The Way Forward

After having learned nothing after his first failed term, Trump still appears wholly incapable of avoiding shambolic chaos of his own making.

Take his Gaza "plan," for example.

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......

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......

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 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.

He went on to say that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, is a Palestinian — a label Trump has long used as a slur — before concluding that Trump 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.