Two Trump initiatives that unfolded on Tuesday evening seemed to capture, in the flash of a few hours, the outline of President Trump’s vision for shaping American power.
Ten thousand people working around the world for U.S.A.I.D., the main American aid agency, were told to pack up and come home over the next month, eviscerating a Kennedy-era initiative to build alliances by making the United States the world’s most generous and benevolent superpower. Mr. Trump declared that their leaders were “radical left lunatics,” and the State Department ordered them to halt virtually all their projects, even if that meant cutting off programs that helped eradicate smallpox and prevented millions of H.I.V. cases.
At the same time, in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump was describing a new American venture to seize, occupy and rebuild Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The two million Palestinians there would be moved elsewhere — voluntarily or forcefully was never made clear. A 15-year clearing and rebuilding of a devastated land would commence, Mr. Trump said, one that experts imagine could easily cost multiples of the roughly $40 billion that the United States spends annually on U.S.A.I.D.
Mr. Trump then described a future for Gaza in which it would be repopulated by citizens of the world, living happily in glass towers with spectacular sea views. There was no discussion of a right of the Palestinians to return to the territory, which he said would be owned and governed by the United States. Nor was there discussion of whether moving the Palestinians out involuntarily would violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against “mass forcible transfers.”
Rarely has a confluence of declarations captured so vividly that Mr. Trump’s vision of America First is only selectively isolationist — and driven by a vision of commercial profit. His is a one-way version of isolationism, defended by high walls at home and protected by American troops at the border to keep illegal immigrants out. But the borders of other territories must give way to American national security concerns, or development whims.
In this vision, the Panama Canal and Greenland must be owned or operated for American interests first, what Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, referred to last month as the Monroe Doctrine 2.0. But that doctrine applied only to the Western Hemisphere. Gaza would be an out-of-area operation, a forcible insertion of American troops abroad — not unlike what William McKinley, Mr. Trump’s hero, did in the Philippines 127 years ago or what George W. Bush ordered in Iraq a little more than a century later.
Both are now regarded as acts of American colonialism, if not imperialism. And both sparked insurgencies, leading to American withdrawal.
Mr. Waltz said on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had been thinking about his proposal for months and that he wanted to force “the region to come up with its own solutions.”
But he insisted, in a CBS interview, that he was “not seeing any realistic solutions on how those miles and miles and miles of debris are going to be cleared, how those essentially unexploded bombs are going to be removed, how these people are physically going to live for at least the decade, if not longer” that it will take to rebuild. Anyone challenging Mr. Trump’s vision of moving the population out does not “have a realistic view” of the desperation of people in a “completely unlivable” strip of land.
Mr. Trump’s view of U.S.A.I.D. was born of the long-running — and often justifiable — suspicion that foreign aid programs have become disconnected from America’s foreign policy interests, their efficiency and results often questionable.
And his solution for Gaza springs from his experience as a real estate developer. In his first term, he even had a video produced for Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, showing him how hotels and condos could be built along the country’s east coast, if it just gave up its nuclear weapons. (Mr. Kim chose to keep building weapons — his arsenal is now far larger than it was when Mr. Trump began his failed diplomacy with the country — and those beaches still have buried mines, rather than five-star resorts.)
But as Mr. Trump made his sales pitch, there was no acknowledgment, even fleetingly, of how the United States would have a sovereign claim on Gaza — or why he would want to own the territory, and with it the problem of the insurgency that could well follow any effort to force out the population. Perhaps that is no surprise: From all accounts, there was no effort by the White House to field-test the ideas with the government’s own experts, hold Situation Room meetings that weighed the pros, the cons or even the legality of the idea.
He had not given allies in the region a heads-up — even Jordan and Egypt, which he said would come around to the idea of absorbing the Palestinian refugees. He made no effort to square the idea with his long-running critique of America’s “forever wars.”
It was diplomacy by the seat of his pants, the force of his will and his certainty that every beautiful beach deserves a Trump international property, or its equivalent. And it was wrapped in an explanation that there was no other way to start the process than by evicting everyone and bringing in the bulldozers.
“In any city in the United States of America, if you had damage that was one-hundredth of what I saw in Gaza, nobody would be allowed to go back to their homes,” Steven Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Mideast envoy and a fellow developer, said after viewing the region from the air. “That’s how dangerous it is.”
“Its buildings could tip over at any moment,” he added. “There’s no utilities there whatsoever, no working water, electric, gas, nothing. God knows what kind of disease might be festering there. So when the president talks about cleaning it out, he talks about making it habitable.”
There was a bit more explanation of the recall of the U.S.A.I.D. staff, but it was more a critique of what had gone wrong than a description of the administration’s plans to fix it.
American diplomats have long complained that U.S.A.I.D. had grown too distant from American interests, that its programs often operated on autopilot. Many career diplomats have argued, publicly and privately, for bringing the independent agency back inside the State Department, much as many American allies run aid from their foreign ministries.
But as Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about U.S.A.I.D. to a Fox News interviewer while visiting El Salvador on Monday, he described an us-versus-them hostility to those running the aid efforts. “They have basically evolved into an agency that believe they’re not even a U.S. government agency,” he said. “They’re a global charity, that they take the taxpayer money and they spend it as a global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest or not.”
He cited complaints from some embassies that “U.S.A.I.D. is not only not cooperative; they undermine the work that we are doing in that country.” It is an accurate description of the bureaucratic rivalries that often take place around the world, where U.S. embassy staff, military attachés, aid workers and C.I.A. station operatives may all have different priorities. And there are political tensions — which became clear as Mr. Trump again restricted the use of American foreign aid to any organization around the world that provides abortions, or abortion counseling, even if those activities are legal in the country being helped.
Mr. Rubio charged that the agency’s leadership “just think that they’re a global entity and that their master is the globe, not the United States.”
Mr. Trump’s chosen tools for handling these problems are the bulldozer in Gaza and the wrecking ball to one of the world’s largest government aid agencies.
“You would much rather see us go methodically through these programs,” said Michael Singh, the managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a veteran of the Bush administration, whose proudest moment was initiating the program, in 2003, that has been so effective against the spread of AIDS.
“But Trump believes he needs to get as much done as quickly as possible. And that’s why he is a disrupter. So we need to think hard about each of these programs, and justify them in terms of American national interest.”
But he said, “we also have to remember that once you dismantle something, it’s tough to rebuild.”
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