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diplomacy
'Diplomacy, Not Catastrophe' Needed as Israel Appears Poised for US-Enabled War on Iran
"It would be a catastrophic mistake to be led into a war by the same neocons that claimed the Iraq war would be a cakewalk," warned one group.
Jun 12, 2025
Israel is likely preparing to bomb Iran even as the Trump administration works toward a nuclear deal with Tehran, stoking fears of Iranian retaliation against U.S. military bases and other American or allied sites in an already inflamed region, and prompting calls for urgent diplomacy to avoid war.
U.S. and European officials told Western media Thursday that Israel is preparing to unilaterally attack Iran as negotiations between Washington and Tehran draw closer to a preliminary framework for an agreement to curb Iran's nuclear development. The government of fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes any such deal.
"If this escalates, innocent lives will be caught in the crossfire in Iran and across the region."
American intelligence agencies have periodically concluded over the past two decades that Iran—which has not started a war since the 19th century but supports proxy attacks on Israel—is not developing nuclear weapons.
While President Donald Trump—who has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran if a nuclear deal is not reached—has publicly opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, numerous observers are warning that Tehran and its proxies would very likely view the U.S. as complicit in any such action.
"If Israel does strike Iran in the next days or hours, and even if they do so in defiance of Trump's warnings, the likelihood that the Iranians will perceive it as an independent act by Israel in defiance of Trump is essentially zero," Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Wednesday on social media. "There is no plausible deniability."
Vahid Razavi, an Iranian American advocate for human rights and ethics in technology and founder of ParentsPlea.com, told Common Dreams Thursday that "Israel will only attack Iran with the support and blessing of the United States."
"The 'good cop/bad cop' game that Trump and Israel are playing in the region is a distraction," Razavi added. "There is no substantial difference in U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran."
Iran has threatened an "unprecedented response" if Israel attacks.
"In case of any conflict, the U.S. must leave the region because all its bases are within our range, and we will target all of them in the host countries regardless," Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh said Thursday during a televised address.
Nasirzadeh's remarks followed a Wednesday threat by an official from Ansar Allah that the Yemeni rebel group also known as the Houthis is "at the highest level of preparedness for any possible American escalation against us."
"Any escalation against the Islamic Republic of Iran is also dangerous and will drag the entire region into the abyss of war," the unnamed official toldNewsweek.
The Trump administration stands accused of war crimes in Yemen amid an escalation of the decadeslong U.S. bombing of the country as part of the so-called War on Terror. Successive U.S. administrations also backed a Saudi-led war on Yemen that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, while Israeli and British forces have bombed the country since 2024 in retaliation for Houthi missile attacks on Red Sea shipping and Israel.
Last October, Iran launched a limited missile strike on Israel in response to the assassinations of Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Lebanon-based resistance group Hezbollah, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. This prompted retaliatory Israeli attacks on targets in and around Tehran, including the headquarters of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The prospect of another Israeli attack on Iran prompted the U.S. on Wednesday to order the evacuation of some diplomats from Iraq and call for the voluntary departure of American military families from the region.
Meanwhile, numerous observers stressed the need for a diplomatic resolution to avoid a wider war in the Middle East—and possibly beyond.
"We must face the reality: if this escalates, innocent lives will be caught in the crossfire in Iran and across the region, and at home there may be new, dire threats to the civil liberties of our community," the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said in a statement Thursday.
"We are working to ensure our leaders hear us loud and clear: We need diplomacy, not catastrophe," NIAC added. "We are organizing multiple actions in the coming days against a potential war and in support of peace and ask for your support to fuel this vital effort."
Former Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner succinctly said Wednesday: "No war with Iran. No war, period."Keep ReadingShow Less
From USAID to US Harms
Donald Trump’s sharp cuts to this country’s humanitarian aid will ensure that its soft power crumbles, doing lasting damage to its international standing.
May 27, 2025
With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let’s recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you’re a this-or-that and you shout back: “Takes one to know one!” Indeed, it does. This month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said of his fellow billionaire Elon Musk: “The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”
Elaborating, Gates explained that Musk, as head of his self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had decided to put “USAID in the wood chipper” by cutting 80% of its global humanitarian programs and that, he pointed out, will mean “millions of additional deaths of kids.” To help undo the damage, Gates announced that he’ll be spending down his own $200 billion fortune over the next 20 years to promote public health in Asia and Africa so that “children [are] not being malnourished or women not bleeding to death or girls not getting HIV”
Amid the blizzard of executive orders and bizarre budgetary decisions pouring out of the Trump White House, Gates put his finger on the cuts that really matter, the ones that will do lasting damage—not just to their unfortunate victims but to America’s sense of global leadership as well.
