Mideast

Congratulations are in order for President Trump. He said he would bring home Israel’s hostages and end the horrific fighting in Gaza, and that appears to be exactly what he is doing with this week’s deal. While many of the ideas that went into Trump’s 20-point peace plan predated his reelection, he and his team deserve a standing ovation for translating those ideas into a practical proposal, defining a first phase that was both big and digestible and putting together all the pieces that made its agreement possible.

Success, however, does have its downsides. Remember the Pottery Barn rule of foreign policy, made famous during the Iraq war? “You break it, you own it.” We now have the Trump corollary: “You patch it, you own it.”

Despite coming to office eager to shed America’s Middle East commitments, Trump just took on a huge one: responsibility for a peace plan that will forever bear his name. On Oct. 6, 2023, the day before Hamas’ assault, Arab-Israeli relations were poised for the historic breakthrough of Saudi-Israel normalization; two years later, Arab-Israeli relations — including Trump’s first-term Middle East peacemaking achievement of the Abraham Accords — are hanging on by a thread. By offering a plan that promises not just an end to fighting in Gaza but building a full and enduring regional peace, the president has taken on the task of repairing the damage wrought by Hamas’ unholy war. In other words: fixing the Middle East.

How Trump fulfills this not inconsequential responsibility has major consequences for America’s role in the region and in the world. The Chinese are watching whether, when the going gets rough, he will have the mettle to maintain a broad alliance. The Russians are watching whether the president will strictly enforce the letter of the deal or let certain unpleasant aspects slip. The Iranians will be watching whether Trump will find himself so drowning in the details of Gaza reconstruction that he won’t be able to stitch together a repeat of the highly successful Arab-Israeli coalition that protected Israel a year ago from Iran’s barrages of ballistic missiles and drones. And all these adversaries — and others — will wonder whether the intense U.S. focus needed to ensure implementation of this deal will distract the president from their own areas of mischief.

Those are some of the international stakes. There’s a difficult road ahead in achieving the deal itself. Some of the most vexing challenges will include:

• Implementing a highly complex Gaza peace plan that, in its requirements for disarmament, envisions Hamas to be fully complicit in its organizational suicide — or at least its institutional castration;
• Having the U.S. military orchestrate the recruitment, deployment and management of multinational forces to police the territory just as the Israel Defense Forces are withdrawing from it, a tricky maneuver fraught with risk;
• Creating and supervising a transitional administration that will oversee everything from humanitarian relief to rubble and ordnance removal to massive reconstruction projects, all the while preventing what’s left of Hamas from stealing goods to divert to underground weapons factories, an art that it perfected after previous ceasefires;
• Securing buy-in from the United Nations and its specialized agencies, which need to play an essential role in delivering food and medical services, without buckling under pressure to rehabilitate the deeply flawed U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, an organization that bears special responsibility for keeping the Palestinian-Israeli conflict alive for decades;
• Preventing Qatar and Turkey — longtime friends of Hamas who have emerged in recent weeks as diplomatic Good Samaritans — from translating their current status into a malign influence over the direction of Palestinian politics, which can only be worrisome to Israel and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and a long-term detriment to the cause of peace;
• And dealing every step of the way with an Israeli prime minister of a rightist coalition who will likely view every decision, great and small, through the lens of a fateful election he is expected to call very soon that will show whether the Israeli people want to punish him for the terrible errors that left Israel unprepared for Hamas’ 2023 attack or reward him for the impressive victories Israel’s military achieved across the region in the two years that followed.

Getting this far was a huge achievement. Ensuring effective execution — never a strong suit for a “big idea guy” like Trump — is a thousand times more difficult. This can’t be done with a small team of White House officials chatting on Signal. It will require an army of — please excuse the term — experts: experts in military command and control, experts in ordnance removal and disposal, experts in civilian rehabilitation and reconstruction, experts in communication and community engagement. Corporate subcontracting can address some of this, as can the impressive talents of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but don’t be fooled into thinking that a consulting company or a former foreign official can pick up the slack of the entire U.S. government. This plan, after all, has Trump’s name on it, not Deloitte’s or Blair’s.

The president has at least one more vital task in this matter. He must explain to the American people why we are doing this. For nearly 20 years, American presidents of both parties have said they wanted to pivot away from the Middle East, but they continually find themselves entangled in the region’s often byzantine conflicts and politics. Americans deserve to know why the “America First” president has decided that American interests are intimately bound up in the success of this peace plan. Our domestic divisions notwithstanding, fair-minded people on both sides of the aisle will be rooting for Trump’s success in this peace deal.

For now, sure, the president should enjoy the accolades and celebrate the coming release of Hamas’ hostages. The morning after will come soon enough.

Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute.

THE HAGUE — Aboard Air Force One over the Atlantic on Tuesday, President Trump turned his attention for a brief moment from the diplomatic victory he had brokered between Israel and Iran to one that has proven far more elusive.

“I’d like to see a deal with Russia,” Trump told reporters before arriving in the Netherlands for a NATO summit and referencing his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. “Vladimir called me up. He said, ‘Can I help you with Iran?’ I said, no, I don’t need help with Iran. I need help with you.”

“I hope we’re going to be getting a deal done with Russia,” Trump added. “It’s a shame.”

It was a rare expression of frustration from Trump with Putin at a critical time in Moscow’s war against Ukraine, and as Ukrainian leaders and their allies in Europe desperately seek assurances from Trump that U.S. assistance for Kyiv will continue.

The president will be at the summit in The Hague through Wednesday, where he is expected to meet with leaders from across Europe, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Now we’re going to NATO — we’ll get a new set of problems,” Trump said of the meetings. “We’ll solve a new set of problems.”

The European bloc hopes to leverage Trump’s jubilation over the outcome of Israel’s war with Iran — which saw its nuclear program neutered and much of its military leadership and air defenses eliminated — into a diplomatic success for itself, European officials told The Times. After ordering U.S. precision strikes against three of Iran’s main nuclear facilities over the weekend to assist the Israeli campaign, Trump announced a ceasefire in the conflict on Monday that has tentatively held.

“The message will be that deterrence works,” one European official said. The hope, the official added, is that Trump will feel emboldened to take a more aggressive stance toward Russia after succeeding in his strategic gamble in the Middle East.

In The Hague, discussions among NATO and European officials have focused on Russia’s timetable for reconstituting its land army, with the most aggressive analyses estimating that Moscow could be in a position to launch another full-scale attempt to take over Ukraine — or a NATO member state — by 2027.

In a text message sent to Trump, screenshots of which he posted to social media, NATO Secretary Gen. Mark Rutte fawned over the president’s “decisive action” to bomb Iran, a decision he called “truly extraordinary.”

“Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world,” Rutte wrote. “You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done.”

Rutte was referencing a new commitment by members of the alliance to spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defense, a significant increase that has been a priority for Trump since his first term in office.

The matter is not fully settled, with Spain resisting the new spending commitment. “There’s a problem with Spain, “ Trump told reporters on the plane, “which is very unfair to the rest of the people.”

But the new funding — “BIG” money, as Rutte put it — could help appease a president who has repeatedly expressed skepticism of the NATO alliance.

As he spoke with reporters, Trump questioned whether Article 5 of the NATO charter, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all, in fact requires the United States to come to the defense of its allies.

“There are numerous definitions of Article 5, [but] I’m committed to being their friends,” he added. “I’ve become friends with many of those leaders, and I’m committed to helping them.”

Trump has failed thus far to persuade Putin to agree to a ceasefire against Ukraine despite applying pressure to both sides — particularly against Kyiv, which Trump has incorrectly blamed for starting the war.

In the Dnipro region of Ukraine on Tuesday, 160 people were injured and 11 were killed in a ballistic missile strike by Moscow, Zelensky wrote on social media.

“Russia cannot produce ballistic missiles without components from other countries,” Zelensky said. “Russia cannot manufacture hundreds of other types of weapons without the parts, equipment and expertise that this deranged regime in Moscow does not possess on its own. That is why it is so important to minimize the schemes that connect Russia with its accomplices. There must also be a significant strengthening of sanctions against Russia.”

Assuming a similar strategy to the Europeans, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in an interview on Sunday that Congress should act to enable Trump with leverage against Putin in upcoming negotiations.

“How does this affect Russia?” Graham responded on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked about the war with Iran. “I’ve got 84 co-sponsors for a Russian sanctions bill that is an economic bunker-buster against China, India and Russia for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

“I think that bill’s going to pass,” he added. “We’re going to give the president a waiver. It will be a tool in Trump’s toolbox to bring Putin to the table.”

As President Trump parades through the Middle East this week, he will encounter a very different region than the one he experienced during his first term. True, the Israeli-Palestinian problem remains unresolved, as do the challenges emanating from Iran’s much-advanced nuclear program and the instability and dysfunction in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

But this old wine is now packaged in new bottles. Beyond the garish headlines of Trump’s plan to accept a Boeing 747 as a gift from Qatar, new trends are emerging that will redefine the region, posing additional challenges for U.S. policy.

