US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a joint press conference at the White House on Monday. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Donald Trump called it “potentially one of the great days ever in civilization.”
Even for a president known for hyperbole, this was setting expectations absurdly high for his new 20-point peace plan for Gaza.
But this is an administration that often treats announcements as world-changing breakthroughs. It’s only got one peacemaking play — expressing extreme optimism designed to bounce rival parties into an agreement.
Still, the humanitarian situation in Gaza is so horrific, and the plight of remaining hostages held by Hamas following the October 7, 2023, terror attacks is so dire, that any hope for ending agonizing human misery should be eagerly grasped.
Trump’s new plan does appear to be the administration’s most substantive, thoughtful and broadly supported effort to end the Gaza war yet. If fully implemented, it in theory offers the promise of a future for Palestinians in the Strip. If it takes hold, it might create space for a process to mediate the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It’s certainly more realistic than Trump’s previous wild vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East” arising from the rubble of Israel’s onslaught. And its step-by-step approach likely to last many months acknowledges that such a vicious conflict can’t be ended by the kind of shallow, art-of-the-deal trade-offs in which Trump dealt as a real estate mogul.
Trump did forge progress in getting Netanyahu to publicly sign up for a plan that bore clear hallmarks of his recent meetings with top Arab and Muslim leaders.
Yet the Middle East has never lacked peace plans. There’ve been scores of them, sponsored by the US, Europe, the Saudis and other Arab states. But most never come anywhere near implementation, because the region’s tortured history and political opportunism on both sides always intervenes.
This is one reason why Trump’s claim that “we’re at a minimum, very, very close,” to solving “things that have been going on for hundreds of years and thousands of years” is best received with only reserved optimism.
Even if Hamas gets on board, the choreography of a hostage release within the allotted 72 hours would be a heavy lift. And on the intense Gaza battlefield, incidents could explode at any time that either side could use as an excuse to ditch Trump’s peace proposal.
The other cautionary note is one that has also haunted Trump’s other big peace initiative — over Ukraine, which like his Gaza process includes windy claims of imminent breakthroughs and photo ops but failed amid worsening bloodshed.
Trump clearly loves the big moments and gets impatient with the drudgery of diplomacy. But both tracks also reveal a White House that frequently misreads the emotional, historical and political forces driving the protagonists in a conflict that make them less willing to compromise.
The fate of Trump’s new Middle East initiative therefore may depend on these questions:
— Is the president prepared to devote his full focus, energy and seven-days a week attention to solving this most intractable of global conflicts?
— Will he impose the kind of considerable US leverage and personal pressure on a strongman leader that he’s so far been loath to bring to bear on Netanyahu in Israel or Vladimir Putin in Russia?
— And can an administration that keeps getting nowhere with top-down peacemaking create an intricate diplomatic process in the shadows that builds confidence between parties and creates key small wins rather than photo-ops?