In short, globally, the sharp cuts to USAID’s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America’s soft power at a time when great-power competition with Beijing and Moscow has reemerged with stunning intensity.
In President Donald Trump’s transactional diplomacy, only the hard power of mineral deals, gifted airplanes, or military might matters. And yet, as we learned in the Cold War years, it’s much easier to exercise world leadership with willing followers won over by the form of diplomacy scholars have dubbed “soft power.” As the progenitor of the concept, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, put it: “Seduction is always more effective than coercion. And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.” He first coined the term in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending, writing that “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants,” that “might be called co-optive or soft power, in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” In his influential 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye argued that, in our world, raw military power had been superseded by soft-power instruments like reliable information, skilled diplomacy, and economic aid.
Actually, soft power is seldom soft. Indeed, Spanish steel might have conquered the New World in the 16th century, but its long rule over that vast region was facilitated by the appeal of a shared Christian religion. When Britain’s global turn came in the 19th century, its naval dominion over the world’s oceans was softened by an enticing cultural ethos of commerce, language, literature, and even sports. And as the American century dawned after World War II, its daunting troika of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines would be leavened by the soft-power appeal of its democratic values, its promise of scientific progress, and its humanitarian aid that started in Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948.
Even in these uncertain times, one thing seems clear enough: Donald Trump’s sharp cuts to this country’s humanitarian aid will ensure that its soft power crumbles, doing lasting damage to its international standing.
The Logic of Foreign Aid
Foreign aid—giving away money to help other nations develop their economies—remains one of America’s greatest inventions. In the aftermath of World War II, Europe had been ravaged by six years of warfare, including the dropping of 2,453,000 tons of Allied bombs on its cities, after which the rubble was raked thanks to merciless ground combat that killed 40 million people and left millions more at the edge of starvation.
Speaking before a crowd of 15,000 packed into Harvard Yard for commencement in June 1947, less than two years after that war ended, Secretary of State George Marshall made an historic proposal that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. “It is logical,” he said, “that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Instead of the usual victor’s demand for reparations or revenge, the U.S. gave Europe, including its defeated Axis powers, $13 billion in foreign aid that would, within a decade, launch that ruined continent on a path toward unprecedented prosperity.
What came to be known as the Marshall Plan was such a brilliant success that Washington decided to apply the idea on a global scale. Over the next quarter century, as a third of humanity emerged from the immiseration of colonial rule in Africa and Asia, the U.S. launched aid programs designed to develop the fundamentals of nationhood denied to those countries during the imperial age. Under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, who had campaigned on a promise to aid Africa’s recovery from colonial rule, disparate programs were consolidated into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961.
At the outset, USAID’s work was complicated by Washington’s Cold War mission. It would sometimes even serve as a cover for CIA operations. Just a few years after the Cold War ended in 1991, however, USAID was separated from the State Department and its diplomatic aim of advancing U.S. interests.
Then refocused on its prime mission of global economic development, USAID would, in concert with the World Bank and other development agencies, become a pioneering partner in a multifaceted global effort to improve living conditions for the majority of humanity. Between 1950 and 2018, the portion of the world’s population living in “extreme poverty” (on $1.90 per day) dropped dramatically from 53% to just 9%. Simultaneously, USAID and similar agencies collaborated with the United Nation’s World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox and radically reduce polio, ending pandemics that had been the scourge of humanity for centuries. Launched in 1988, the anti-polio campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, spared 20 million children worldwide from serious paralysis.
Behind such seemingly simple statistics, however, lay years of work by skilled USAID specialists in agriculture, nutrition, public health, sanitation, and governance who delivered a multifaceted array of programs with exceptional efficiency. Not only would their work improve or save millions of lives, but they would also be winning loyal allies for America at a time of rising global competition.
