John Jefferson
Only three weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump is at a crossroads.
Trump has taken the reins of government from Joe Biden’s disastrous administration that effectively spent its final year publicly unraveling, largely due to its foreign policy—more specifically, over Biden’s unconditional backing for Israel’s war on Gaza. The policy pleased no one: It ignited outrage from the left, leading to scenes of chaos and sometimes shocking violence on the home front; America-Firsters were forced to watch the country regularly humiliated and pushed around by its own client state, all as U.S. troops were put at risk, the country’s geopolitical position diminished, and the risk of another U.S. war in the Middle East grew; and the rest of the country, fed up with feeling abandoned at the behest of overseas commitments, once more seethed as a foreign government got endless billions of dollars while their communities struggled.
Trump won the election in no small part by promising a sharp change from this. But having inherited Biden’s war as his own, Trump is now faced with a choice that may define his presidency: make good on this promise, largely by putting his foot down with Israel, or repeat Biden’s failures.
The president has already reaped the benefits of the first option, and before he was even inaugurated, when he pressured Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire. He received widespread applause for doing what Biden had proven himself too weak to do for the past year, and for making good on a key campaign promise and bolstering his image as a peacemaker—all while neutralizing Gaza as a flashpoint in domestic politics. In many ways, it simply followed the model of Ronald Reagan, who used U.S. leverage—namely, the enormous military aid that made Israeli wars almost entirely reliant on American support— to end Israel’s similarly self-destructive war on Lebanon in 1982.
But Trump’s moves since taking office suggest he’s moving toward rejecting that approach and instead of falling into the same trap as Biden, with similarly disastrous potential consequences. For one, Netanyahu has made clear he has no intention of moving to the next stage of the ceasefire deal, and simply restarting the war after the first 42-day phase of the agreement—and Trump has made public and, reportedly, private statements indicating he may back him to do this.
Taking this course would betray a key segment of voters who went for Trump, kill his stated hope of leaving his “proudest legacy” as a “peacemaker,” and reignite the massive protests that bedeviled Biden—which were populated not by foreigners on student visas, but by thousands of Americans, whom it would not be popular to put down with heavy-handed measures. What’s more, it would diminish the image of strong U.S. leadership and cause many Americans to ask who exactly is running U.S. foreign policy: the president of the United States, or Benjamin Netanyahu?
Maybe more perilously, it puts the threat of having the United States dragged into another dumb and disastrous Middle East war back on the table. Trump’s ceasefire has ceased the Houthi attacks on American ships in the Red Sea—which, besides endangering Americans, had also effectively started an undeclared U.S. war in Yemen—but this would restart if Netanyahu begins slaughtering Palestinians again. Likewise with Netanyahu’s clear efforts to drag the United States into a war with Iran, which Trump has indicated he doesn’t want, and which the Biden administration only narrowly avoided by dumb luck.
The peril is just as great with the plan Trump rolled out this week, for the United States to “take over” the Gaza strip, relocate the Palestinian population out of it to neighboring countries, and clear the territory for real estate development that would, presumably, be eventually settled by Israel. Pitched as a simple, common-sense solution, this would in reality be Biden’s embarrassing floating pier boondoggle on a grander scale, with even worse potential blowback on the United States. (Trump has nominally walked back some of the most alarming parts of the plan since, seemingly ruling out deploying U.S. troops to the territory, but it’s hard to see how Gaza being “turned over to the United States by Israel” could happen without involving a U.S. military force.)
The refusal of countries like Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states to take in a large influx of Palestinians is not simply a matter of their lacking the will to do it. Besides the sudden, enormous strain this would create on their resources and infrastructure, it would also further inflame public opinion among their populations, who have protested in large numbers against the war and demanded their governments rip up the Abraham Accords that Trump brokered in his first term, along with other peace agreements with Israel. These populations would be even more furious at seeing their rulers effectively helping Israel ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.
It’s hard to imagine how the president’s dream of a grand deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other states would happen under these circumstances. In fact, Jordan views the expulsion of Palestinians into its borders as such a serious threat to its existence, it has gone so far as to threaten war against Israel if it goes forward with this.
The reality is, the long-term peace Trump insists would come out of the expulsion of Gazans is an illusion. Biden’s own secretary of state admitted that, after a year flattening Gaza and killing tens of thousands, Hamas had “recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” Hamas or an organization like it will continue to exist wherever the Palestinian population goes, given the enormous anger and resentment that Israel’s war has created, and which expulsion and a takeover of their land would only add to. It is simply unrealistic that Palestinians, once removed from their homeland, will sit quietly and watch from their new homes as the United States and Israel occupy it. In short, Trump’s plan would likely ensure neverending and quite possibly widening war, not lasting peace and stability.
Meanwhile, just as with Biden’s pier, the Americans and Israelis tasked with clearing Gaza and resettling it—whether troops or civilians—would be sitting ducks for the resulting attacks. At the same time, the sharply increased risk of anti-American terrorism that U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that Biden’s approach had led to would be turned up to overdrive if the United States was now not only perceived as ethnically cleansing Gaza, but occupying it. In other words, not only would the Gaza takeover plan mean once more endangering American lives at the behest of a foreign government, and for no conceivable benefit to U.S. interests, but it makes it more likely for the United States to be pulled into another terrible war in the region.
Biden’s presidency and legacy are in tatters because he wasn’t a strong enough leader to do what Reagan and other presidents had done: to act like the superpower the United States is and tell Israel “no.” Instead, he pursued fantastical, failed workarounds like the pier and subjected himself and the country to constant humiliation, all in the hope of avoiding having to stand up to the Israelis. Trump began his presidency doing the opposite, the result being that U.S. interests were put first and the risk of all-out war lowered. It would plainly be in both the country’s and his best interests to stay on this path. The question is if he’s smart enough to realize it—and strong enough to make it happen.
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