The Trump Vision for the Planet -- and Getting There

It is only a couple days since President Trump added an eighth "war ended" notch to his diplomatic belt, getting out all the living hostages, innocents seized in a raid by Hamas two years ago, and facilitating a sort of cease-fire in the war in Gaza.

We can certainly debate and discuss the extent to which the action, celebrated worldwide, will indeed lead to a lasting peace.  I'm not all that optimistic, because much like Vladimir Putin does not operate in a rational manner, neither do the worst of the Islamist radicals, and Hamas fits that description.

But that's not the point -- it is that the deal that was indeed done involved nations which have been brought in, or volunteered, who a year ago wouldn't have come close to participating in such a negotiation.

Why?

It's not that hard to answer, but it certainly says a lot about government.

Donald Trump learned a great deal during his first term. A lifelong New York real estate developer with a worldwide footprint long before entering politics, he looked at his own background in 2016 as ideally suited to overhaul the problems of an entrenched deep state, protected by an unquestioning press that was as much of the problem as immovable government itself.

He looked at elections and winning the presidency as a means to an end -- not, as Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Democrats everywhere view them, the end in themselves.  Those people wanted power.  Donald Trump wanted a better world -- economically healthy and peaceful.

He won in 2016 for a variety of reasons -- the appearance of a fresh approach by a known individual, the poor legacy of the Obama terms, the poverty of ideas in the Hillary campaign and her inability to explain her candidacy other than entitlement and a uterus.

Reality hit even before his inauguration. The Federal Government in 2016 was a rigid and insulated body, bloated beyond belief and with a mentality of entrenchment; just let me have my job, get promoted, retire with a nice pension and not necessarily have to do very much along the way -- don't disturb that. 

Obviously that does not apply to many thousands who served diligently in government and did an excellent job -- but the fact that it did (and still does) apply to so many still there who haven't been DOGEd yet lets you know how deep things ran.

That entrenched state was governed by political appointees, not necessary there in those jobs for expertise but out of patronage.  Trump saw that as an impediment to his broad, long-term goals of economic prosperity and world peace through American strength.

To his unpleasant discovery, the people that now-President Trump had engaged for his Cabinet in 2017 included a number who were more attuned to the loyalties of the deep state than they were to the long economic and diplomatic goals. 

One could argue that, despite the putridity of the intervening Biden Administration, the USA and the world are better off for President Trump having a four-year period to reflect on what those impediments to greater success had been in his first term. With another opportunity, selecting people far more prepared to do the leadership jobs needed in the way he wanted them done, he could do a lot more.

President Trump's vision for the planet has nothing to do with his winning elections. It is a vision where war ends, whether after lasting two years, 30 years, or 2,000 years.  The people leading things now, he believes, can set that old nonsense aside and solve things.

The genius of this president's strategy in this is that he never attacks these problems by looking at the war itself, or the disputes themselves, or the land grabs that are so often involved.  Those are the kinds of issues that can drag on for years, or a millennium or two.

The genius is in looking years down the road and envisioning each situation as an end state, with a successful economic plan, peaceful relationships, and defused tensions.

Donald Trump will always be the real estate developer. Two thousand years of Middle East tensions, and when Donald Trump becomes president, he looks at the Gaza Strip, not as a homeland for a wandering people no one wants, but as a long stretch of beachfront coast ready to develop and create jobs and homes for all those people living there. 

About 99.99% of the world looks at Gaza and sees fighting, Islamist radicals, torture, guns.  President Trump sees Gaza ten years from now without all that, not based on years of failing negotiation for this territory or that land, and failing cease-fires, but based on things no one looks at -- a thriving economic future with productive employment for people now running scared.

Further, he doesn't just rely on the usual suspects to assist -- like the UN, which has no credibility in the region anymore after 80 years of failure and the inability even to ensure that aid to displaced refugees even gets there.

Who else would look at the problems in the Middle East and start by getting the Arab nations to be willing to sit down with the Israelis?  And who else would use the carrot, not the stick, to get them to the table, looking at economic relationships, mutual investments?

The Arab states are mostly rational actors. Their leaders depend for their wealth on oil, and as long as the pipelines and refineries are open, their stability is ensured. Guarantee that and, well, their disputes with Israel -- which ultimately wants only its own security -- fade far into the background.  It is not in the interest of the Saudis, or the Jordanians, Egyptians, or Qataris, that anything happen to Israel, because Israel is not a threat to them and they know it.

Getting some of them to be willing to make that first step, the 2020 Abraham Accords, only took an appeal to their sensibilities and ignoring historic, but irrelevant, disputes with no real roots remaining in present-day life.

Indonesia, a Muslim country, is going to send troops to support the interim peacekeeping force in Gaza.  Hamas would not dare attack them, nor would they do the same to Qatari troops provided by the nation that housed their leadership.  Why would those nations become involved?  Because the appeal to them was an economic one.

I'm over 70, and have seen a lot of diplomatic approaches over that time to try to solve international disputes.  They rarely work, because the proposed terms simply don't affect the people of the countries involved and so don't change the fundamentals. Country X hated Country Y because of something from 200 years ago, or ethnic disputes, or whatever, and nothing two scotch-sipping diplomats come up with changes that.

But if that diplomacy leverages economic development and investment to improve the lives of those people, well, all of a sudden the lion can lay down with the lamb, because there's plenty of opportunity for both, and the ability to feed one's family is far, far more important than whether you're Sunni and the neighbor is Shi'ite.  

