It has been said that diplomacy is the art of thinking twice and saying nothing. When it comes to the Middle East, however, the US diplomatic corps and State Department in particular has more consistently prone to being completely thoughtless and often doing the wrong thing.
The hostility of the US Department of State to the rights of the Jewish People to its own homeland even predates its legendary "Arabism". Robert Lansing, Wilson's Secretary of State during World War I, was greatly perturbed by the Balfour Declaration: he was greatly disconcerted that the "Killers of Christ" could potentially achieve sovereignty in the Holy Land. However, following the discovery of oil in the Middle East and particularly the Arabian Peninsula, the diplomatic corps found a new economic excuse to further buttress their already entrenched Judeomisia: they feared that not favoring those Judeocidal regimes in their wars against the Jews could have dire implications for access to petrodollars. This was all but codified during FDR's February 1945 tete-a-tete with Ibn Saud, but also was more explicitly expressed by Secretary of State George Marshall exploding at Truman; shocked that Truman would recognize Israel and antagonize her neighbors, he declared that he would not vote for his own President in 1948.
In more recent years, irrespective of which party occupied the White House, one could almost always count on whoever ran the State Department to uphold the Judeomisic policy regime.
The list of diplomatic Judeomisic miscreants is endless:
- Ike's John Foster Dulles, who lied to Ike about what Israel was doing in the Suez, which Ike realized at the end of his second term after Dulles was already dead;
- LBJ's Dean Rusk's and his DOS, who tried to tip the balance back to the UAR troops during the Six-Day War and were caught with their pants down;
- Nixon's Bill Rogers during the Nixon years, who originated the "Land for Peace" formula even after the three "No's" of Khartoum;
- Ford's Henry Kissinger, who openly courted a still-hostile Sadat at Israel's expense apropos of nothing;
- HW's James Baker, coiner of "F*** the Jews";
- W's Colin Powell, who got his education on Middle East politics and views on the "peace process" straight from his Saudi counterparts at CENTCOM during the first Gulf War (which also infected his colleague Norman Schwarzkopf);
- W's Condi Rice, who learned everything she knew from "realist" Brent Scowcroft and her tenure on the board of Chevron and disingenuously compared the disputed territories to the Alabama of her upbringing;
- Obama's John Kerry, who once had a "perfect" voting record as per AIPAC while in the Senate as late as 2002 but who suddenly got PTSD while visiting Israel leading him to compare the disputed territories to South Vietnam, and who so famously bungled "cease-fire" negotiations during the 2014 Gaza War by handing Hamas' Qatari interlocutors all of their negotiation points which infuriated even the Left in Israel;
- and even Trump's Rex Tillerson, who owed his position to his oil contacts and the aforementioned Condi Rice pressing Trump to take him.
- (The one exception to this rule was Reagan's tandem of Alec Haig and George Shultz, who were on the side of the angels, but that was balanced out by bitter antisemite Caspar Weinberger at the DOD, who spent his entire life trying to overcompensate for his last name).
Mike Pompeo overturning the State Department's "But Settlements!!!" irritant of a truism goes a long way towards finally undoing more than a century of diplomatic perfidy.
The question is: why now? Trump has ostensibly been somewhat gradualist in his approach--one step at a time reestablishing who the deserving party is in this conflict [Israel] and who the intransigent terrorists are [Hamas, the PA, their shills]; but one would expect that for this particular declaration, he would have waited until he was reelected.
Two developments accelerated this declaration. The first is the ongoing impeachment brouhaha: the latest "Ukraine!" salvo has revealed just how much the entire bureaucratic establishment loathes that Trump has shown just how malevolent and incompetent they are, which is why he uses Giuliani: no one can be trusted to do a job right, much less keep their mouth shut. The second is indirectly related, based on Nikki Haley's revelation that John Kelly and Tillerson's policy m.o. resembled Mean Girls more than Foggy Bottom, trying to get Haley to join their Stab-In-The-Back club because Trump's Jerusalem Embassy declaration wouldn't toe the standard diplomatic anti-Zionist line.
What this does in addition to upending more than a century of established diplomatic antisemitism is that the the entire corps is has been put on notice: this is now official company policy, and hewing to the previous one is a firing offense; like Reagan and the air traffic controllers in 1981, if the firing is done en masse, so be it. There's nothing this President likes to say more or says better than"You're Fired", and the entire corps is just begging for it.
