SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images
SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images
It was going to be the biggest military attack since World War II, said U.S. President Donald Trump of the joint military operation with Israel that he called off Saturday night. He said that he didn’t do it because he was asked not to by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Pakistan, as well as Iran and who knows what other countries whose national interests rarely if ever intersect. But in this case, there’s almost no daylight between those U.S. allies and our adversaries, because they share the belief that Trump doesn’t have what it takes to break Iran’s will. And the evidence—in addition to Trump’s failure to make good on the many social media threats he’s issued against Iran and its proxies—is that he’s returning to talks that have produced nothing for the White House except embarrassment.
Even Trump voters, who at the beginning of the war overwhelmingly backed his Iran campaign, are increasingly coming to believe he can’t or won’t make good on his promise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and dismantle the regime’s nuclear weapons program for good. And evidence supporting Americans’ concerns that the administration has lost discipline and focus is what he called in another Truth Social post his “historic” deal to disarm Hamas. According to Trump, the deal announced last week with the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group that crossed into Israel nearly three years ago to massacre, rape, torture, and kidnap thousands, including dozens of Americans, is “a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY.”
Hamas officials disagree. First, it’s not peace, but a truce, and it’s only for 10 to 15 years. And we get to keep our heavy weapons in Gaza, warehoused under the supervision of Palestinian—i.e., Hamas—administrators. And in the meantime, the Israelis have to stop attacks in Gaza, withdraw from Gaza, and stop targeting Hamas officials, presumably including those involved in the Oct. 7 massacre.
Trump officials told the media that “We’re not asking Israel to do anything other than agree to the 20-point plan that they agreed to initially, and so we’re very confident they will adhere to it. If they don’t, obviously, President Trump will be very, very disappointed.”
White House messaging tells adversaries and allies alike that the Pax Americana is a broken reed. Under Trump, America’s patrimony is up for grabs.
The agreement brokered in October stipulated that after the plan’s initial stage, which called for a cease-fire and for Hamas to free hostages, Hamas would disarm, and then Israel would implement a staged withdrawal from Gaza. Israel agreed to the deal, but Hamas never disarmed. And it won’t now, either.
All that’s changed is Hamas now sees an opportunity to get its cut of the pie the president is serving all its friends: If the Iranians get to toll shipping through the Strait of Hormuz while the White House acts like their chamber of commerce and raises $300 billion for Tehran to rebuild its nuclear program, why shouldn’t we let the Americans push money to us to rebuild? If the Lebanese government is asking Trump to lean on the Israelis and get them out of southern Lebanon, while no one disarms Hezbollah, why can’t we get the same deal? We’ll lay low for a while, quietly reserving the right to break the truce at a time of our choosing, and get paid, and Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt will get the Americans to pressure the Jews.
Critics of the agreement are posting on social media that the U.S. side doesn’t understand how it works in the Middle East, that the White House is getting played by Hamas. But Trump knows that Hamas has no intention of disarming. He’s regularly threatened them, too, and when they ignored his social media jeremiads, they paid no price.
He knows the Hamas deal is fake because he knew the deal Vice President JD Vance struck with Hamas’ patron Iran was fake. Vance’s memorandum of understanding was ultimately meaningless and wasn’t going to work, Trump reportedly told aides. While Trump let Vance negotiate failure, the vice president insulted Israeli officials who doubted the efficacy of the deal, and Vance’s youth brigades attacked Trump allies like Sen. Ted Cruz and podcaster Mark Levin and laid into Trump voters on social media, just because they said openly what the president whispered to his deputies.
And it’s because nothing is working right now—not negotiations, not proportional strikes that fail to achieve strategic objectives like winning the strait back and destroying Iran’s nuclear program—that the administration is looking for wins in the communications space, because in the real world it looks like America is losing.
So, if Trump can’t win the war, or won’t, he can win a peace by pocketing Hamas’ nonconcessions to pad his résumé as a dealmaker—indeed, a “PRESIDENT OF PEACE,” as U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz described the commander in chief now determined, like the loser presidents who preceded him, to waste American time, prestige, and money on “a credible political path that achieves self-determination and Statehood” for a Palestinian terror enclave.
The Hamas deal, like the administration’s arrangement with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon and Trump’s repeated and unrealized threats against Iran, is evidence that the president is in danger of losing the plot, if he hasn’t already.
The White House includes the cease-fires between Israel and Hamas and between Israel and Iran as two of the eight peace deals Trump has arranged since taking office. Some of those deals are holding up, like the one between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and some aren’t, like the agreement struck between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But none of that really matters to most Americans, nor should it. We go to the polls every four years to vote not for the candidate most likely to win cease-fires for foreigners, but rather for the one who will advance our prosperity by imposing our peace.
Rome imposed its peace on rivals, and on those who might someday cause trouble, to bring wealth and glory to Rome. Caesar Augustus turned Rome from brick to marble, but the architecture of the Pax Romana was made of steel and blood. They make a desert and call it peace, said one victim of Rome’s devastations to serve Roman interests. Our version of peace has been much gentler, but the purpose of the 80-year Pax Americana is the same: to make things better for Americans, regardless of what that might mean for foreigners.
Trump seemed to grasp this most fundamental concept of statesmanship more clearly than his most recent predecessors, from Bill Clinton through Joe Biden. He seemed to understand what peace, outside of the clichés promoted at beauty pageants, really means. “Peace through strength” is how he formulated the true nature of peace, or the only kind of peace that can matter to Americans: America’s peace.
One of the pillars of the postwar order is the Strait of Hormuz, through which the free flow of oil stabilizes international energy markets. Of late, administration validators have argued that the strait is becoming less strategically important with the construction of Saudi and UAE pipelines that bypass the strait and reach the Red Sea directly. But as those who can read a map or even a newspaper understand, the Red Sea is also vulnerable to Iran via its Red Sea proxy, the Houthis.
The strait is still crucial to America and its allies. And losing it to Iran would mean a strategic defeat for the United States, one significantly more consequential than losing in Iraq and Afghanistan. But White House messaging tells adversaries and allies alike that the Pax Americana is a broken reed. Sure, the Americans once protected the strait against a nuclear superpower—for decades—but under Trump, America’s patrimony is up for grabs.
Leaks from Trump officials that plans to take the Strait by force are complicated by the lack of interceptors tell American adversaries little about our stockpiles they haven’t already counted. Rather, they indicate that, since a massively funded military has many other ways to ensure victory against an obscurantist third-world regime like Iran’s, the president is looking for excuses to fail to win. When the administration publicly frets over the possible targeting of desalination plants in the Arab Gulf states, it is indicating that it doesn’t truly understand the stakes and sacrifices involved in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And when Trump reasons, as he did in a Truth Social post Saturday, that he is once again walking back his plans to strike Iran for “the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran,” he is saying that America’s peace, now and for future generations, is not his priority.
Trump can’t say how these ghoulish puppet shows with Iran and its proxies augment America’s wealth and glory because they don’t. Rather, they make America complicit with monsters. They put us in the same room as Hamas, whose cruelty, Trump said less than a year ago, “struck to the core of humanity itself.” He vowed then that America stands with Israel under the motto “Never again,” but now he’s leaning on a wartime ally to play along with phony deals he’s struck with Hamas and Hezbollah that deter Israel while shielding the terrorists on its borders. These aren’t the acts of a president of peace, never mind a commander in chief who understands the nature of America’s peace and the character of our adversaries who want to break it.
Lee Smith is the author of The China Matrix: The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact.
