In a speech at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Mr Trump told Israeli ministers he believed the Palestinians are “ready to reach for peace” but stopped short of endorsing the idea of a Palestinian state. “Both Israeli and Palestinians seek lives of hope for their children and we know that peace is possible if we put aside the pain and disagreements of the past,” he said. 

The absence of any talk of two states was immediately picked up by Right-wing ministers like Naftali Bennett, who leads the pro-settler Jewish Home party. “Peace doesn’t always have to mean Israel severing part of its land and handing it over to its enemies,” Mr Bennett told The Telegraph. “That doesn’t bring peace, that brings misery.”

Mr Trump did offer challenges to both the Israeli and Palestinian sides during his brief visits. During his meeting with Mr Abbas, he urged the Palestinian leader to end the policy of making payments to the families of Palestinians who carry out attacks against Israelis.  "Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded and even rewarded,” Mr Trump said. His words were applauded by Mr Netanyahu.

Rhode points to former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's reaction to the deal offered to him by then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000.  "Barak offers Yasser Arafat absolutely everything in the West Bank and as it came [to] the Temple Mount – which we know in the Bible there were two Jewish Temples there – Barak said, 'you get the top of the Temple Mount where your mosques, your holy places are, we get below because those are the archaeological remnants, but it's in return for a peace agreement,'"

Rhode said. "Arafat, who could do things much more in the name of the people here than Mahmoud Abbas, jumps up, starts to shake and said, 'there never was a Jewish Temple here!'" he explained. Rhode referred to a pamphlet by the Muslim Wafk (Islamic trust), which oversees the al-Aksa Mosque and Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, written in the 1920s. It stated that there's no doubt Solomon's Temple was on the Temple Mount.

Rhode also said while the Palestinians may be willing at some point to recognize the country of Israel, they won't recognize it as a Jewish state because that would contradict their religion. "If they recognize it as a Jewish state, they're denying the basic Muslim idea that once land is conquered by Muslims, it's Muslim forever," he said. "That is a huge violation of Islam. It's a violation of your personal honor, they say. It's apostasy and punishable by death."

Nothing more could have illustrated the massive divide between the concerns of many of the nations of the world and those of the United States, which is rapidly descending into second-rate power status, along with its NATO allies Britain, France, and Germany.

While Mr Trump was threatening to fire his senior White House staff, reprising his one-time role in his reality television show ‘The Apprentice’, China’s President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and presidents and prime ministers from around the world sat down to discuss the creation of new international and intercontinental highways, railways, and maritime routes under China’s proposed Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

Even countries that are cool on the Chinese initiative, including India and Japan, sent representatives to the summit that carried a bit more clout than the pathetic representation of the United States, Matt Pottinger, a little-known special assistant to Trump and the senior director for East Asia of National Security Council. In fact, the only reason Trump sent anyone to represent the United States at the Beijing gathering was because of a special request made by President Xi during his recent meeting with Trump at the president’s private Mar-a-Lago Club resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Even North Korea, which rankled South Korea, Japan, and the United States by firing a ballistic missile into waters near Russia, sent a delegation to the Beijing meeting headed by Kim Yong Jae, the North’s Minister of External Economic Relations. The Trump administration, which sent a virtual unknown to Beijing, complained loudly about North Korea’s representation at the Silk Road summit.

But Washington’s complaint was conveyed by someone as unknown as Mr Pottinger, Anna Richey-Allen, a low-level spokesperson for the US State Department’s East Asia Bureau. The reason why the United States is being spoken for by middle-grade bureaucrats is that the nation that still believes it is the world’s only remaining ‘superpower’ is now governed by an administration rife with top-level vacancies, inter-agency squabbling, and amateur league players.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella told a news conference in Moscow that martial rule took effect Tuesday evening in the southern region of Mindanao “on the grounds of existence of rebellion.” “The whole of Marawi city is blacked out, there is no light, and there are Maute snipers all around,” Lorenzana said in the news conference in Moscow, which was broadcast live in the Philippines.

