https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/28/donald-trump-genie/
EXCERPT:
Throughout our lives, ever since the founding of Israel, peace in the Middle East has been the ultimate desideratum and the ultimate impossibility. Over the decades there were meetings and summits and accords aplenty, lots of handshaking and headlines, but nothing ever really happened.
If the job of trying to make peace in the Middle East had stayed in the hands of people like John Kerry, so it would have remained. Kerry perfectly fit the mold of the modern State Department functionary. He looked the part. He dressed the part. And he viewed the job in the same way that other functionaries before him had viewed it: it was all about holding endless decorous meetings with one’s Israeli and Palestinian counterparts, having pretty much the same conversations with them that one’s predecessors had had, hosting dinners and receptions with these people at which the usual compliments were exchanged and the usual toasts made, and, finally, giving speeches in which one said the same old things in the same old way.
Kerry was great at this. He could gas on for hours without ever saying anything fresh or surprising or moving the ball so much as a centimeter.
On December 28, 2016, at the end of his term as secretary of state, he delivered his valedictory oration, a 9,700-word declamation about peace in the Middle East most of which was comfortingly familiar to old hands at this sort of thing. He talked about how the Palestinians needed to clean up their act but also deserved a better life in a country of their own; he talked about how America was Israel’s great friend but expected Israel to stop settlements in the occupied territories; he paid obeisance to the United Nations, which, of course, would play a crucial role in any solution to the Middle East conundrum.
The one twist in Kerry’s speech that day involved the then-recent and unprecedented decision by the Obama government not to block an anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council. Defending the vote, Kerry explained that a two-state solution was “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living in peace and security with its neighbors.”
And then along came Donald Trump. Before his first term was over, he got the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan to make peace with Israel.
And these aren’t just deals between governments that have promised not to make war on each other. They’re comprehensive agreements that will involve contact between all kinds of people at all levels of the societies involved. This is a far more remarkable achievement than just getting a few politicians and diplomats together to shake hands and smile for the cameras. No—it’s the kind of sweeping deal that is simply too big for the narrow imaginations of the typical professional diplomat or political hack, like John Kerry, to conceive.
But at the same time, it’s precisely the kind of deal that Donald Trump, a past master of the high-level business deal, excels in making. It’s the kind of achievement that could only be pulled off by someone who thinks outside the box.