And Along Comes DOGE
Enter Elon Musk, chainsaw in hand. Following President Trump’s example of withdrawing from the World Health Organization on inauguration day, Musk started his demolition of the federal government by, as he put it, “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” As his DOGE hirelings prowled the agency’s headquarters in the weeks after inauguration, Musk denounced that largely humanitarian organization as “evil” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” Without a scintilla of evidence, he added, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
With head-spinning speed, his minions then stripped the USAID logo from its federal building, shut down its website, purged its 10,000 employees, and started slashing its $40 billion budget for delivering aid to more than 100 nations globally. The White House also quickly transferred what was left of that agency back to the State Department, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent six weeks slashing 83% of its global humanitarian programs, reducing 6,200 of them to about 1,000.
As USAID’s skilled specialists in famine prevention, public health, and governance stopped working, the pain was soon felt around the world, particularly among mothers and children. In Colombia, the agency had spent several billion dollars to settle a decades-long civil war that killed 450,000 people by mapping 3.2 million acres of uncharted lands so that the guerrillas could become farmers. That work, however, was suddenly halted dead in its tracks—project incomplete, money wasted, threat of civil conflict again rising. In Asia, the end of USAID support forced the World Food Program to cut by half the already stringent food rations being provided to the million Rohingya refugees confined in miserable, muddy camps in Bangladesh—forcing them to survive on just $6.00 a month per person.
Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership.
In Africa, the aid cuts are likely to prove catastrophic. Departing USAID officials calculated that they would be likely to produce a 30% spike in tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease that already kills 1.25 million people annually on this planet and that 200,000 more children would likely be paralyzed by polio within a decade. In the eastern Congo, where a civil war fueled by competition over that region’s rare-earth minerals has raged for nearly 30 years, the U.S. was the “ultra dominant” donor. With USAID now shut down, 7.8 million Congolese war refugees are likely to lose food aid and 2.3 million children will suffer from malnutrition. In war-torn Sudan, U.S. aid sustained more than 1,000 communal kitchens to feed refugees, all of which have now closed without any replacements.
With 25 million of the world’s 40 million HIV patients in Africa, cuts to USAID’s health programs there, which had reduced new infections by half since 2010, now threaten that progress. In South Africa, a half-million AIDS patients are projected to die, and in Congo, an estimated 15,000 people could die within the next month alone. Moreover, ending USAID’s Malaria Initiative, which has spent $9 billion since President George W. Bush launched it in 2005, essentially ensures that, within a year, there will be 18 million more malaria infections in West Africa and 166,000 more likely deaths.
On March 3, with such dismal statistics piling up, Elon Musk insisted that “no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”
Writing from Sudan just 12 days later, however, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that Peter Donde, a 10-year-old child infected with AIDS at birth, had just died. A USAID program launched by President Bush called PEPFAR had long provided drugs that were estimated to have saved 26 million lives from AIDS (Peter’s among them) until Musk’s cuts closed the humanitarian agency. Kristof reported that the end of U.S. funding for AIDS treatment in Africa means “an estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid.” Why, he asked, should Americans spend even 0.24% of their Gross National Product on programs that keep poor children alive? Answering his own question, he wrote that the demolition of USAID “means that the United States loses soft power and China gains.”
Indeed, Dr. Diana Putman, USAID’s former assistant administrator for Africa, argues that the agency’s programs have been the chief currency for U.S. ambassadors in negotiations with developing nations. “Their leverage and ability to make a difference in terms of foreign policy,” she explained, “is backed up by the money that they bring, and in the Global South that money is primarily the money that USAID has.”
The Loss of Soft Power
In short, globally, the sharp cuts to USAID’s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America’s soft power at a time when great-power competition with Beijing and Moscow has reemerged with stunning intensity.
In back-handed testimonials to USAID’s success, the world’s autocrats celebrated the agency’s demise, particularly the end of the $1.6 billion—about 4% of its annual budget—that it devoted to pro-democracy initiatives. “Smart move,” said former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. On X (formerly Twitter), Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán announced that he “couldn’t be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance, @elonmusk are finally taking down this foreign interference machine.” Expressing his joy, Orbán offered a “Good riddance!” to USAID programs that helped “independent media thrive” and funneled funds to the “opposition campaign” in Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections. Similarly, El Salvador’s de facto dictator, Nayib Bukele, complained that USAID’s pro-democracy funds had been “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.”
