Standing up to the bully: can Australia lead the way?

"This whole story is another reminder," an American Republican commentator tweeted recently, "that for Trump, there is no such thing as win-win. Winning must involve humiliation and subjugation."

The story Patrick Chovanec was referring to wasn't about US President Donald Trump's decision to cut funding for Palestinian refugees by $300 million, or about his decision to walk out on the six-nation deal with Iran over its nuclear program. It wasn't even about his latest repetition - while trumpeting a supposed trade deal with Mexico - of the assertion that the Mexican government would end up paying for the wall between it and the United States.

The country being humiliated was one of Washington's long-standing allies and closest cultural neighbours, Canada. In remarks made off the record to the Bloomberg news agency but later revealed by Toronto's Star newspaper, Trump insisted that any trade deal with Ottawa would be "totally on our terms" but that he could not say this publicly because "it's going to be so insulting [that] they're not going to be able to make a deal".

At a symposium on "Palestine and the West" in Adelaide late last year, senior Fatah official Afif Safieh repeatedly had to field questions about whether Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was going to accept a similarly lop-sided and iniquitous deal if it was put to him by Jared Kushner and his Saudi allies.

"There is no deal! We have seen nothing," Safieh insisted. At the time, many in the audience were sceptical. But I've come to believe that Palestinian diplomats may indeed have been shown nothing - and that's precisely the danger.

From the outset, one of the major planks of Trump's electoral appeal has been his mastery of "the art of the deal". His administration has declared breakthrough "deals" with the European Union, China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea on trade, oil production and nuclear proliferation, all of which were either devoid of detail or entirely illusory (the biggest illusion of all being that meeting Kim Jong-un was itself a breakthrough).

Kim Jong-un with Donald Trump at the June summit in Singapore.Credit: AP

The way in which the administration avoids accountability for the failure or uncertainty surrounding these deals is by leaving what it wants in any given negotiation - its preferred finishing point - opaque.

The EU nations who were parties to the Iran deal negotiated in good faith for months with a representative sent to meet them by US secretary of state Rex Tillerson, but ultimately none of the alleged conditions for the deal to be salvaged mattered. Once Trump had decided the deal needed to be scrapped, that was that - and having upheld the need for talks with allies on such a multilateral question, Tillerson was scrapped too.

The "art" of dealmaking, then, seems to consist of demanding concessions and waiting for one's opponents to cave in - an approach that Trump's Middle Eastern allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, seem to be emulating with Qatar. If this means wrecking the known diplomatic and political architecture of any given region, so much the better.

From the United Nations to NAFTA to the WTO to the International Criminal Court, a pattern emerges: Trump abhors multilateral bodies and agreements, believing that bilateral arrangements can and will give the United States the "win" every time.

Palestinians working on a vineyard in the occupied West Bank, with an Israeli settlement in the background. Credit: New York Times

The Trump administration has been willing to adopt this approach with its closest allies. So it is hardly surprising that the Palestinians should also experience such high-handedness, given that many Americans regard being pro-Israel as the only morally acceptable stance on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and are Zionist by historical temperament. In addition, Trump's ambassador to Israel and his chief peace envoy - also known as his bankruptcy lawyer and his son-in-law - are not only both Jewish but also known supporters of Israel's settler movement.

For decades the international community has understood any peace process between Israelis and Palestinians to rest on a number of core issues: the need to guarantee Israeli security; to provide Palestinians with a viable, contiguous state alongside Israel; to resolve the question of Palestinian refugees; and to address the status of Jerusalem. In recent times, Israeli governments have added a further issue - their insistence that Israel be recognised as a Jewish state, a position they sought to codify by passing the nation-state law in recent weeks.

While the unveiling of the Kushner peace plan - or as Trump has described it, "the ultimate deal" - has been postponed several times, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to antagonise Palestinians on these core issues, first by ending a decades-old US commitment to the two-state solution, then by declaring Jerusalem to be Israel's capital without further comment on the Palestinian population of the city, and finally with the recent decision to divest from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, as well as Palestinian hospitals in occupied East Jerusalem, and to shutter the Palestine Liberation Organisation's office in Washington.

