Never has there been a better example of New York City street smarts and Donald Trump’s business experience and property development wheeler dealer acumen, than what he brought to the table and pulled off over the last week or two with the Middle East peace agreement.
Imagine for a moment you’re a New York property developer and you have your eye on one particular property. If only you could acquire it, it would be the jewel in your property development crown.
Problem is the owner understands the value of his property which has been in the family for seventy two years and will only sell on his terms. He holds all the aces. So what do you do?
You develop your ideas into a broader canvas and think in terms of not just a single development but an entire precinct. An entire city block.
You then you set about acquiring all the other properties around “the jewel in the crown” and submit the development plans to council. Pretty soon the owner of the target property realises that you’re serious and his property is going to drop in value, he has no bargaining chips left and no one else is going to want to buy.
Notice the similarities and direct correlation with Trump’s approach to Middle East peace and US education?
When you think about it, the Middle East is just another real estate deal but on an unimaginable canvas, so instead of the make or break, crash or crash through approach and like all previous presidents for the last seventy two years, crashing, his approach has been, just like the real estate jewel example above, to make the Palestinian road block irrelevant by marginalising it, going around it and circling back to it later.
In the case of the Middle East after decades of trying to do a peace deal with a Palestinian leadership which, as the Israeli Foreign Affairs minister Abba Eban said, “never missed and opportunity to miss an opportunity” and who only ever wanted peace at the expense of the entire elimination of Israel, Donald Trump decided to simply go around them and instead encircle them with peace deals with the surrounding Arab countries.
Instead of making a peace deal dependent primarily on the Palestinians as the tip of the spear and then signing up the rest, he decided to deal with them last as a minority of one against nine or ten.
With education it’s the same property developer mindset, logic and tactics at work.
Instead of trying to strike an impossible deal with the jihadis of education, the teachers unions, he has decided to make them irrelevant, go around them and deal directly with the parents with his School Choice policy knowing and understanding that all parents, wanting the best for the kids, will choose and spend wisely.
That is, by giving the money for each child’s education directly to the parents and letting the parents choose the school, market forces will take care of the rest and force underperforming schools to close due to lack of enrolments and force underperforming, ideological teachers out of the profession.
In both cases, Trump’s out of the box, lateral thinking and street smarts has not only marginalised the Palestinians and the education unions but more importantly the lunkheads in the Washington State Department and Education establishment.