Offering even more eloquent testimony to USAID’s past efficacy, China has moved quickly to take over a number of the abolished agency’s humanitarian programs, particularly in Southeast Asia, where Beijing is locked in an intense strategic rivalry with Washington over the South China Sea. Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, two public health specialists observed that “a U.S. retreat on global health, if sustained, will indeed open the door for China to exploit the abrupt, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. programs in… Southeast Asia, and it may do the same in Latin America.”
Last February, only a week after Washington cancelled $40 million that had funded USAID initiatives for child literacy and nutrition in Cambodia, Beijing offered support for strikingly similar programs, and its ambassador to Phnom Penh said, “Children are the future of the country and the nation.” Making China’s diplomatic gains obvious, he added: “We should care for the healthy growth of children together.” Asked about this apparent setback during congressional hearings, Trump’s interim USAID deputy administrator, Pete Marocco, evidently oblivious to the seriousness of U.S.-China competition in the South China Sea, simply dismissed its significance out of hand.
Although the dollar amount was relatively small, the symbolism of such aid programs for children gave China a sudden edge in a serious geopolitical rivalry. Just two months later, Cambodia’s prime minister opened new China-funded facilities at his country’s Ream Naval Base, giving Beijing’s warships preferential access to a strategic port adjacent to the South China Sea. Although the U.S. has spent a billion dollars courting Cambodia over the past quarter-century, China’s soft-power gains are now clearly having very real hard-power consequences.
In neighboring Vietnam, USAID has worked for several decades trying to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War, while courting Hanoi as a strategic partner on the shores of the South China Sea. In building a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” manifest in today’s close trade relations, USAID played a critical diplomatic role by investing in recovering unexploded American munitions left over from that war, cleaning up sites that had been polluted by the defoliant Agent Orange, and providing some aid to the thousands of Vietnamese who still suffer serious birth defects from such toxic chemicals. “It is through these efforts that two former enemies are now partners,” said former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-V.T.). “People in the Trump administration who know nothing and care less about these programs are arbitrarily jeopardizing relations with a strategic partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world.”
A Global Turn Toward Hard Power
Although the demolition of USAID and sharp cuts to economic aid will have consequences for the world’s poor that can only be called tragic, it’s but one part of President Trump’s attack on the key components of America’s soft power—not only foreign aid, but also reliable information and skilled diplomacy. In March, the president signed an executive order shutting down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including organizations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that had been broadcasting in 50 languages worldwide, reaching an estimated 360 million people in nations often without reliable news and information.
A month later, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a 50% cut to the State Department’s budget, closing diplomatic missions and completely eliminating funds for international organizations like NATO and the U.N. While the actual implementation of those cuts remains uncertain, the State Department is already dismissing 20% of its domestic workforce, or about 3,400 employees, including a significant number of Foreign Service officers, special envoys, and cyber-security specialists. Add it all up and, after just 100 days in office, President Trump is well on his way to demolishing the three critical elements for America’s pursuit of global soft power.
Already, the erosion of U.S. influence is manifest in recent criticism of this country, unprecedented in its bitterly acrid tone, even among longstanding allies. “Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is slipping away,” warned veteran French legislator Claude Malhuret in a March 4 speech, from the floor of France’s Senate that soon won a remarkable 40 million views worldwide. “Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a ketamine-fueled buffoon in charge of purging the civil service.”
With such cutting critiques circulating in the corridors of power from Paris to Tokyo, Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership. And, as Professor Nye reminds us, leadership based solely on coercion is not really leadership at all.
Welcome to Planet Trump in the year 2025.
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How to Meet with Trump: A South African Masterclass in Diplomatic Strategy
South Africa's president read Trump perfectly and knew exactly how to handle this obvious and simple man.
May 24, 2025
You probably saw the cringe-worthy spectacle a few months ago: U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House. The Ukrainian president's pained expression as he described facing down Russian President Vladimir Putin—an authoritarian bent on destroying democracy and consuming land that isn't his—while Trump, who clearly identifies more with the aggressor than the victim, publicly humiliated him. Trump celebrated this awful spectacle as "good television." Once a desperate attention seeking reality show host, always a desperate attention seeking reality show host.
It's worth asking: Why would any world leader willingly walk into that gilded trap of an Oval Office—where, notably and ironically, "none of the items on the mantle in Trump's Oval Office were made in the U.S."—knowing they'll likely face an inept man-child who ignores shared reality and acts as though the universe revolves around him?
South Africa just gave every world leader a roadmap for navigating Trump without losing their dignity or falling into his reality TV traps.
