Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo shift on Israeli settlements is U.S. foreign policy at its worst The surprise announcement validating Israeli settlements shows Trump's obsession with doing the opposite of what Barack Obama did, whatever the cost.

Aaron David Miller | Opinion contributor

Monday’s surprise announcement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the United States views Israeli settlements as not “inconsistent with international law” should have come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the Trump administration’s pro-Netanyahu and anti-Palestinian policies since coming into office.

The move combined all of the worst elements of Trumpian foreign policy — an obsession with his predecessor; the centrality of domestic politics in his foreign policy; and the untethering of the recent announcement from any coherent strategy, including the furtherance of the administration’s own peace plan.

Indeed, Monday’s upending of decades of U.S. policy was yet another example of the Trump administration coming up with a solution to a problem America didn’t have and creating new problems in the process.

Trump's obsession with Obama

Every administration defines itself to a certain extent in terms of the policies of its predecessor, usually in an effort to break out anew and to put its own unique cast on what it does and doesn’t do. But rarely has there been an administration three years in that is still so obsessed with and focused on the actions of its predecessor.

This administration uses the Obama administration as a kind of North Star to instruct what not to do, regardless of the merits of the policy. Nowhere was this clearer than in Pompeo’s remarks Monday, which opened by stating flatly that the Trump administration was reversing the Obama administration’s position on settlements. Pompeo went on to single out former Secretary of State John Kerry, whom he described as changing decades of a bipartisan approach by publicly reaffirming the illegality of settlements.

Pompeo neglected to mention that despite its tough rhetoric, the Obama administration failed to block, or impede significantly, Israeli settlement activity on the ground, let alone confront Israel with consequences for continuing it.

And in a moment of partisan cherry-picking, Pompeo failed to mention the one example of a Republican administration — President George H.W. Bush — that denied Israel $10 billion in housing loan guarantees because of its settlement construction.

Instead, Pompeo tethered Trump’s policy to President Ronald Reagan, who did refer to the settlements in 1981 as “not illegal,” but who also clashed with Israel over settlements by calling for a freeze.

Domestic politics trumps all

Every administration injects domestic politics into its foreign policy. But rarely has there been an administration where domestic considerations dominate nearly every foreign policy move — from climate to the Iranian nuclear accord to Ukraine. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Trump’s policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.

Appealing to his political base of evangelical Christians and conservative Republicans, Trump has made the Republican Party — and his presidency — the go-to source for demonstrating America’s pro-Israeli pedigree.

Trump was the first president to visit Israel so early in his term; the first to pray at the Western Wall; the first to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem; and the first to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. In all of this, Trump has been driven not by national interests but by the goals of securing his base and casting Democrats as less than supportive of, if not hostile to, Israel.

This week's announcement on settlements feathered Trump's own political nest; tossed support to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s fighting for political survival; and perhaps set the groundwork for additional settlement growth and annexation of land.

Trump undercut his peace plan

For an administration that has worked on a 60- to 80-page peace plan — the so-called ultimate deal — it’s hard to imagine behavior more destructive to its own initiative than in validating settlements.

Palestinians have committed their own share of transgressions that have made peace elusive. Even so, no Israeli action has been more humiliating to Palestinians and more destructive to a possible two-state solution than settlements. The Trump administration has now legitimized that enterprise and undermined its own role in any mediation or negotiation.

If the administration had wanted to ensure that it would alienate Palestinians and doom its already half-dead peace plan, it could not have concocted a better solution in a laboratory than Pompeo's pro-settlement announcement.

Indeed, when I first met Jared Kushner, the administration's senior adviser on the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, I said half-jokingly that I wish my father-in-law had as much confidence in me as his had in him — because President Trump has given his son-in-law mission impossible. The last thing the peace process needed was another insurmountable challenge. Yet, courtesy of the Trump administration, that’s exactly what it got.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow for American Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department adviser and Middle East negotiator, is the author of "The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President." Follow him on Twitter: @aarondmiller2