John E. Herbst
As the cease-fire his administration brokered between Israel and Hamas went into effect last week, US President Donald Trump told the Israeli Knesset that next he wanted “to get Russia done.”
The Israel-Hamas war and the Russia-Ukraine war are obviously different in many important ways. Having served as a US diplomat both in Israel and Ukraine, I know the regions where these conflicts take place have much that makes them distinct. Nonetheless, there are several important lessons from Trump’s recent triumph in the Middle East that might apply to ending the war in Europe.
What worked in the Middle East
Specifically, Trump’s engineering of a deal between Israel and Hamas was a tour de force achieved through military and diplomatic pressure. The US president utilized both brilliantly.
The military pressure came mainly from Israel but also from the United States. Israel’s full-bore assault on Gaza after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack immediately put Hamas on the defensive. But as often happens when Israel responds to a Palestinian attack with major force, this led to major international pressure on Israel to ease up. The Trump administration largely—but not entirely—worked to shield Israel from that pressure, which meant that Israel kept the heat on Hamas.
Israel further strengthened its position with its ingenious operations against the leadership and soldiers of Hezbollah, dealing a near-fatal blow to Iran’s principal instrument of influence in Lebanon. US and Israeli strikes against the Houthis also weakened Iran’s surrogate in Yemen. Finally, the Israeli and US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities in June significantly set back its nuclear program. As a result of these operations, Israel and the United States greatly weakened Iran, Hamas’s major sponsor and principal source of arms.
But that was not Hamas’s only problem. Trump’s diplomacy applied additional pressure on the group. He leveraged the close relationships he has cultivated with Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt to push Hamas to accept his terms for peace, something they were more willing to do because Trump’s twenty-point peace proposal left open the prospect of an independent Palestinian state. Trump also applied diplomatic pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the terms, despite the plan’s deep unpopularity with the far-right members of his coalition.
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