(JNS) When people are called pragmatic, it’s meant to imply reasonableness, the ability to compromise, occupying the sensible middle ground.

That compliment may often be justified. However, as the obverse of principle, pragmatism has also been the West’s progressive undoing.

US President Donald Trump is an arch pragmatist. His “art of the deal” is based on beating down the other side through negotiations in which he plays a superior hand.

This approach characterizes his foreign policy. Over both Iran and Gaza, however, it’s currently threatening to derail his intention to restore respect for American power—not to mention his much-desired legacy as the world’s principal peacemaker.

At the time of writing, a negotiation process still seems to be underway between the United States and the Iranian regime as an alternative to war. Trump’s terms include the regime giving up its nuclear program, ballistic missiles and sponsorship of terrorism—a demand for nothing less than surrender, to which the regime will never agree.

If Trump attacks Iran, we’ll finally know that he realizes that deal-making among nations has its limits. The fact that he keeps being persuaded to continue with these talks, however reluctantly, has created fears that he’s being played by the world’s supreme masters of tactical concessions, delay and manipulation.

In Gaza, where Trump prevented Israel from finishing off Hamas and forced the Israelis into a negotiated ceasefire, Hamas has regrouped and strengthened, daily breaking the ceasefire by attacking Israeli troops.

Although Hamas refuses to demilitarize, Trump is moving ahead with the second stage of his Gaza peace plan, which he originally said was dependent on total demilitarization. The concession is another example of choosing pragmatism over principle.

This reveals a fallacy that Trump shares with his liberal universalist foes, who form the majority of mainstream diplomats and for whom “conflict resolution” rather than war is an article of faith.

This is based on the iron belief in the efficacy of negotiation and compromise, which relies in turn on the fallacy that everyone in the world, like the West, is governed by short-termism and self-interest.

To such pragmatists, the idea that Islamists believe they are doing divine work in murdering and conquering unbelievers is too absurd to be taken seriously.

They therefore fail disastrously to realize that Tehran’s agenda is totally and irrevocably non-negotiable. They also fail to grasp that Hamas similarly views negotiated concessions as a sign of weakness, which galvanizes them to redouble their infernal efforts.

Last week, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, told the president that Hamas will demilitarize “because they have no choice.” “They’re going to give it up. They’re going to give up the AK-47s,” he said. Why? What incentive do they have?

Moreover, Britain’s Telegraph reported last month that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, had been “hammering the phone” with Witkoff and other officials pushing for Hamas to be allowed to retain AK-47s and other personal weapons.

To break the deadlock, Powell was suggesting, just abandon the demand for demilitarization. Simple!

The sinuous Powell, who is highly influential in Washington, DC, has a long record of pragmatic engagement with terrorists. His connections with IRA leaders during Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence in the 1980s and 1990s led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and 28 years of peace in the province.

The British are constantly thrusting this agreement down the throats of the Americans as a genius strategy to end world conflicts.

Last year, Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Syria, revealed that in 2023, Powell’s NGO Inter Mediate, which provides a bridge between diplomats and terrorists, had introduced Ford to the Al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed al-Jolani, now known as Ahmed al-Sharaa and, since last January, Syria’s president.

Powell was thus instrumental in prompting Ford to help transform al-Jolani into a “moderate” statesman who said he had renounced his earlier extremism. Yet last month, after having slaughtered Alawites, Druze and Christians, al-Sharaa’s army smashed the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and captured swathes of Kurdish territory, inflicting atrocities in Rojava.

A ceasefire deal brokered by the Americans delivered the Kurds into al-Sharaa’s control. This has caused the Kurds to feel bitterly betrayed by the West, having previously acted as its invaluable allies against Islamic State, the terrorist group to which al-Sharaa once belonged.

Using the Good Friday Agreement as a global “conflict resolution” template is a category error. The IRA merely wanted a united Ireland, a reasonable if contested aspiration.

Islamists, however—with their fanatical, absolute and non-negotiable agendas to destroy Israel, the Jews and the West—don’t suddenly become convinced of the benefits of pragmatism. Instead, they become convinced of the endless gullibility or amoral cynicism of Western diplomats bent upon making concessions which these implacable foes rightly perceive as weakness.

Pragmatism involves dismissing or even denying the importance of virtue and its opposite, evil. This is the hallmark of today’s Western world.

That’s why Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile financier whose copious files were dumped into the public arena this past week—revealing the staggering scale and depth of his depraved influence—was not an aberration but the monstrous apotheosis of the culture.

He was a spider spinning an enormous global web of financial, sexual and political corruption. People were drawn into it in huge numbers because he was a passport to money, sexual license and political influence. That was because all the West’s normative moral rules had broken down.

Hyper-individualism had made licentiousness the order of the day. Absolutes such as truth or objectivity were abolished in favor of subjective opinions and the primacy of feelings and emotion.

The nuclear family was smashed. Sexual morality gave way to a lifestyle free-for-all. Non-judgmentalism was mandatory. Young people now learn codes of sexual behavior from pornography.

For the West’s elites to be clutching their pearls over Epstein piles hypocrisy upon moral collapse.

In Britain, the Epstein scandal is threatening to bring down Starmer, who in 2024 appointed Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the United States. It’s now been revealed that Mandelson appears to have received money from Epstein while sending him market-sensitive, secret information about the government’s responses to the financial crash in 2008.

Starmer has been forced to admit that when he sent Mandelson to Washington, he was aware that his new ambassador had continued his friendship with Epstein after the financier’s conviction in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

Starmer appears to have taken the pragmatic view that Mandelson’s stellar political abilities made it worth the gamble. With the gamble now blowing up in Starmer’s face, it turns out that pragmatism was a losing bet.

Pragmatism is fine within the guardrails of normative morality. But if it tears out those guardrails and throws them into the trash, then it goes belly-up.

Pragmatism has corrupted the West and exposed it to grave danger in one particularly graphic example. Qatar, an Islamist Muslim Brotherhood state, works to destabilize and ultimately conquer the West for Islam.

Accordingly, over the decades, it has insinuated itself into America and Britain, turning their universities into Islamic propaganda factories and buying up countless individuals in politics and the media.

As a result, instead of viewing Qatar as an enemy, America has treated it as a valuable ally. It used Qatar—the sponsor of Hamas—as an honest broker in the Israeli hostage negotiations, which is why they dragged on at the cost of countless hostages’ and Israeli soldiers’ lives.

And now, Qatar has pride of place on Trump’s Board of Peace—and is using all its influence to stop Trump from destroying the Iranian regime.

You might say that Qatar is the Jeffrey Epstein of world politics.

Dealing with the devil never ends well. Abandon principle for pragmatism, and everything goes smash. It’s a lesson the West clearly has yet to learn.

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