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President Donald Trump‘s peace deal in Gaza is not simply unprecedented due to the longevity of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. If the deal even somewhat holds, it’s a categorical repudiation of a quarter-century of failed diplomatic consensus. It proves the futility of the democracy promotion of the Bush and Obama-era neoconservatives and negates the notion that the rest of the world should walk on tenterhooks to appease Iran and its proxies in order to garner a consensus in the Middle East. The Gaza deal repudiates the notion that any regional peace hinges on prioritizing a Palestinian state, and it thoroughly invalidates the discernment and judgment of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
Most importantly, Trump has taught the world that, yes, the United States can just go into conflicts, bomb people, places, and things that pose an imminent threat to America’s interests, and then just leave. In other words, Trump has proved that, contrary to a wave of fatalism overtaking the West, we actually can win wars by fighting.
UKRAINE HOPES TO BENEFIT FROM TRUMP’S GAZA MOMENTUM WITH ITS OWN PEACE
When is the last time the U.S. won a war?
America lost 20 years and some $2 trillion fighting in Afghanistan. The only other war authorized by Congress this century, Iraq, was only a victory if you believe that the creation of a power vacuum filled by the Islamic State group was a favorable outcome.
It’s not only that we’ve lost most of the other illegal wars of the past 25 years, but also that they didn’t have anything to do with America’s interests in the first place. Former President Barack Obama never pretended that the Gaddafi regime in Libya had anything to do with America’s safety or sovereignty. Instead, the Obama-Clinton consensus was that we, along with the legally binding NATO, had a “responsibility to protect” the civilians of Benghazi. The end result: Four Americans were killed in the infamous 2012 embassy attack, and Libya is still split between two rival governments fighting for control a decade later.
In his first term, Trump functionally turned the de facto loss in Iraq into a victory by vanquishing the Islamic State group. But his tactical assist in Israel is arguably more important than that. In exchange for about $22 billion, Israel has helped entirely eradicate the Putin-aligned Assad regime from Syria, all but eliminated Hezbollah, and now forced Hamas into submission.
Now, look at a map of the Middle East, and consider the trajectory of the seven B-2 bombers that flew from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Iran’s mountainside nuclear facilities. Fourteen Americans had to fly over Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to get to Iran. The latter two countries were dominated by Hezbollah and Assad up until two months prior, but thanks to the Israelis, we flew with the implicit assent of half the Middle East. In less than half an hour, we took out Iran’s imminent nuclear weapons capability, denying them the ultimate trump card that would put them alongside the power and threat level attained only by the likes of Russia and China.
Not one American boot stepped on the ground. In effect, Trump won a war against a nuclear Iran without ever actually starting one, and he did it in one night.
Trump’s critics will claim that without Iran allowing experts to assess the damage, we cannot say with certainty that Iran’s nuclear weapons capability was destroyed beyond repair. But that’s actually not the point.
Even if you don’t know much about 16th-century history, the term “the defeat of the Spanish Armada” likely rings a bell. In 1588, the Spanish Empire had become the first on which the sun never set, spanning from about half of the entire Western Hemisphere to the Netherlands to the Philippines to southern Italy to vast swaths of the African coastline. At the time, England was more famous in Europe as a slightly backwater island famous for failed attempts to reclaim the French throne and suicidal political and religious instability.
And yet the little island nation destroyed roughly one-third of Spain’s entire naval fleet. Although Spain was able to rebuild rapidly, replacing most of the lost fleet within two years, the aura of inevitability of Spain’s imperial dominance was shattered. No longer was Spain centered as the power to cower to if other countries wanted to travel the seas. The physical fleet could be replaced, but Spain’s facade of invincibility was irrevocably shattered.
Since the Obama era, the Western world has regarded a nuclear Iran with the same level of inevitability and deference as it once treated imperial Spain. The question of Iran’s nuclear possessions was not a matter of if but when and how. The entire JCPOA was designed with the assumption that we could not stop Iran from developing nuclear power, so we could maybe try to trust them not to turn it into nuclear weaponry.
Trump did not care for the assumption, so he took it out. Trump did this not because he was prioritizing some sort of high-minded idealism and putting America last, but precisely because Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, and the assassin’s veto it would give a theologically suicidal power, was a threat to America.
Trump understands that, however much sympathy we have for the freedom fighters rebelling in Iran, American taxpayers do not have a “responsibility to protect” them and deploy American lives to enact regime change. We went in, bombed the threat to America, and left.
Unfortunately for the neoconservatives, every other country in the region is arguably worse suited for a Western imposition of democracy promotion. While rational self-interest may seem like a safe assumption for citizens educated in the tradition of liberal democracy, the human heart reared by religious fundamentalism does not yearn for freedom and rights over dogma. In polls by Arab Barometer, the majority of citizens of Mauritania and Jordan say they would favor a sharia dictatorship that does not hold elections, with roughly 2 in 5 citizens from Gaza, Morocco, and Iraq agreeing. Support for “benevolent” dictatorship is trending rapidly toward 50%, and frankly, as a matter of sheer self-interest, this is a rational result of a failed quarter-century of democracy promotion.
When Israel gave the Gaza Strip to Palestinians as a grand democratic experiment, the latter promptly voted Hamas into power. Even though Hamas presided over a 27% decline in GDP per capita before inviting its own obliteration with the Oct. 7 massacre, Palestinians were irrationally thrilled to trade away their material well-being in exchange for Hamas starting a war that indeed killed a tragic number of innocent Palestinian children.
By contrast, power in Saudi Arabia has been consolidated and escalated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an enlightened despot as eager as Catherine the Great to rely on lawfare and executions to quash dissenters in the name of advancing liberalism.
Meanwhile, the majority of men from Jordan, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, and Gaza say that women should not have a final say in family decision-making within the home and that men make better political leaders outside of it. Even if it were America’s job to liberate the rest of the world from its predilection for illiberalism, democracy would be one of the last ways to do so in the Middle East.
By all available reporting, we now understand that the Qataris forced Hamas to the table not in spite of Israel’s decision to assassinate the first team of negotiators residing in Doha, but because of it. Empathy, goodwill, and charity are useful in trying to liberalize a trade deal among allies. But to win a war, you must end it, and to end it through a peace deal, Israel had to prove it could do so by sheer force.
Trump does not like to begin wars, and as evidenced by his first term, he knows how to use peace through strength to prevent them from starting. And now Trump has proved he can win them. Far from starting World War III, as the naysayers from the left wing and alt-right warned, Trump made the world safer. Indeed, Trump made it that much more likely that World War III will never begin at all.
