Before he visited the White House yesterday, the Taoiseach was on Fox News on Monday evening. You can watch the interview he did below:
If you’d seen that clip before yesterday’s big facedown with the US President, you’d have gotten a useful preview of how it would ultimately go. Which was, I think, about as well as anyone might have hoped it could go.
First of all, I think you’d have to be a very biased observer not to give the Taoiseach “props” for how he calibrated his message – both on Fox, and in the White House – for an American audience: Focusing on trade, negotiation, investment, and the history of the Irish in America was about the best he could do. This column has never hestitated to criticise the Taoiseach, but in this case we all benefit from his ability to project calm leadership. He couldn’t have done much better, I think.
But still: He was calibrating his message. And to some extent, being a little bit dishonest.
On Iran, for example, his message to Americans and to Trump was “Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” and “we would like to see a different regime in Iran” which is, you’ll note, the exact same – almost word for word – as the White House’s view on Iran. His qualification (that Ireland would have preferred a negotiated solution) is hardly an implicit critique of the war, given that the US and Iran have been negotiating for decades.
If your position is “Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” then implicit in that position is that force can be justified to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. Everything else is sophistry. Absolutely nothing that Mr. Martin said in America, to his audience, could be taken as a condemnation of the US/Israeli military action.
Is that, truly, the Irish Government’s position? I do not think it is, dear readers. So Mr. Martin went to the USA and pretended that the country at large thinks something other than it does.
And of course, this worked just fine: The most revealing moment of the whole trip was – after days of fretting/hoping in the media that President Catherine Connolly’s anti-war views might cause a stir – when the US President turned out not to know who Catherine Connolly was. “He’s lucky I exist” was all Trump said, when those comments were put to him.
That moment should, of course, throw into stark relief just how futile Irish posturing on the world stage is. Something that Mr. Martin recognised in Washington, even as he indulges it at home.
Note what was absent: Given a clear platform to speak to millions of Americans directly about the Middle East, Mr. Martin did not utter a single word of criticism to the United States over its policy, nor did he raise a single word of critique for the United States’ closest ally, and his own Government’s self-chosen geopolitical nemesis, Israel. Here was an opportunity to directly articulate the foreign policy of the Irish state to millions of ordinary Americans, and the Taoiseach declined to do it. Why?
The obvious answer is that the Taoiseach is enough of a patriot to understand that doing so would be devastatingly damaging to the image of this country in the United States. And so he put national self-preservation before the topic that the Oireachtas has spent more time on than any other singe issue over the last few years. The word “Palestine” didn’t escape his lips.
You can praise him for that (I do) or criticise him (others certainly will) but regardless of which point you align with, you must surely recognise the absurdity of the Irish position: We have spent endless hours of parliamentary time to arrive at a position on international affairs which the Taoiseach does not feel able to publicly articulate because it might damage us as a country.
And you can also call this for what it is: Cowardice. Not, let me be clear, personal cowardice on the part of the Taoiseach, but a kind of institutionalised national cowardice in which Irish foreign policy is an entirely domestic affair: We are the only country in the western world whose foreign policy is designed to be for almost entirely domestic consumption.
So what did Mr. Martin do well? Well, his defence of Sir Keir Starmer – whether you like Starmer or not – was a neighbourly thing to do and it will have been received well in London and in Brussels. He also kept the focus where it should be: On Irish economic and social ties to the United States.
I am of course obliged to mention that, of the two men, Trump and not Martin was correct on both immigration and green energy. Martin’s defence on the former will have seemed weak to anybody who actually understands what is happening in Ireland and Europe, but – as Mr. Trump’s comedic misgendering of President Connolly shows – that will have been a very small portion of his audience.
There are some, of course, who will believe that Taoiseach Mary Lou-McDonald would have done something differently: That she would either have declined a Fox News invitation (in essence, a chance to talk directly to Mr. Trump’s political base) or that she would have gone on there spewing fire and brimstone about illegal wars and alleged genocides and the pernicious influence of the Jewish state. Those people, alas, are deluding themselves: Even Mrs. McDonald, in pre-emptively declining a White House invitation herself, committed to the fact that she would have accepted one if she were the Taoiseach. The notion that she would have gone over to Washington and given Bret Baier or Donald Trump a dressing down over his country’s immorality is fanciful – because she knows as well as Mr. Martin does that “middle Ireland” would be horrified by such a display and its potential implication for their jobs.
So this is the position of Ireland: We have one foreign policy at home, and another in the United States. That position is probably durable, for the long term, but it is also ludicrous, and makes our domestic politics into a joke. Ireland’s two chief exports are tech goods to the US market, and meaningless solidarity to the Gaza Strip. Yesterday, Mr. Martin had to prioritise one over the other. He duly did.