The good, the bad, and the uncertain in the Middle East peace deal

Give credit where due, but hold applause until the difficult parts are worked out.

Remember when Donald Trump, who ran for president promising to invest in infrastructure but failed to do so in his first term, graciously congratulated President Joe Biden for getting the biggest infrastructure bill in American history through Congress in 2022?

I dug up Trump’s tweet from just a few hours after Biden’s bill passed:

“I am deeply relieved that this day has come. My administration worked relentlessly to persuade Congress to fund the repair of our nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and mass transit systems. Despite our differences, I commend President Biden and his team for building on our efforts to get this bill over the finish line. Now, with the backing of Republicans and Democrats, we can start creating jobs and rebuilding America.”

Oh, wait a second--I’m being told that this is a paraphrase of Biden’s this week congratulating Trump for the Gaza deal. Actually, despite having sought an infrastructure bill himself (or maybe because of this), Trump did everything he could to stop Congress from passing one while Biden was president; he even launched a retribution tour against the 13 Republican House members who voted for it.

So now, when Trump does something right, should we give him credit, even though he’s pathologically incapable of ever returning the favor?

My answer after Israel and Hamas accepted Trump’s peace proposal last week was yes. Despite everything, including the childish insults the White House keeps throwing at them, Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and many other leading Democrats praised him, too.

When lives are at stake, responsible people should put politics and disgust with other Trump policies aside and try to offer a fair assessment. In that spirit, here are some thoughts on this Middle East deal.

1. The Good

As Biden labored to get a Gaza ceasefire in the final days of his presidency, sources in his administration told me then-President-elect Trump helped close the deal, with a blunter warning to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu than Biden had ever delivered: the fighting had to end by Inauguration Day.

At the time, I reflected that Biden had been the best president of my lifetime at strengthening alliances with democracies against our enemies in Russia and China. But Biden did less well confronting leaders who only speak “thug” (especially in the Middle East)—too often signaling fear of what they might do if America asserted its strength, rather than making them fear what we might do. The problem with Biden, I wrote then, was that he believed in American values but not in our power. Trump, however, believed in our power but not in our values.

On those very rare occasions when Trump harnesses his instinct for power and his fluent command of “thug,” to a worthy goal, he is capable of achieving good results. That’s what we saw in this latest push for peace in the Middle East.

First, Trump dictated terms by putting an American plan on the table. Its 20 points were consistent with what the majority of Israelis want: an end to the war, the immediate release of all hostages, and disarmament of Hamas. But the plan was not what the Israeli far right or its prime minister wanted. It rules out any future Israeli occupation or annexation of Gaza, gives every Gazan the right to stay in or return to the territory, grants safe passage to Hamas members who agree to leave, and seeks to build a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood,” which it “recognise[s] as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

Second, Trump mobilized immense pressure on Hamas from regional states, including Qatar and Egypt, while telling Netanyahu he had to get on board (even muscling him to apologize to the emir of Qatar for trying to kill Hamas negotiators living in Doha). Perhaps most important, Trump accepted a partial “yes” from Hamas as sufficient to trigger implementation of the deal and to bind Israel to its terms, though Netanyahu would normally have seized on any hesitation from Hamas to resume the war. As a result, the hostages (never a Netanyahu priority) are free, and the guns, for now, are largely silent.

2. The Bad

If Trump’s bullying, refuse-to-take-no-for-an-answer style helped seal a cease fire in January, why didn’t he use the same method to keep it in place and push something like his 20-point plan through right away? The answer, I think, is that he let his attention drift, as it nearly always does—to his tariff war, to Russia, to his domestic obsessions—without empowering his tiny team (which was simultaneously busy with all these other things) to pursue a coherent deal. He mused about building golf courses in Gaza while giving Netanyahu a free hand to resume the war as he pleased.

Some have argued Trump was right to “give war a chance” in Gaza before pursuing peace. But what did the extra eight months of war achieve for Israelis or Palestinians other than more death and destruction, suffering for the hostages, and a famine that burned Israel’s reputation alongside the children it killed? At the start of 2025, the Hamas leaders who executed the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre were already dead. Its military power was already vastly diminished. The emergence of Hamas fighters from their holes in Gaza in the last few days doesn’t support the argument that Israel’s recent offensives depleted it much further. The hard truth, as most Israelis know, is that Netanyahu prolonged the war because it was politically useful for him, not because it was militarily necessary.

The release of hostages and potential peace is something to celebrate. But it could and should have come sooner.

3. The Uncertain

The part of Trump’s plan that sounds silly on its face—making him titular head of Gaza’s transitional authority—is arguably smart, because it signals to everyone, including to the Israeli government, not to undermine that authority. But this only works if Trump has the attention span to insist that Phase Two of the agreement—the part that deploys international and Palestinian security forces to Gaza and creates its governing body—is agreed and fully implemented.

But where are those forces? Where is the money to fund them, and Gaza’s reconstruction? Where is the U.N. resolution to authorize them? In a normal administration, there would have been whole teams dedicated to figuring out each of these elements as they are negotiated. The Trump administration has five guys, some part time, working on the big picture, but it gutted and disempowered the parts of the government that should have been filling in the details. If it’s going to take months to organize alternative governance for Gaza, Hamas will use that time to reconstitute, and the Israeli government will have daily pretexts to go back to fighting.

When Hamas fighters started murdering anti-Hamas Gazans over the weekend, a vigilant president would have condemned them; when Israeli officials suggested they may resume offensive operations in Gaza after the hostages are freed, an attentive president would have made clear the deal prohibits this. But Trump has done none of that as he takes his victory lap; his initial response to the Hamas violence was particularly bad—he said that the terror group just wants “to solve the problems” and that “we gave them approval for a period of time.”

Right now, it’s looking like Trump’s craving to be crowned the world’s greatest peacemaker is causing him to believe he’s already made peace, as if admitting remaining difficulties would suggest his crowning achievement is unfinished.

This attitude even seems to be spilling over into other parts of his foreign policy. Over the weekend, Trump went completely TACO with China again, backing down from threats to impose new trade sanctions in response to Beijing’s new plan to limit exports of critical minerals. Maybe he thought a blow up with Xi Jinping would rain on his coronation. Will his achievement in the Middle East encourage him to be bolder in standing up to Russian President Vladimir Putin or to treat the ugly war in Ukraine as a distraction from the Pax Donaldia?

Trump’s Nobel dreams and transparent craving for critics to “say nice things” certainly incentivize better behavior than whatever satisfaction he gets from a MAGA hate rally. So, we should be willing to dole out a few gold stars—while making clear the big prize requires a whole lot more.

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

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