While pursuing peace talks with two large Muslim rebel groups in the south of the predominantly Roman Catholic nation, Duterte has ordered the military to destroy smaller extremist groups which have tried to align with the Islamic State group.

Duterte had repeatedly threatened to place the south, the scene of decades-long Muslim uprisings, under martial law if terrorism spiraled out of control. Human rights groups have expressed fears that martial law powers could further embolden Duterte, whom they have accused of allowing extrajudicial killings of thousands of drug suspects in a crackdown on illegal drugs.

Every successive president starting with Franklin D Roosevelt has been bought — lock, stock and barrel — and made to dance to the tune of the Deep State. Even Dwight D Eisenhower, the retired five-star Army general-turned-president who warned against the disastrous rise of misplaced power by the military industrial complex was complicit in contributing to the build-up of the military’s role in dictating national and international policy.

Enter Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump has paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Just recently, for instance, Trump — boasting about the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States — agreed to sell Saudi Arabia more than $110 billion in military weapons and “tanks and helicopters for border security, ships for coastal security, intelligence-gathering aircraft, a missile-defense radar system, and cybersecurity tools.” Meanwhile, Trump — purportedly in an effort to balance the budget in 10 years — wants to slash government funding for programs for the poor, ranging from health care and food stamps to student loans and disability payments.

The military doesn’t have to worry about tightening its belt, however. No, the military’s budget — with its trillion dollar wars, its $125 billion in administrative waste, and its contractor-driven price gouging that hits the American taxpayer where it hurts the most — will continue to grow, thanks to Trump. This is how you keep the Deep State in power. The rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer, the military will get more militaristic, America’s endless wars will get more endless, and the prospect of peace will grow ever dimmer.

The Queen held a minute's silence at Buckingham Palace at 16:00 BST. In a statement in Downing Street on Tuesday, the prime minister said the bombing had been a "callous terrorist attack" that targeted "defenceless young people". She said the security services believed they knew the attacker's identity but were not yet able to confirm it.

Number 10 later said Mrs May had been updated "through [Monday] night" and had phoned Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at 04:00 BST to brief him. It is the worst terrorist attack in the UK since the 7 July bombings in 2005, in which 52 people were killed by four suicide bombers.

So-called Islamic State has said - via IS channels on the messaging app Telegram - it was behind the Manchester attack, but this has not been verified. The UK threat level has been judged to be severe for nearly three years - which means an attack is considered highly likely.

But in recent months the tempo of counter terrorist activity has been increasing with - on average - an arrest every day. After the attack in Westminster by Khalid Masood in March, police and security officials have been warning that further attacks were almost inevitable.

But they also believed that those were more likely to be low-tech involving knives or vehicles. The fact that the Manchester attack involved explosives will worry them. It may not have been at the level of complexity seen in Paris in 2015, when multiple attackers sent from Syria used guns and suicide belts, but it will still have required planning.

“This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it,” Trump said Sunday in Saudi Arabia, referring to the fight against terrorism. “This is a battle between good and evil.”

Addressing political leaders from Arab and Muslim countries, Trump mentioned “God” a whopping nine times. The theme of his speech was the joint need to combat terrorism, but it was infused with a spiritual message. “Religious leaders must make this absolutely clear: Barbarism will deliver you no glory — piety to evil will bring you no dignity,” he warned. “If you choose the path of terror, your life will be empty, your life will be brief, and your soul will be condemned.”

For “many centuries,” Christians, Muslims and Jews have been living “side by side” in the Middle East, Trump went on. “We must practice tolerance and respect for each other once again — and make this region a place where every man and woman, no matter their faith or ethnicity, can enjoy a life of dignity and hope.”

“The Americans want to emphasize that what they’re looking for is harmony between the main religions, that all three religions might be united around the idea of peace,” said Major General (res) Yaakov Amidror, Netanyahu’s former national security adviser.

