Trump's slaps and hugs: It has been the talk of the town for the last few days. There is no doubt that this talk will echo all over the world, too, at least for a while. World decision-makers gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly meeting are trying to know more about the US president, to communicate with him, and to engage with his close advisers. It seems foreign policy decision-makers want to know how much they can get from Trump's unpredictability and his ever-changing, though nowadays somehow settled, administration. “No one is going to grip-and-grin,” UN Ambassador Nikki Haley told reporters, disparaging the idea that being at the UN was all about having handshakes and photo-ops. “The United States is going to work. This is a time to be serious, and it's a time for us to talk out these challenges and make sure there's action that follows them.” Haley, describing ahead of time Trump's first speech to the United Nations on 19 September, said that “I personally think he slaps the right people, he hugs the right people, and he comes out with [the] US being very strong in the end.” Administration officials stressed that North Korea and Iran were top of the US agenda at the UN. A more aggressive strategy towards Iran is expected to be pushed by Washington in the coming days, an approach that may preserve the nuclear deal but at the same time confront Iran's behaviour in the region. Foreign officials, observers and journalists are listening carefully this week to see how President Trump's “America First” stance is reflected in his speech and his approach to world affairs. In New York, Trump is staying in Manhattan in his residence at Trump Tower and is holding meetings in the Lotte New York Palace Hotel and not at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, as was reported earlier. The president is accompanied on his stay in New York by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The latest published number of the State Department's delegation members is 140 officials, down from twice that number last year, according to the New York Times. As in every previous year, we are reminded of what the second UN secretary-general, Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, said on 13 May 1954. “It has been said that the United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” One wonders if that statement is still valid in 2017.
Egypt in Hillary's book: As expected, Hillary Clinton's newly released book What Happened has raised many discussions and arguments about what Hillary sees and says about the 2016 US presidential elections, the Trump victory, and her own loss. In the book, after talking about activists who are willing to sit out elections, waste their votes, and refuse to engage, she notes that “when I was secretary of state, I met in Cairo with a group of young Egyptian activists who had helped organise the demonstrations in Tahrir Square that shocked the world by toppling president Hosni Mubarak in early 2011.” “They were intoxicated by the power of their protests but showed little interest in organising political parties, drafting platforms, running candidates, or building coalitions. Politics wasn't for them, they said. I feared what that would mean for their future. I believed they were essentially handing the country over to the two most organised forces in Egypt: the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. In the years ahead, both fears proved correct.” There are no other words about Egypt in the book, except when she writes that she is proud to be a Democrat and mentions what US Democratic Party presidents have achieved over the years, including “peace between Israel and Egypt under [former US president Jimmy] Carter.” Let us wait and see how the Arab and Egyptian social and traditional media will handle Clinton's latest book. Are they going to enrich us with some inventive conspiracy theories, as they did with her previous book entitled Hard Choices?
