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April 16, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:39
The US State Department’s unrealistic approach to the Middle East has led to its many failures
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Well, it seems to me that if you want to understand President Trump's policy on Israel and other parts of the world, the first thing to note is that just like his first term, he has literally expelled the State Department from the center stage of forging.
U.S. foreign policy and national security policy.
During the first administration, by bypassing the State Department, he achieved four peace accords between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and South Sudan.
He understood, I believe, that following the State Department way of thinking about the Middle East would only lead him to More and more failures because the State Department introduced scores, if not hundreds,
of plans to resolve the Palestinian issue, to expand Israeli Arab peace, and they failed on all of them because of their detachment from the real Middle East.
The second element, which...
Can I just jump in very briefly?
Tell me a little bit more about that.
You're talking about sort of a posture that's been in the State Department for a long time.
So just explain that to me a little bit before we continue.
Well, we can look back to 2011 when the turbulence on the Arab street was heralded by the State Department as an Arab spring.
It was an Arab tsunami.
But Arab tsunami doesn't fit the alternate reality created by the State Department, which means peace around the corner.
And if we only talk with the enemy, peace will come.
If we only reason and appease the enemy, peace will come.
And therefore, they refer to the...
Tsunami on the Arab Street, which started at the end of 2010 and still going on throughout the Middle East.
Arab Spring, Facebook revolution, youth revolution, etc.
The U.S. led NATO military offensive against Gaddafi in 2011 under the contention that Gaddafi has brutally mistreated the opposition in Libya.
Well, they just missed a small point that indeed Gaddafi was brutal.
And it was that Gaddafi who...
He desisted from terrorism since 2003, transferred his nuclear infrastructure to Tennessee, by the way, where it's there until today.
But for the State Department, the most important thing was violation of human rights, because the State Department was, probably still is, under the delusion that the U.S. has a choice between Arab countries that abide by human rights and Arab countries that do not abide by human rights.
They are not yet attached with the fact of life that the choice is between pro-American Arab regimes that violate human rights or anti-American Arab regimes that violate human rights.
And that military offensive against Gaddafi has transformed Libya until today into a chaotic state, major arena for anti-American Islamic terrorism,
an arena of civil wars with the involvement of Russia and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, France, Greece, Policy by the State Department,
which had nothing to do with Middle East reality.
You can look at the way the State Department ushered in the Ayatollah's regime to topple the Shah of Iran, who was America's policeman in the Gulf.
And that was, if you study the telegrams those days, the documents which were exchanged between The U.S. Embassy in Washington.
The U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Ambassador was William Sullivan.
The U.S. Embassy in Paris, which was a site of Ayatollah Khomeini's exile in Washington.
That has led to the State Department and President Jimmy Carter to conclude that Ayatollah Khomeini is expected to be an Iranian edition of Gandhi.
That's the term that they...
And President Carter announced a meeting of world leaders in the islands of Guadeloupe.
Ten days before Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran, President Carter told the global leaders, you can rest assured, Ayatollah Khomeini is going to be preoccupied with tractors, he said,
not with tanks.
Those assessments of Ayatollah Khomeini had nothing to do with reality.
They were consistent with the alternate reality developed by the State Department, which has always Claimed that there's no need to fight terrorists.
We can reason, we should negotiate, and diplomacy is preferred to military when it comes to terrorists.
You can look at the State Department that welcomed Bashar Assad as a potential moderate.
Well, because he was working in Britain, and he was a successful ophthalmologist, and he was...
President of the Syrian Internet Association, and he was married to a British-educated woman.
Aren't those qualifications for a potential moderate leader?
And American senators and American State Department officials flew to Damascus.
They welcomed Bashar Assad, and they expected moderation to prevail.
Obviously, we know it had nothing to do with reality.
The same thing applied to Saddam Hussein, a very infamous meeting between Saddam Hussein and the American ambassador to Kuwait and Baghdad,
April Gillespie, who basically transmitted the assessment of then-Secretary James Baker and the establishment of the State Department.
when Saddam Hussein asked
What would be the American reaction if Iraq?
Would decide to use military in order to return Province 19, that's how they refer to Kuwait, to the motherland in Iraq.
And April Gillespie's response, which was the State Department view, was none of our business.
It's an inter-Arab issue.
I don't think there could be a more green line than that to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
And I can only imagine how bewildered he was when suddenly the U.S. attacked him after the State Department gave him a green light to invade Kuwait.
And then I can add more and more, but you have the issue of Yasser Arafat.
It was welcomed into the community of law-abiding entities, but the State Department referred to Yasser Arafat as a terrorist turning a peacemaker and basically ushered Yasser Arafat way into the Nobel Prize for Peace.
One of the most ruthless terrorists in modern times, receiving the Nobel Prize of Peace.
Endorsed by the State Department.
And obviously, 1948, the State Department did not want a Jewish state.
The State Department claimed, first of all, that Israel had no means to face an all-out Arab assault.
Well, we proved the State Department wrong in 1948, while the U.S. was boycotting, It's a shipment of arms to the area.
But this has been a State Department track record in the Middle East, wrong and wronger and wrongest.
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