9/11 x 10
Nation-Building, Trump Style
The president who once scorned “nation building” at his public rallies seems determined to undertake the most delusional nation-building project in U.S. history.
It was a week ago yesterday that Donald Trump declared the United States would “take over” the Gaza Strip.
The details of that plan are no clearer today than they were then.
Only yesterday he said, “We're not going to have to buy... We’re going to have Gaza. We don't have to buy. There's nothing to buy. We will have Gaza… There is nothing to buy. It's Gaza... it's a war-torn area. We're going to take it, we're going to hold it, we're going to cherish it.”
The unanswered questions boggle the mind.
If the United States isn’t buying it, how then will the United States acquire it? Following that, how will the United States secure it without using military force? Who would oversee the expulsion of 1.8 million people currently living there? Who would cover that cost? Who’s going to pay for redevelopment?
The corporate media — which spent years hounding Trump over rubbish like “Russian collusion” and “insurrection” — suddenly finds itself incapable of holding him to account at a moment when it truly matters.
No, instead, it’s certain MAGA-adjacent folk who are aghast — because they grasp there’s nothing about this scheme that aligns with a vision of “America first.”
On whether U.S. troops will be deployed to Gaza, Trump said yesterday, "If it's necessary, we'll do that — we're going to take over."
As you’re about to see… the president who first rode into office on a wave of revulsion with endless Middle East wars has stepped back into a doom loop that began on 9/11.
9/11 x 10
Apart from the shock and the death, let’s not forget the financial and economic impact of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
The Twin Towers fell on a Tuesday morning. The stock market was closed the rest of the week.
When it opened the following Monday, the Dow fell 7.1% in a day — a vicious drop in the middle of a miserable bear market that began with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in early 2000 and didn’t end until late 2002.
A mild recession was already underway before the attacks. The attacks prompted the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan to crank up the printing presses in hopes of “stimulating” the economy and making George W. Bush’s wars seem cost-free.
The result was a bubble in the housing and credit markets that burst catastrophically with the global financial crisis of 2008.
As we’ve chronicled before, al-Qaida pulled off the attacks for a cost of about $500,000. The ensuing 20 years of “forever wars” in the Middle East and South Asia cost the U.S. government $8.043 trillion.
Going by those numbers, Osama bin Laden and crew generated a formidable return of 16,086,000:1.
What drove the 19 hijackers to do what they did?
Contrary to what Bush said, they didn’t “hate us for our freedoms.” Nor did they lash out against decadent Western culture represented by McDonald’s cheeseburgers and Madonna music videos.
The hijackers said they were radicalized by U.S. meddling in the Middle East — especially U.S. support for Israel.
The lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, said the turning point for him was the Israeli shelling of a refugee camp in Lebanon during 1996, killing 106.
Fast-forward to the present: Whether you realize it or not… the U.S. government has subsidized much of Israel’s assault on Gaza that began after the Hamas attack in October 2023.
On the occasion of the first anniversary in October 2024, the Costs of War project at Brown University determined that U.S. support for Israel over those 12 months cost U.S. taxpayers at least $22.76 billion. That’s $67 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
A related estimate by the Israeli newspaper Calcalist finds that Washington is funding 70% of Tel Aviv’s military costs.
You might not be aware of those figures. But millions of people across the Arab and Muslim worlds are. Surely a few of them already feel the same call to action Mohammed Atta did.
And now Trump seeks to expel 1.8 million people from Gaza — an act that would only amplify the existing rage. We could be looking at 9/11 times 10.
So much for “America first.”
No, They Won’t Leave Willingly
About the fate of the 1.8 million people still alive in Gaza…
Trump has repeatedly said over the last week that whenever the makeover of Gaza is complete, they won’t be allowed to return to where their homes once were.
“No, they wouldn’t,” he told Fox News on Saturday — “because they’re going to have much better housing. In other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them.”
Where that permanent place is supposed to be is up in the air. Trump says he’s going to browbeat Jordan and Egypt into taking them. But during a visit to the White House yesterday, King Abdullah of Jordan demurred. He reinforced his position later on social media.
The king knows full well that if his country takes in any more Palestinian refugees than it has already… he’ll be deposed and strung up the next day. And Trump probably won’t like whoever replaces him.
Yes, the Gazans’ homes have been ground to dust. But it’s their homes. Their shops. Their olive groves. How would you feel if God forbid you were in their shoes?
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff tried to blow off that aspect. “Peace in the region means a better life for Palestinians—a better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today,” he said on Fox News. “A better life is about better opportunity, better financial conditions, better aspirations for you and your family.”
Really, how much more globalist can you get?
Or as Hunter DeRensis writes in The American Conservative, “Is there a mindset more hostile to the conservative understanding of human nature than Witkoff’s reduction of man to a rootless, economic animal unmoored from history, family, land, language and God?”
