Can Trump bring peace to Gaza?

TEL AVIV: US President Donald Trump is probably not even aware of John Maynard Keynes’s 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which cautioned that the harsh demands imposed on Germany after World War I – with their “unjust and unworkable economic basis” – would destabilize all of Europe. But Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan reflects one of Keynes’s most important insights, embodied by the warning that the “perils of the future lay not in frontiers and sovereignties, but in food, coal, and transport.”

Gaza has never been central to discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Trump views the enclave as the Archimedean point from which he can not only expand his family’s business empire – a key motivation behind much of his foreign policy – but also consolidate US alliances in the Middle East and advance a grand international infrastructure program capable of countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

These ambitions long preceded the Gaza war. In 2017, during his first presidency, Trump reached an agreement with Japan to offer “high-quality infrastructure investment alternatives in the Indo-Pacific region,” and established a partnership aimed at promoting universal access to affordable and reliable energy in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. “In a globalized world,” then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis stated, “there are many belts and many roads, and no one nation should put itself into a position of dictating ‘One Belt, One Road.’”

Former US President Joe Biden took up the infrastructure mantle in 2022, when he established the I2U2 Group with India, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates to focus on “joint investments and new initiatives in water, energy, transportation, space, health, food security, and technology.” The following year, the Biden administration – along with France, Germany, India, Italy, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the European Union – committed to developing a new India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), aimed at stimulating economic growth and development through enhanced connectivity and integration.

IMEC builds on the 2018 “Railways for Regional Peace” project, which would connect Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia via high-speed rail. It adds a maritime route from India to the Persian Gulf, and pipelines for exporting gas, mainly green hydrogen, from India and the Gulf countries to Europe. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it, IMEC is more than “just a railway or a cable”; it is a “green and digital bridge across continents and civilizations.”

But realizing the IMEC vision will be no easy feat. For starters, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are strategic trade partners of China, and part of the BRI. The UAE also joined the China-led BRICS grouping in 2024, and Saudi Arabia has been weighing membership since being invited to join in 2023. Trump now must convince them to distance themselves from China’s Middle East infrastructure plans, and commit instead to the US-backed strategy.

More fundamentally, progress on connectivity requires a stable Middle East – and that presupposes a peaceful and reconstructed Gaza. So, unlike US President Woodrow Wilson’s interwar administration – which succumbed to domestic isolationist pressures and withdrew from peace-building in Europe, ultimately leading to another conflagration – Trump is willing to take heat from his MAGA base for being too focused on foreign affairs. He has leveraged American power to push recalcitrant regional players toward a peace deal that reflects Keynes’s wisdom.

Trump’s peace plan includes not only a permanent ceasefire, the deployment of a temporary International Stabilization Force (with a United Nations mandate), and the disarmament of Hamas, but also the creation of a transitional Palestinian civil administration and Gaza’s reconstruction and economic development. It states that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza, and that no Palestinians will be forced to leave the enclave.

While Trump’s plan does not lay out a path toward Palestinian statehood, it does recognize statehood as “the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” Once Gaza is “redeveloped,” and the Palestinian Authority is reformed, the “conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway” toward this goal. Persuading Israel’s far-right government to approve, even in principle, a plan that includes any mention of Palestinian statehood is a notable feat.

But this is just the beginning. The plan is more outline than blueprint, and its lack of clarity on how its various stages would be navigated leaves plenty of room for divergent interpretations by the parties. Already, Hamas has said that it would not relinquish its weapons, and both Hamas and Israel are likely to resist many other elements of the plan. The ceasefire remains tenuous. Moreover, Trump’s regional alliance is riven by deep ideological and strategic divisions: The Qatar-Turkey axis is too friendly to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood for the Saudi-Emirati-Israeli bloc. It also remains to be seen how Egypt would stomach a Turkish role in Gaza.

Nonetheless, Trump has set the stage for a new Middle East peace, based on economic integration and infrastructure connectivity. An expansion of the Abraham Accords – Israel’s bilateral agreements establishing diplomatic relations with four Arab countries (Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the UAE) – may now be in the offing.

To improve the chances of success, Trump has taken a number of steps to increase his administration’s leverage over regional actors, including signing an arms deal with Saudi Arabia and a security pact with Qatar, and indicating that he may lift the ban on F-35 sales to Turkey. For Egypt, the prospect of securing major contracts in Gaza’s reconstruction is highly appealing. Trump has even brought Syria into America’s orbit, while Turkish and US companies gear up for the reconstruction bonanza.

Perhaps most important, Trump has made it clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs him, even going so far as to send a letter to Israel’s president requesting a full pardon for Netanyahu in his ongoing corruption trial. Internationally isolated, wholly dependent on US military and political support, and facing a citizenry eager for an end to Israel’s longest war, Netanyahu has little choice but to bend to Trump’s will. Whether the Trump peace plan’s watered-down vision of Palestinian statehood coincides with that of the Arab side is another matter.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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