The UNRWA move is perhaps the most shocking of all, since beyond any alleged mismanagement of its finances, the divestment is clearly aimed at eliminating millions of Palestinians from political consideration in any peace plan by redefining what it means to be a Palestinian refugee. Instead of the crass demand facing other refugees to "go back to where you came from", Palestinians in foreign lands are told to "stay where you are, assimilate and forget your ties to your homeland".

'The weak are erased from history': Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Credit: New York Times

At the same time that Trump was bullying Canadians and Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was renaming a nuclear research centre in the Negev Desert. At the ceremony he had this to say:

"In the Middle East, and in many parts of the world, there is a simple truth: There is no place for the weak.

"The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong."

Leaving aside whether one agrees with this statement or not, it is this conception of strength that has driven North Korea's push for nuclear weapons, and which has perpetuated the conflicts tearing the Middle East apart; a political Darwinism which tells people that being a minority within any state is a first step to annihilation and that being uncontested masters of a territory where your own kind have sovereign rights is an existential necessity.

It also shows us that there are two different ways of understanding the famous dictum "Never Again", which arose from the aftermath of the Shoah. If it is understood first and foremost as a call for international moral vigilance to prevent a recurrence of genocide - a call that is now commonly associated with international failure to act - then it can also be understood as insisting that we will take up arms in pursuit of a state for our own ethnic group, so that never again can we be threatened.

But in international relations, there are always weaker parties. In the modern era, they have relied on international bodies to compensate for disparities in power, and an approach based on rules that notionally bind all nations has been seen as underpinning global peace and prosperity, as Julie Bishop pointed out in a speech at Melbourne's La Trobe University this year.

Trump and those who have advised him see matters very differently, arguing that the "globalist" order has rigged the international system to ensure American decline and that strength is the only true guarantor of stability - which perhaps explains the President's fondness for leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Rodrigo Duterte. It might be possible to add Netanyahu to this list if it wasn't for Trump's awareness - as someone who constantly complains of the US being ripped off by foreigners - that his country doles out tens of billions of dollars in aid to Israel.

For some years, Australia and other countries who supported Israel pointed to its creation as a success of the international system, proudly citing the role of Labor's H.V. "Doc" Evatt in voting for the 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

For both the Israeli prime minister and Trump's current National Security Adviser, John Bolton, this is a false reading of history, since Israel was in their view created through unilateral actions underpinned by the force of arms. Bolton is also of the view that the Palestinians are too weak to be trusted with statehood, and has argued that the Gaza Strip should become part of Egypt and the West Bank part of Jordan - the so-called "three-state solution" - which may explain a recent remark Trump made to Abbas about a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation.

Palestinian children at the "school of tyres" in the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, which the state of Israel has scheduled for demolition.Credit: New York Times

Yet even if we were to accept that Palestinians are weaker than, say, the East Timorese or the South Sudanese or the people of Afghanistan when it comes to being able to exercise self-determination, we need to ask what kind of strength it is that insists that it is constantly in danger from the reproduction of such weaklings - the so-called "demographic threat" - and that needs to pass a law declaring theft isn't theft when it is Palestinian-owned land that you are stealing. We need to ask whether a nuclear-armed nation that needs to demolish the self-determination of the tiny communities of Susiya and Khan al-Ahmar or defund the education of a girl like Aya Abbas - who achieved top marks in Syria while studying at an UNRWA school - can ever really rest in its quest to silence the beating of the tell-tale heart?

So far, Australia has managed to escape the worst of this sort of bullying, exempted as it was from Trump's arbitrary application of tariffs and managing to appease the bully-in-chief over its bilateral deal on refugees. But if this country is to do its bit in upholding a multilateral and rules-based order, then its role in preserving the Trans-Pacific Partnership is surely a better example to follow. Having watched as the Trump administration stormed out of another multilateral deal, Canberra kept working towards its declared objective and managed to maintain that architecture.

The question is whether Marise Payne and other Western foreign ministers are prepared to shoulder such a burden when it comes to the Iran nuclear deal or the Middle East peace process. A substantial part of that challenge would be to articulate a common vision of what success would look like, with or without an American contribution, and the creation of a coalition that is political and not military to pursue that success and offer an alternative version of "winning".

The other part of the challenge is for any such vision to incorporate the voices of the strong and the weak. If we lack the will or the capacity to do this, then Palestinians, Syrians, Afghans, Rohingyas, Uighurs, Kurds and many others will have little choice but to conclude that Netanyahu was right.