Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio says it really throws a corrupt man when other people don’t respond to bribery. This is the confusion facing President Donald Trump in his doings with more principled international leaders — even in the terrorist state of Iran.
Read more ‘I think he’s dead’: Mitch McConnell pulls a ‘Franco’
Someone like Trump believes “everyone has their price,” Cartoggio told the Dispatch. “… Team Trump’s One Neat Trick to get Iran to accept its interpretation of Paragraph 5 was to offer the Iranians the fattest envelope America could stuff.”
U.S. diplomats led by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff proposed a trade-off to the enemy, in Trump’s ceasefire deal, said Catoggio. Iran relinquishes its claim to control the Strait of Hormuz and renounce toll payments in exchange for billions of dollars of unfrozen funds. Dangling $100 billion in Iranian money at the regime if they’d let go of the strait treated Hormuz like an income-producing Iranian asset that the United States might buy.
“If the price was right, a rational actor would happily sell, no? And remember, that $100 billion is the tip of the iceberg under the memorandum: $300 billion in new investments from private interests is waiting for Iran if it complies fully with the terms of the deal, including meeting U.S. demands on its nuclear program,” said Catoggio. “That’s almost as much as the country’s GDP last year. Bribes don’t get much sweeter. Trump’s fat envelope should have worked. After all, everyone has their price. Don’t they?
But the transaction went sideways, said Catoggio, because Trump keeps expecting other leaders to act the way he acts himself — “transactional and generally without a guiding worldview.”
“Trump is amoral whereas the Iranian regime is immoral, but they are immoral actors in the pursuit of long-term goals, enshrined in the Islamic Revolution of 1979,” said Catoggio. “No amount of resistance appears capable of convincing the president that foreign nationalism usually can’t be broken by buying, bullying, or bombing it into submission. Occasionally, it can: The predators who rule Venezuela rolled over meekly when Trump demanded fealty. But Ukraine fought on after the U.S. cut off military aid. Canada began organizing a western counterweight to U.S. power after Trump challenged its sovereignty. And Denmark continues to defy White House threats to sabotage NATO if it doesn’t cough up Greenland.”
Read more The choke-worthy irony of Trump’s new scare tactic
Unlike Trump, not everyone has their price, particularly people motivated by nationalism. But genuine nationalism and patriotism is an alien notion to a creature like Trump.
“Patriotism is an irrational impulse insofar as it implies that one should be willing to make great sacrifices for the good of one’s country, and the president is an eminently rational actor. (In the economic sense of the term. No other.) He’s a draft-dodging mobster, not Nathan Hale. Naturally he assumes that the Iranians are too,” Catoggio argued. “… In a war like the one in Iran, led on one side by someone who believes in nothing and on the other by people who believe fervently in crazy things, which is more likely to misjudge the other’s willingness to persevere toward strategic victory rather than be bribed to quit?”
But what the president “lacks in intellectual foundations for his patriotism, he makes up for in raw chauvinism,” Catoggio added. “… He plainly revels in leading the most powerful country in the world because it’s the most powerful country in the world. That people abroad might feel similar pride in their own lesser nations is hard for him to grasp, I’m sure. What do they have to feel pride about? Without chauvinism, what is patriotism worth?”
His broken understanding of “America first” serves Trump’s “preposterous narcissism,” said Catoggio, “but it also leaves him unprepared and likely confused when people abroad decide that not only do they not like the world’s strongest power pushing them around, they’re willing to do something about it.”
Read more ‘Guess where the money came from?’ Outrage sparked as cost of ‘free’ Air Force One is revealed