Then South Africa's president showed up and delivered a masterclass in strategic diplomacy.
While it's important to talk about the falsehoods regarding "white genocide" that Trump kept repeating during this meeting—as many outlets are doing—I think we also need to examine the brilliance of how President Cyril Ramaphosa handled this, shall we use the very diplomatic language of, challenging leader.
Reading the Room (and the Racist)
This visit came days after the administration's theatrical welcome of white South African "refugees"—an absurd spectacle given that South Africa, where the white population at 7% of the total still owns 50% of the land and where a majority of crime impacts non-white South Africans, is hardly experiencing white genocide. The real genocide Trump ignores? Gaza, which the United States explicitly supports.
But rather than falling into the cruel trap Trump and Vance set for Zelenskyy, South Africa's president read Trump perfectly and knew exactly how to handle this obvious and simple man.
The Blueprint: Three Brilliant Moves
Move 1: Disarm with Humor
The South African president joked that he was sorry he couldn't bring Trump a plane, to which Trump replied, "I wish you would have." Any observer knows it would be a massive conflict of interest for a U.S. president to accept a plane from a foreign leader. Unfortunately, this isn't hypothetical, as Trump officially accepted a luxury plane gifted by Qatar's leader on the same day on May 21. But Trump, existing in his gold-plated self-centered universe, just enjoyed the joke. Brilliant—point out actual corruption while flattering the ego.
When an ABC reporter had simply asked about the Pentagon's announcement regarding this controversial Qatari gift, Trump unleashed his predictable (and with its frequency, less interesting but no less dangerous) attack on the press: "What do you have to do with the Qatari jet? They're giving the United States Air Force a jet. Okay? And it's a great thing… You are a terrible reporter. Number one, you don't have what it takes to be a reporter. You're not smart enough."
But humor? That disarmed him completely. The South African president got Trump to openly joke about foreign governments buying influence, something that would send any other president scrambling for damage control. All it took was the right tone and one luxury plane as a punchline.
Move 2: Bring the Right White Men
Recognizing Trump's racism (evident in everything from unlawful abductions that did not follow any due process and sent likely majority innocent people to El Salvador to the inconceivable resurgence of the Nazi salute in Trump's White House to the targeting students of color who speak out about the atrocities in Gaza) and sexism, the president knew he'd need white men to make Trump listen. But not just any white man—he brought golfer Ernie Els.
When Trump presented misleading clips and questionable papers (which reporters noted had nothing to do with his claims), he again predictably attacked the press: "If the news wasn't fake, like NBC, which is fake news, totally, one of the worst, ABC, NBC, CBS, horrible... if we had real reporters, they'd be covering it."
But Els? Trump actually listened to Els, who gently educated this president averse to historical realities: "It's been 35 years since the transition. President Ramaphosa was right in the middle of the transition time, 1990 and before that... There was a lot of stuff happening in the apartheid days. You know, we grew up in the apartheid era. But I don't think two wrongs make a right. President Mandela, when he came out of prison... didn't come out with hatred, you know, and really unified our nation with his sport."
A white man who has captured Trumps attention because of golf, that colonial relic spread by the British colonial elites during the 18th and 19th centuries, became the vehicle for Trump to hear about South Africa's real issues rather than his fantasized "white genocide" narrative.
Move 3: Speak the Language of Wealth
Understanding that people who hoard wealth only hear from other wealth hoarders, President Ramaphosa brought South Africa's richest man, Johann Rupert. Surrounded by the Oval Office's imported gold, Rupert could speak Trump's language while delivering hard truths: "We have too many deaths. But it's across the board. It's not only white farmers. It's across the board... The crime is terrible, sir... but the biggest murder rate is in the Cape Flats. Gangs."
With a billionaire as messenger, Trump was momentarily forced to confront reality rather than his distorted fantasy of South Africa.
The Lesson Plan
So what can other world leaders learn from this diplomatic parkour?
- Use humor to disarm while pointing out actual violations: it catches Trump off guard when reporters can't.
- Bring a white man who does something Trump cares about: Your options are limited to golf, wrestling, or maybe real estate, but stick to sports
- If possible, bring wealth: the ultra-rich can only hear from other ultra-rich
There you have it. South Africa just gave every world leader a roadmap for navigating Trump without losing their dignity or falling into his reality TV traps.
The question now is: Who will be smart enough to follow it?
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