Trump's Praise for Pakistan's Mediation Efforts Criticized by US Geopolitical Expert

WASHINGTON: Making Pakistan a mediator is like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, writes US geopolitical expert Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the AEI think tank. On April 9, Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Asif described Israel as a "cancerous" country. On April 16, White House spokeswoman Carolyn Levitt heaped praise on the Pakistanis. Then Donald Trump praised Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir and said he would go to Pakistan. Michael Rubin writes in The Sunday Guardian. Trump's comments reflect a diplomatic fantasy. It's easy to make a deal, just ask US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, who won the Nobel Peace Prize nearly a century ago for their agreement to outlaw war. A decade later, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from a meeting with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and compared Pakistan's role in averting war to the "bad luck" of events, and expert Rubin claimed that "Pakistan's role in averting war has been compared to the" bad luck "of events.