There’s also an uncomfortable historical parallel that Palestinians are all too aware of: Adolf Hitler initially wanted to exile the Jews of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Only when that proved impractical did he resort to the “final solution.”
“It is simply unrealistic that Palestinians, once removed from their homeland, will sit quietly and watch from their new homes as the United States and Israel occupy it,” writes Branko Marcetic, also at The American Conservative.
“In short, Trump’s plan would likely ensure never-ending and quite possibly widening war, not lasting peace and stability.”
U.S. Troops in the Crosshairs
Which leads to the biggest unanswered question of all: Who would force the Gazans from their homes if they don’t go willingly?
Would it be the Israel Defense Forces? For all the death and destruction they’ve wrought, they still haven’t met their goal of “eliminating” Hamas… so how are they going to take on this new task?
Or would it be U.S. troops?
Good luck with that, says retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.
Wilkerson was the longtime aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell who’s spent the last 20-plus years making amends for helping his boss gin up the Iraq War. He says the troops would resist.
“They’re not going to do that, in my view,” he said last week on Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom podcast.
“Even if [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth orders them to, they’re going to leave the service before they’ll do that — or the majority of them will, they’ll refuse to go. And if they get there and are ordered to do that, they’ll refuse to do it.
“And should they do it, Hamas will take them on and do the same to them they did to the IDF — beat the **** out of them.”
Even the bloodthirsty Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is thrown for a loop at this prospect. “I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza,” he said last week. Gaza “would be a tough place to be stationed as an American.”
As it happens, last month was the best month for Army recruiting in 15 years — perhaps because those new recruits believed in the promise of a foreign policy that put America first.
“Did those young men sign up in anticipation of another bloody war of choice,” writes DeRensis in his American Conservative piece — “or because they had momentary hope that if they put their lives on the line for their country they’d be treated more thoughtfully than by Trump’s predecessors?”
Who Voted for This, Anyway?
Before we wrap it up, we should address an objection — the one about how Trump is playing four-dimensional chess and has an endgame none of us mere mortals can comprehend.
National Security Adviser Mike Waltz tried to make that case last week — suggesting Trump is pressuring Israel’s neighbors to come up with their own plan for Gaza.
“I don’t think [Trump’s plan] should be criticized in any way,” he told CBS News. “It’s going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions.”
As the independent journalist Aaron Mate reminds us, the 22 nations of the Arab League developed their own solutions over 20 years ago. The Arab Peace Initiative of March 2002 offered full normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would have wound up with 78% of the land that made up historic Palestine.
Israelis might not like that plan, but that’s their problem. It shouldn’t be ours. America first.
By now, Trump has repeated his Gaza intentions often enough that they can’t be dismissed as one of his wild-hair ideas, good for half a news cycle before going down the memory hole.
And none of it came up during the campaign last year.
As Glenn Greenwald tweets, “Do Republicans now think American voters cast their 2024 ballot so that their kids would be deployed to a war in the Middle East to fight against Palestinians in Gaza, force them to leave and then give the land to Israel and Jared Kushner?
“I don't remember polls showing that.”
Grim as the prospect is, you and I must face it squarely as citizens and investors.
As Marcetic sums up in his American Conservative article, “not only would the Gaza takeover plan mean once more endangering American lives at the behest of a foreign government, and for no conceivable benefit to U.S. interests, but it makes it more likely for the United States to be pulled into another terrible war in the region.”
And, awful as it is to contemplate, new attacks at home.
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets
P.S. Oh, look, it’s another hotter-than-expected inflation number.
The Labor Department is out with the January consumer price index. The “expert consensus” among Wall Street economists was there’d be a 0.3% month-over-month increase.
Oops — it was 0.5%, the biggest monthly jump since August 2023.
That means the official year-over-year inflation rate is back to 3.0% — up sharply from 2.4% only four months earlier.
To be sure, this number will likely make the Fed wait even longer before resuming its 2024 rate-cut cycle — if it resumes at all.
Mr. Market is taking this development surprisingly in stride: At last check the Dow is down about a third of a percent and the Nasdaq is up about a fifth of a percent. The S&P 500 is slightly in the red at 6,061 — squarely in the middle of its trading range the last three weeks.
Gold clings, however tenuously, to the $2,900 level. Today it’s silver’s turn to take the lead, up 1.7% and comfortably over $32.
For once, crypto is like watching paint dry — Bitcoin still hovering a little over $97,000.
Crude is taking a tumble after the weekly inventory numbers from the Energy Department, down nearly two bucks to $71.62.
The next economic number of consequence is retail sales, coming on Friday. We’ll see how well the mighty American consumer is holding up against this inflationary resurgence.
And we’re back tomorrow with “regular programming” covering multiple themes. Thanks for hearing us out for one of our occasional single-topic deep dives.
