The Jerusalem Provocation

How bad is your Trumpophobia? One way to tell is what you make of the President's decision today to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocate the U.S. embassy there. I can imagine extreme cases seeing this as a deliberate provocation, designed to provoke a terrorist attack Trump could then use to justify some extreme measure of his own, whether that be a roundup of American Muslims, a punitive attack on Iran,or something similarly chilling to this mindset.  Objectively, his decision is a provocation that almost certainly will have a violent response somewhere. But I don't think that response is something Trump really wants, much less depends upon. At worst, he may see it as a way to show the world that he isn't afraid of any consequences to come, or of the Muslim world. But his very careful, repetitive prepared speech today suggests that he, or at least his diplomatic advisors see this as they call it, as a fait accompli that will settle the Jerusalem question irreversibly. For an occasion that gave him ample opportunity to say "Fuck you, Islam," he adopted an almost painfully conciliatory tone, reserving the smack talk for the unnamed past Presidents who couldn't solve this problem before he cut the Gordian knot. He sounds little different from them, however, in his stated desire for peace conditional upon Islamic reconciliation with the permanent existence of Israel.
What happens next depends on the extent to which those in a position to worry about the repercussions of the next terrorist attack are in a position to restrain those who have less reason than ever to give a damn. That's the short term. The long term may depend on powers outside the Middle East that might find just as much reason to keep Muslims riled up as they have to prop up Kim Jong Un. Donald Trump's Zionism is an inconsistency in his America First policy that makes him vulnerable to those who might turn the security of Israel into something for which Trump may have to make concessions elsewhere, e.g. Eastern Europe or the South China Sea. It is not inconsistent with his nationalistic view of the world for him to believe strongly that the Jewish people are entitled to a nation over which Islam or the Third World hold no anti-imperialist veto. But I'm not sure if he's calculated how much that should matter to the U.S., or what price Americans should pay to affirm that principle. He may well see only benefit to himself in the form of Jewish and End Times-obsessed Christian voters. But in less than a decade he won't be President anymore, while the rest of us continue to deal with whatever consequences follow from what he's done today.