The architects of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians entirely ignored the religious aspects of the conflict, he said. “That was a huge mistake.” Talking about interfaith dialogue and tolerance will not bring peace tomorrow, Amidror stressed. “But we have to begin somewhere,” and the understanding that there is a religious element to the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic is a welcome first step.

Promoting religious tolerance is, of course, not the only element of Trump’s Middle East strategy. In his meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week he will also want to talk business, and will seek to find out what concrete policy proposals each side can bring to the table to foster a climate conducive to peace.

His predecessors have done exactly that and failed spectacularly. It is by no means guaranteed — and that’s an understatement — that Trump’s attempt to clinch what he’s called the “ultimate deal” will see any more success. But at the very least, an approach that pairs political pressure on both sides with an effort to create goodwill among the region’s religious groups is something fresh.

Described as the Riyadh Declaration, the document was signed following US President Donald Trump’s visit to the Saudi capital for a summit that brought in Islamic representatives from 55 countries, and vowed “to combat terrorism in all its forms, address its intellectual roots, dry up its sources of funding and to take all necessary measures to prevent and combat terrorist crimes in close cooperation among their states.”

“The leaders welcomed the establishment of a global center for countering extremist thought to take base in Riyadh, and praised the center's strategic objectives of combating intellectual, media and digital extremism and promoting coexistence and tolerance among peoples,” said the text of the document, published by the Saudi Press Agency.

The exact membership of what the communique called the Middle East Strategic Alliance will be decided next year, but putative members have committed to assembling “a reserve force of 34,000 troops to support operations against terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria when needed.” While rich in specific epithets, the declaration broadly followed the agenda of Sunday’s Sunni-dominated Riyadh summit, and the speech delivered by Trump, which mentioned Iran a dozen times, and accused it of “spreading destruction and chaos across the region.”

Erekat’s warning is the latest of a series of similar declarations from Arab and Muslim leaders. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is slated to meet with Trump in Bethlehem on Tuesday, said in January that if Trump moves the embassy, it will “destroy the peace process.” Abbas’ senior aide and the PA’s supreme Sharia judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash stated that an embassy transfer would be a “declaration of war.” And earlier this month, Turkish President Recep Erdogan said it would be “extremely ill-advised” for Trump to move the embassy.

Erekat said a Palestinian state without eastern Jerusalem as its capital would have “no meaning.” He also expressed his hope that “President Trump would give us a chance.” “He said … he will not impose solutions on us or on the Israelis,” Erekat said. “(But) the fact that he is going to move the embassy is imposition, is dictation.”

Erekat also met with opposition member Tzipi Livni (Zionist Union) – his counterpart in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations – and the two expressed their hope that Trump would be successful in his efforts to jumpstart the moribund peace process. The new US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, welcomed the notion of an embassy relocation but said the decision was ultimately Trump’s.

Perhaps the only thing that’s preventing a war from breaking out right now, is the fact that North Korea doesn’t have an effective way to deliver a nuke, nor have they been making much progress in that arena. It seems like every time they test a long range missile, it fails spectacularly. So long as that state of affairs continues, war can be averted.

Unfortunately, North Korea’s missile program has just made a huge leap. On Sunday they tested a new missile that was arguably far more effective than anything they’ve ever launched before. A Hwasong-12, a new medium long-range surface-to-surface missile, was launched from Kusong early Sunday morning. The missile flew roughly 430 miles, but the weapon was intentionally lofted. Analysts suspect the missile could potentially hit targets 2,800 miles away if fired along a standard trajectory.

Is it any wonder why North Korea is the perfect trigger for World War 3? This unstable nation is rapidly increasing its nuclear capabilities, and it’s a nation that China and Russia have a vested interest in keeping alive. They want a buffer state between their borders and South Korea, which is allied with the United States. So any conflict with North Korea (a conflict that is looking more likely every day) could easily drag more nuclear armed nations into the fray.

Unless one side of this fight backs down, World War 3 is inevitable. And so far it doesn’t look like either side is willing to compromise on North Korea’s missile program.