After Trump’s Triumph
Security is key and we're not dealing with the Boy Scouts.
Earlier this evening I was on Fox News to discuss the remarkable breakthrough by President Trump, the Israelis, and our Arab partners in the Middle East. Please see above for linked video and below for talking points.
Trump has achieved a breakthrough that the foreign policy experts said was impossible. This presidential-level peacemaking is remarkable. No one has ever seen anything like it.
Expect imperfection. The deal is complicated, has 20 points, with a lot of details to be worked out. That doesn’t detract from the fact this is a historic breakthrough. The framework is good even if implementation will take some improvisation and flexibility.
Don’t be afraid of turbulence and what the anti-U.S. mainstream media will characterize as failure. As Simple Minds said, “It’s my feeling we’ll win in the end.”
Security is crucial and underemphasized in the agreement and talk of the day. The question is not if but when Hamas will break the agreement. Like Chicoms, you can tell when Hamasistas are lying: their lips are moving.
There is no doubt that the agreement requires Hamas to disarm and it also requires that Gaza be a “deradicalized, terror-free zone.” We need to accept the fact that this means doing what Egypt and the Gulf states do: aggressively repress political Islam, the ideology of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood (which Arab states rightly see as one and the same).
Who will establish peace? As a former Reagan and Trump official observed to me, Hamas is still killing people right now: fellow Arabs who disapprove of Hamas tyranny. Who will police these animals? They will be augmented by the 1,000 terrorists Israel had to release to get 20 hostages back.
Will a European security force be willing to shoot back at Hamas? Are the French or Swedes in their fancy uniforms up to the task? Will they be willing to chuck nonviolent Hamas members and other Islamists who advocate clerical rule or Islamofascism into jail? Will they shoot rock-throwers? Will they use KGB methods if their boys are kidnapped by Hamas? (Case study: “Kidnapped Soviets Released Through Castration.”)
The next big move has to come from Gulf state Arabs, including a supposedly reformed Qatar. They are the most likely source of funds for rebuilding.
Saudi Crown Prince MBS is rumored to be coming to Washington next month. Hopefully Riyadh will pony up sooner than that, and then the visit can be the basis for something big. Maybe too big.
This policing of Gaza is probably best left to Arab states, especially Egyptians. The 20-point plan more or less leaves Trump as the ultimate governing authority in transitional Gaza (he is chairman of an oversight board, but we know he will wear the pants in that arrangement).
I’m not sure how Tony Blair got named in the peace plan, but losers like him and many of our national security establishment bureaucrats are clueless about political Islam. That is one reason we failed in Iraq. Blair is also hated in his own country, with approval below 20% and disapproval above 50%. He was a winner in the 1990s when he took Labor to the right and won several elections, but he has since become a loser.
None of this would have been possible without Trump reversing Biden-era footsie with Iran and ignoring Europeans, who are pointless. Bombing Iran was critical. So was Israel’s bombing of double-dealing Qatar. We need to keep maximum pressure on Iran.
Trump gave an off-ramp to double-dealing Qatar that it wisely accepted. As a friend on the Hill noted, “Qataris are not reformed because they haven’t had the generational/cultural change that the other Arab states have had. And it would’ve been nice if they could’ve done this a whole lot sooner; we’d have a lot fewer dead Palestinians that they lamented and we wouldn’t have their defense minister saying ‘we are Hamas,’ and we would obviously have the hostages back sooner.”
It may be necessary in the future for Israel to bomb Qatar again just as it may be necessary to strike Iran if it acts up, or deal aggressively with insurgents or agitators in Gaza. Such actions should be seen not as setbacks, but as growing pains and waypoints for a new Middle East. (If Israel strikes Qatar again, we should join them and waste Al Jazeera, which cheered on GI-killing insurgents in Iraq—a poor choice that will be repaid sooner or later. JDAMs over Doha…)
For the longest time, the establishment experts said you had to create a Palestinian state before the problems of the Middle East (e.g., Iran) could be fixed. Trump showed that getting tough on Iran and its proxies is actually what created the conditions to maybe solve the Palestinian problem.
Some Democrat pooh-bahs have been boo-hoo or snide about these momentous developments. Antony Blinken, who was dotard Joe Biden’s secretary of state, said it was “good that President Trump adopted and built on the plan the Biden administration developed.” Actually, dotard Biden played footsie with Iran and declared in 2019 that he wanted to make Saudi Arabia “the pariah that they are.”
Half of the Democrat Party is sympathetic to Hamas and the other half are delusional like Blinken, perhaps having taken more acetaminophen than RFK would advise and becoming mildly retarded. The world is forging ahead with a future that does not concern them.
