The default setting for anything to do with President Trump’s forays into geo-politics is to treat him as the global village idiot who no-one takes seriously. Across the world the self-appointed guardians of global policy wisdom pronounce in the columns of elite media or on the BBC that Trump is too thick, pays no attention to detail, remains ignorant of history, and should not be allowed anywhere diplomatic negotiations.
The points would be fair were it not for the fact that European foreign policy “experts” have made such a comprehensive hash of producing workable solutions to almost any contemporary world problem. The Middle East , for example, is Europe’s invention. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was preceded by the Cambon Declaration named after the French foreign minister, Jules Cambon, who promised a “foyer”, a home, for European Jews in Palestine.
Europe willed the end but never the means to create a viable state for its Jewish citizens in Palestine. Africa was largely colonised and then controlled by white Europeans with armed conflicts in Algeria, the former Rhodesia, Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria with South Africa ruled on the basis of open racism for years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today Somalia and Sudan are ablaze and Libya is sending thousands of migrants to destabilise Greece with the EU helpless to stop these conflicts.
The petty nationalisms of Europe are in full throttle in the Balkans. The EU’s failure to adopt any measure to make the single market work and relaunch economic growth or provide enough military, financial, diplomatic or political support to tackle Russian neoimperalism is noted around the world whose leaders flock to Washington not Brussels.
Europe complains about Trump tariffs but French, Belgian, Spanish, Irish and Bulgarian EU politicians denounce any idea of Europe signing a trade deal with Latin America’s Mercosur trade bloc. The Polish political class refuses to support the idea of Ukraine joining the EU, a much better way of strengthening Ukraine than a never ending meat grinder war destroying the lives of young Ukrainans.
But when it comes to denouncing Trump as a geo-political idiot Europe, including the London elites, are united.
Yet in the Caucasus Trump diplomacy seems to have pulled off a small miracle. For decades Muslim Azerbaijan has been locked in endless disputes with its Christian neighbour Armenia. Azerbaijan has oil and gas. Armenia has remnants of Soviet era manufacturing but a powerful diaspora which has allowed the nation to become a financial services regional hub. Armenian GDP per capita is nearly three times that of Azerbaijan. The countries fought two wars over control of its border region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s and after 2000, the first resulting in a win for Armenia, the second in Azerbaijan defeating Armenia troops.
The UN, France and Russia which considered the two quarrelling nations as its backyard failed to find a permanent solution. Turkey under its Muslim Brotherhood President Erdoğan which has never admitted its genocidal massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman empire in 1915 consistently supports Muslim Azerbaijan. But now something not far short of a geopolitical miracle has taken place as Ilham Aliev, the longstanding Azerbaijan autocratic leader has shaken hands with Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pachinian and the two men have signed a wide-ranging agreement that if fully implemented and upheld will result in peace and open(ish) borders between the two nations, show Vladmir Putin that his neo-imperialist ambition to restore Moscow hegemony or guiding influence over the former USSR territories won’t work and indicate to President Erdoğan that his belief in an Islamist future for Muslim nations between Europe and Asia is doomed to failure.
And here’s the worrying news for Trump haters. The peace deal in the Caucasus was brokered by Donald Trump after repeated failures of Europe, including British efforts, to persuade Baku and Yerevan to arrive at a compromise. On BBC Radio 4, the former Head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, dismissed Trump’s Envoy Steve Witkoff as a village idiot who didn’t understand the higher reaches of diplomacy, didn’t speak foreign languages, didn’t read his briefing though quite how the British officials know the latter was not explained.
But Witkoff, a lawyer and, of course, a dealer in property, maybe is smarter than the public school elites who run Britain’s spy system. He made Aliev and Pachinian an economic offer they couldn’t refuse. US private sector firms will build and manage a long motorway, a Trump highway, between Armenia and Azerbaijan. A 99 year lease will be awarded by the two governments to this new US backed consortium. Like a modern land version of the Panama or Suez canal the new highway which will have in due course a telecoms corridor running parallel to the roads carrying goods, food, produce and people doing business from Turkey to Iran via Armenia and Azerbaijan and in theory open up the Caucasus region to full blooded capitalist development.
So has US business centred diplomacy succeeded where traditional knocking heads together diplomacy on offer from Europe and Russia failed? Time will tell. The good news is that the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry has denounced the agreement. Iran has also attacked the deal as it reduces Teheran’s economic influence over Armenia. President Aliev was a longstanding comrade of Vladimir Putin. But now he sells gaz to Ukraine and urges Kyiv to stand up to Russian ‘occupation’ of its territory.
All this is a side show compared with the big question of Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Despite the hype that a European “coalition of the willing” led by Macron, Starmer and Merz could help end the Russian aggression it is clear that Putin treats Europeans and Brits as irrelevant. Trump may well stumble and fail or try to force Zelensky into accepting the unacceptable. But in the Caucasus at least Trump-Witkoff diplomacy has succeeded (so far) by using money power than some future arms build up to persuade deadly rivals of the day before yesterday to come together.
Denis MacShane