No one looked at diplomacy that way.  But if you have a vision that stretches far beyond just a cease-fire and actually lifts the lives of the citizens of these nations, you see the creative solutions that don't come from a single-malt.

You see things like President Trump does. 

Copyright 2025 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton. 

A Fun OSHA Story

OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, yet another nanny-state relic of the 1970s actually signed into law by Richard Nixon early that decade.  The intent was to provide Federal oversight and regulation of workplaces that were particularly unsafe and, only incidentally, create a regulatory workforce of more government employees.

The problem with such agencies is that when you create a regulatory workforce like that, they actually have to go find things to justify their existence, whether (in this case) they entail an actual work hazard or not.

I have a good friend from Chicago, a reader of this site, whom I have known for nearly sixty years since college.  We ushered at each other's weddings (a week apart) and although we've not been together much since, distance being what it is, have tried to stay in touch.  I'll call him "Tony", because it's his name.  When I was traveling on business in the late '70s, I visited him on my frequent trips to and through the Chicago area, getting to know his parents pretty well.

[On a side note, Tony's mother was from Chisholm, the small town near Hibbing, MN, that was the home of Moonlight Graham, the physician/ballplayer in the movie "Field of Dreams" and a long scene there.  The actual Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, who really did play in one game for the Giants and practiced medicine in Chisholm, MN, was her pediatrician.  You can't make this up.]

Tony's father had an electronics component factory in the Chicago area.  I believe I was there once, so I recall either the actual factory or Tony's description quite well. To my recollection, it was a fairly straightforward structure, a huge open area about two or three stories high, metal roof. All the assembly, packaging, shipping and the rest was done from that huge open area. Go with that.

In one corner of the building, the office area was raised up a flight of stairs, a level higher than the work floor.  The offices were there, and if you wanted to reach the offices, you climbed the stair a flight up to a small landing area and walked to the door of the office you wanted.  Well, something like that; if you imagine that, the point of this piece will be easily understood.

Imagine the stairs, those exposed industrial metal staircases, just steps and a railing, up to a landing area. Then imagine that at the top of the stairs, in the landing area, there is a pay phone about five feet up the wall for the use of employees needing to make calls in those days long before iPhones and Blackberries.

[Realizing that not everyone who reads this is as old as I, or even half as old as I, a "pay phone" is a communications unit that sits on a wall, or an even more forgotten location called a "phone booth."  You didn't need a cell phone or an app; you just put coins in little slots on top of it, and you'd get a dial tone.  You push buttons and call whomever you want.] 

Now imagine one other thing.  A little inspector from OSHA comes around to the factory for his annual safety review according to OSHA rules. He walks around the shop floor, inspects the assembly area and sees that everyone is properly dressed and the floors are clean and not slippery.  He sees that the shipping area is properly overseen  and tools everywhere are properly put away when not in use.  Safety thrives here.

Finally, he goes up the stairs. The ridged metal stairs are rough and grip well, and the railing is secured well, no slip, no rattle.  He makes it upstairs with no problem.

Except that he has nothing to write up.

Then he sees the pay phone on the wall. "Aha!", he shouts.  "A problem.  That phone is five feet off the wall, a perfect height for you, me, and almost everyone else."

But not, he declares, would it be a good height for someone -- I'm not making this part up -- in a wheelchair.  Nope, someone in a wheelchair would not be able to make a call from that pay phone, and it would have to be lowered in order to allow wheelchair-bound employees to use it.  Otherwise, the factory would be cited by OSHA and fined.

Before you start thinking how stupid that citation would have been, let me help you understand that it is even more inane than that.  Yes, I know that your first thought is to ask if anyone in a wheelchair actually worked there, and the answer was "no."  But OSHA was a forward-looking organization, and didn't want to rule out the possibility that the company might actually hire someone in a wheelchair.  And except for every other reason, that one is legitimate.

It should be obvious to you any now that, no matter how inaccurate my description of the building was, in actuality the pay phone -- and any access to the one-flight-up office area, for that matter -- required one to go up a flight of stairs.  

That's right; in order to use that wheelchair-accessible pay phone that OSHA demanded be lowered to three feet off the floor, the person would either have to maneuver a wheelchair up a flight of stairs (think about that one) or be carried up the stairs by one person, have the wheelchair be brought up the stairs by another person, and then use the newly-relocated phone.

They would need the wheelchair brought up, because -- oh, yeah -- if you lowered the phone from a normal standing-human-accessible height to three feet off the ground, you could only use it from a wheelchair. The rest of the employees, meaning all of them, could not stand and make a call.

Even if you simply lowered the phone to three feet and put a normal chair next to it to pacify OSHA and facilitate calls from the handicapped, you still have to appreciate the idiocy of the OSHA guy requiring this to be done for a phone whose use would require the person to ride a wheelchair up a flight of stairs.

It has been over fifty years since this happened, so forgive me if I can't recall what Tony's dad decided to do -- probably either lowered the phone and put a chair next to it, or just put a second pay phone on the main floor at three feet.

I'd be delighted to know if sanity has returned to the OSHA Inspectors' Guideline Book, or at least the one used by their staff in the Greater Chicago area.

I would imagine that, regardless, some DOGEing over there might even now be in order. 

Copyright 2025 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.