Of all the changes in the Middle East since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, perhaps the most striking is Israel’s emergence as a regional powerhouse. Aided by the administrations of Presidents Biden and Trump, and enabled by Arab regimes that do little to support Palestinians, Israel devastated Hamas and Hezbollah as military organizations, killing much of their senior leadership. With the support of the United States, Europe and friendly Arab states, it effectively countered two direct Iranian missile attacks on its territory.

Israel then delivered its own strike, reportedly destroying much of Iran’s ballistic missile production and air defenses. In short, Israel has achieved escalation dominance: the capacity to escalate (or not) as it sees fit, and to deter its adversaries from doing so. Israel has also redefined its concept of border security in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank and Syria by acting unilaterally to preempt and prevent threats to its territory.

Converting Israel’s military power into political arrangements, even peace accords, would seem like a reasonable next step. But the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems uninterested in such options and is unlikely to be induced to change its outlook. Moreover, securing new, lasting agreements also depends on whether there are leaders among the Palestinians and key Arab states ready to take up the challenge, with all the political risks it entails.

But the Arab world remains in serious disarray. At least five Arab states are dealing with profound internal challenges, leaving them in various degrees of dysfunction and state failure. Amid this power vacuum, two alternative power centers have emerged. The first are the states of the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Relatively unscathed by the Arab Spring and blessed with sovereign wealth funds, oil and natural gas, these stable authoritarian powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, have begun to play an outsize role in the region.

The second category comprises non-Arab states. Israel, Turkey and Iran are the only states in the region with the capacity to project significant military power beyond their borders. While each has suffered periods of internal unrest, they currently enjoy domestic stability. Each also boasts tremendous economic potential and significant security, military and intelligence capabilities, including the capability to manufacture weapons domestically.

One (Israel) is America’s closest regional ally, another (Turkey) is a member of NATO and a newfound power broker in Syria, and the third (Iran) retains considerable influence despite Israel’s mauling of its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran’s nuclear program keeps it relevant, even central, to both Israeli and American policymaking.

All three non-Arab states engender a good deal of suspicion and mistrust among Arab regimes but are nonetheless seen as key players whom no one wants to offend. All three are at odds — with each frustrating the others’ regional objectives — and all three are here to stay. Their influence will most likely only grow in the years to come, given the fractiousness of the Arab world.

In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, it seemed that the Palestinian issue was once again front and center, not just in the Arab world, but internationally. Those who claimed it had lost its resonance could point to the outpouring of sympathy and support for Gazan civilians as Israel’s war against Hamas led to a humanitarian catastrophe.

Moreover, the United Nations passed resolutions calling for an end to the war, many around the world condemned the war and Israel, the International Court of Justice took up the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, and the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu (as well as for Hamas’ military commander, later found to have been killed).

Nonetheless, it has become stunningly clear that, far from pushing the Palestinian issue to the top of the international agenda, the Oct. 7 attack has actually diminished its salience and left Palestinians isolated and without good options. Continued U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas, despite the exponential rise of Palestinian deaths, has protected Israel from negative consequences; key Arab regimes have done next to nothing to impose costs and consequences on Israel and the U.S. as Palestinian civilian deaths mount. The international community appears too fragmented, distracted and self-interested to act in any concerted way in defense of Palestine.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian national movement remains divided and dysfunctional, giving Palestinians an unpalatable choice between Hamas and the aging president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The prospects for anything resembling a two-state solution have never looked bleaker.

How the Trump administration will process these developments remains to be seen. Clearly, it has adopted a pro-Israel view, with Trump musing about turning Gaza into a Riviera-style resort. He has deployed his special envoy to the Middle East to secure the return of hostages taken by Hamas but has yet to invest in any postwar plan for the beleaguered enclave. Indeed, he has left the strategy for Gaza to Israel, which in turn has resumed its military campaign there. Trump has also acquiesced to Israel’s pursuit of aggressive border defenses against both Lebanon and Syria, while enabling Israel’s annexationist policies in the West Bank.

Yet Trump is nothing if not unpredictable. In April, he announced new U.S. negotiations with Iran in the presence of Netanyahu, who himself has tried to persuade the president that the only solution to Iran’s nuclear program is military action. But if U.S.-Iranian negotiations do advance, or if Trump’s interest in Israeli-Saudi normalization intensifies, he may find himself drawn into the Middle East negotiating bazaar, dealing with the intricacies of day-after planning in Gaza and a political horizon for Palestinians.

These paths are already fomenting tension between Trump, who will not be visiting Israel on his Middle East trip, and a recalcitrant Netanyahu. But given Trump’s absolute control over his party, Netanyahu will have few options to appeal to Republicans if the White House proposes policies that he opposes. As most U.S. allies have already learned, if Trump wants something, he’s not averse to using pressure to get it.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations and the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.” Lauren Morganbesser is a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.