US President Donald Trump may be a champion of making America great. When it comes to other countries, however, the proud America Firster is interested in how they trade with the US, stopping conflicts, and having their leaders publicly back his flagship initiatives.

He has been emphatically uninterested in committing American resources to improving the governance and humanitarian record of foreign countries.

“We are getting out of the nation‑building business, and instead focusing on creating stability in the world,” Trump said in a major foreign policy address during his 2016 campaign, marking a shift from predecessors who tried to export American values to developing states. “Our foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else.”

He returned to the theme in May during a visit to the Middle East, long a crucible of American adventures in state-building. Presenting his vision for the region in Riyadh, Trump said that “great transformation” of prosperous Gulf countries “has not come from Western interventionists… giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neo-cons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits,’ like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities.”

“In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” he thundered.

In one place, however, Trump seems to be the one heartily intervening. He is committing American treasure to a project in Gaza that increasingly looks like the very thing the US president has so vociferously opposed.

Trump cajoled, pushed, threatened and enticed pro-Western leaders in the Middle East and beyond to back his 20-point vision for a ceasefire in Gaza and rebuilding of the Strip after two years of war between Israel and Hamas.

With the first phase of that plan nearing completion, the US and its allies are now shifting their focus to the next phase,  the creation of a prosperous, demilitarized Gaza free of Hamas rule.

But to make that vision a reality, Trump looks to be following a path with pertinent similarities to those taken by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both of those cases, American missions to foster the trappings of modern, competent statehood, from security and citizen services to US-friendly free-market economics, ultimately fell apart, now remembered as resource-wasting quagmires.

In recent weeks, reports and leaks out of the White House have signaled that the US is willing to at least consider taking an active role in building Gaza back up. Trump and other officials have hinted at the prospect of more intense US involvement in the project than previously speculated.

“Maybe this is going to be the greatest deal of them all,” Trump said while wrapping up a speech to world leaders last month at a summit in Sharm El-Sheikh to rally support for the Gaza plan. “Not just nation-building.”

On the debate stage during his 2000 run for the White House, George W. Bush said that he “would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.”

Bush was making his pitch after a decade that saw American military interventions in Haiti and the Balkans in which US troops were used to impose order and promote international efforts to create new governing structures.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington changed his approach entirely.

Bush ordered the invasion of Taliban-held Afghanistan, followed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Those short and successful conventional military campaigns quickly gave way to far more ambitious programs to bring democracy to the newly liberated countries.

The effort became........

© The Times of Israel