Trump didn’t seek a cessation of hostilities in Gaza at Israel’s expense.
The New York Post describes the product that U.S. and Russian officials have been “secretly” negotiating amid the White House’s efforts to put an end to Moscow’s nearly four-year war of conquest in Ukraine. The concept is “inspired by President Trump’s 20-point road map for ending the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.” If so, the Trump administration must be deeply confused by its own successes in the Middle East.
The ceasefire framework that was first reported by Axios’s Barak Ravid appears to be the result of bilateral negotiations between Trump’s envoys and emissaries of the Kremlin, cutting Ukraine out of the loop in talks over its own fate. Indeed, as Vladimir Putin cut out Kirill Dmitriev told Axios, “We feel the Russian position is really being heard.”
Ravid’s reporting indicates that the outlines of the 28-point plan codify “the principles” to which Trump and Putin agreed at the Anchorage summit in Alaska this summer — a summit that produced no breakthroughs and resulted only in the president’s visible disappointment.
In fact, whatever emerges from this process is certain to be even worse for Ukraine than the product that the summit risked producing. The deal revives what was previously reported as a Witkoff initiative in which Ukraine would be forced to surrender its land and deliver its people into Russian subjugation — even parts of Ukraine that Russia could not take by force. That includes highly defensible territory in the Donbass that would serve as a launching pad for a third Russian attempt to conquer Ukraine.
“It’s actually a much broader framework,” Kirill mused. In his words, the agreement is “basically saying, ‘How do we really bring, finally, lasting security to Europe, not just Ukraine.’” Chilling stuff.
“This new peace plan has seemingly had no direct input from Ukraine, nor from America’s allies in Europe,” Politico reported. Still, the Trump White House intends to put the terms to which the Kremlin has agreed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “as a fait accompli.”
You know the score by now. If Kyiv doesn’t take it, then Zelensky, not the land-hungry Russian dictator currently ordering the execution of innumerable crimes against civilization, will once again find himself the bad guy in this story.
How this sequence of events remotely resembles the triumph the Trump administration helped engineer in the Middle East this summer is a mystery.
Steve Witkoff and his deputies should avail themselves of the opportunity to review Donald Trump’s October speech before the Knesset. In it, the president described how Hamas was finally brought to heel. That victory was not achieved by putting the screws to Benjamin Netanyahu, as so many pathological Israel critics allege. Just the opposite, in fact: Israel was unleashed.
The IDF was engaged in final ground operations inside Gaza City when Hamas finally relented, having already pacified the Gaza Envelope and the cities surrounding the Gazan capital. Not only were Israeli forces tightening the noose around Hamas in Gaza, Jerusalem was also taking the fight to the terrorist group’s abettors and sponsors. The Israeli Air Force strike on a Doha safehouse harboring the very Hamas chiefs Qatar had supposedly expelled late last year was a tactical failure. Hamas’s most senior leaders survived. It was, however, a strategic success. The strike compelled Hamas’s sponsors in Qatar and Turkey to give up the ghost. They joined Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates in endorsing Trump’s peace plan shortly after.
But that consensus would have been impossible, in Trump’s estimation, if Hamas’s benefactors in Iran retained their capacity to terrorize the region with the looming threat of a nuclear breakout. In Trump’s estimation, “the other Arab and Muslim nations really wouldn’t feel comfortable making the deal that we have now if Iran had that nuclear weapon that they were about two months away from having.”
The president executed a simple formula for peace, one that eluded his Biden-era predecessors. As we put it in our editorial, it was to “defeat Israel’s enemies first and make peace with them second.” If the reporting around this new peace plan for Europe reflects the thinking in the White House, they’ve gotten the necessary sequence of events backwards. Appeasing the aggressor does not beget peace. At most, it buys you a temporary reprieve with worse yet to come.
Trump didn’t seek a cessation of hostilities in Gaza at Israel’s expense. He knew such a peace plan would not be worth the paper on which it is written. Hopefully, the president is dissuaded from giving up on his own formula for peace in deference to this administration’s inexplicable and utterly misplaced respect for the murderous despot in the Kremlin.