordnance? What would it cost to rebuild a demolition site the size of Las Vegas? How would seizing Palestinian territory be justified under international law? And what would happen to two million refugees?”
The day after the rollout of the plan, administration officials couldn’t answer the questions because there were no such answers. All they had were some poorly thought-out rhetoric that their boss had blurted out, to the consternation of much of the planet.
After a day of confusion at the White House, Trump apparently thought he could help clear things up with a 107-word missive published to his social media platform. In it, the Republican said Gaza “would be turned over to the United States,” and Palestinians would be “resettled” in some other countries that he didn’t identify.
Trump went on to say that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, is a Palestinian — a label he has long used as a slur — before concluding that he doesn’t believe U.S. troops will be needed as part of this endeavor because … well, he never actually got around to saying why not.
All of which is to say, Trump created an avoidable international incident on Tuesday, only to make matters worse soon after.
