It was the winningest win of them all for the winner of all winners.
He took command and now “bestrides the world scene like no other,” gushed Walter Russell Mead. “Only Mr. Trump could have made this happen … No other living politician could have reassured Israel, threatened Hamas and patched together a broad Arab coalition the way he has done.” He’s “the president we’ve been waiting for,” added Pulitzer winner Kathleen Parker this morning.
My old friend Niall Ferguson paid tribute to Trump’s “imaginative 20-point plan, set to transform the Middle East” — just one of so many “transformational results at home and abroad” since Trump took office. At the Free Press, Amit Segal also gurgled:
I’ve been covering the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for 25 years. Never before have I seen it in such a state of ecstasy as when the president of the United States ascended the podium Monday … Here, the United States of America and the State of Israel are celebrating victory at the end of a two-year war, together.
Yes, that was a piece of journalism in America, not something that sounds like it might have been originally written in North Korea. Konstantin Kisin merely decided the hostage deal meant that “it’s time for people with Trump Derangement Syndrome to admit they were wrong.”
In one sense, of course, jubilation is entirely justified. The release of the Israeli hostages (no women tellingly and appallingly among them) is an unalloyed wonderful thing. I can’t imagine what these poor souls have gone through, or what was done to them solely because they are Jews. The return of the remains of the rest is also positive, of course, if it transpires, however grim the reality. The return of aid, if it truly gets under way, will be literally lifesaving — which even the Queers for Palestine must be able to celebrate. No one should begrudge a US president credit for helping make that happen. I sure don’t. And pausing this conflict is a real, if modest, gain.
But the $64,000 question, of course, is how and why this happened now rather than before. After all, Hamas offered a similar hostage deal for a ceasefire in April this year and October last year, and Netanyahu said no, insisting that Hamas needed to be totally destroyed and brought to “unconditional surrender” — or another 10/7 was inevitable. So what changed, after so little did?
It’s not as if Netanyahu had a genuine change of heart. He continued to insist after two years of devastation that Hamas still posed a mortal threat, and if the handful of Hamas teenagers still left fighting with other gangs in Gaza were not completely obliterated, another 10/7 was inevitable.
The latest Gaza offensive was still taking place, remember, after the Hamas leadership had been largely wiped out, after the entire Gaza strip, including Rafah, had been made uninhabitable, after Hezbollah had been taken out of the game, after Iran had been attacked and its nuclear threat dented, after hundreds of thousands of civilians had been displaced not once, not twice, but multiple times, after 70,000 lay dead, including many thousands of children, and after Gaza had been brought to the verge of famine. Still not enough, we were told. Hamas was like the armless, legless Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail — and yet somehow still lethal.
So if none of those things had caused Israel to stop its relentless assault on Gaza and its population, what had?
And then you see it. The critical thing that happened — the thing that changed the entire dynamic — is that Netanyahu finally got so cocky last month he decided to bomb Qatar. Israel bombs other countries all the time at will, of course, but the concept of actually bombing Hamas diplomats while in negotiation must have been particularly irresistible: the mother of all fuck-yous to international law.
The only trouble was that this time, Bibi had bombed Trump’s Qatari sugar-daddies — the ones who’d just bribed the fathomlessly corrupt president with a giant 747 and were busy funneling billions into Jared’s bank account. Worse than that: Bibi hadn’t even bothered to tell the US in advance. So Trump was totally blindsided and humiliated.
Think about that for a moment: the prime minister of a foreign country believed he could bomb diplomats of a US ally and military base without telling the US in advance and get away with it. This staggering Israel exception to every rule is so routine we barely even notice it anymore. But in this case, the bombing made Trump seem less powerful than Netanyahu.
This extraordinary snub led to the extraordinary photo atop this column. It depicts Trump holding the phone as Netanyahu is shown reading a written “I’m very, very sorry” script to the Qataris, like a kid being disciplined by a furious dad and made to apologize to someone he’d wronged. Trump, his ego deeply slighted, did more than that. To compensate for Israel’s offense, he issued a security guarantee to Qatar that ensured that if Israel tried that shit again, the US would have Qatar’s back, not Israel’s, and greenlit a long-planned Qatari facility at an Air Force base in Idaho — making Laura Loomer’s strange airbrushed head explode.
Trump did something else as well: finally pissed off enough, he told Arab leaders that if they backed his Gaza deal, the US would prevent Israel from formally annexing the West Bank, despite the vicious campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing Netanyahu was unleashing there.
In other words, Trump finally did what no president had done for a very, very long time: he put real pressure on Israel. His rage after the Qatar bombing was the catalyst. And don’t just take my word for it. A senior White House source told Politico:
The president became much more pointed and direct, and there was a heightened urgency for a peace agreement after the Doha strike. It allowed the president to put maximum pressure on Israel, which he did. And it really did force Israel into a position to submit to peace.
He “forced” Bibi to “submit”. Imagine Politico running a piece where Ben Rhodes leaked that Obama had “forced” Bibi to “submit”. The neocons would have gone nuts. But Trump did it — and they kept their silence.
You want to know the secret genius of Trump’s Gaza deal? It’s America First. A US president finally put the US interests ahead of Israel’s, and didn’t blink. Fuck yeah.
Trump’s wasn’t the only pressure on Israel to get a grip, of course. It helped immensely that Israel was losing other key Western allies, like the UK and Germany, as the war continued; that the image of Israel was permanently tainted as murderous for an entire generation across the globe; that the IDF and much of the country was exhausted anyway; and the war was continuing to appease the far right and keep Bibi out of jail. Trump urged a pardon for Netanyahu in the Knesset, which also helped. But none of that would have mattered, it seems to me, if Bibi hadn’t finally humiliated the US in Qatar so spectacularly. Israeli hubris ended the Gaza war.
Except it may not actually end. The critical steps in “Phase 2” aren’t close to taking place. The deal may yet break down even over Hamas’ apparent inability to locate all the dead hostages — just step 1 of 21 ever-more unlikely ones. The IDF is still in most of Gaza, and the process of Hamas’ fighters getting amnesty if they “decommission” their arms — with a phased and reversible IDF “withdrawal” in return — is still very hard to envision. That “technocratic” Palestinian authority that will govern the place? Well, we’ll see, won’t we?
We can, of course, hope. But moving past this ceasefire will require persistent statesmanship — and it’s not clear how focused Trump will be now he’s had his televised “triumph”; and Tony Blair isn’t exactly Metternich either, whatever he’d like you to believe. But it is a relief, to me at least, that even Trump has declared he will not permit Israel to annex the West Bank, or expel Palestinians from Gaza, or deny Palestinians the right to return to Gaza if they leave. That’s a serious gain. Although it is merely a continuation of America’s longstanding position, it suggests that the US, even under Trump, is not where the Israeli right is.
And maybe Trump and future presidents will begin to see the potential benefits of doing the thing that actually made this possible: treating Israel as a normal ally, whose interests matter but should never eclipse that of the superpower.
For the sake of the US, of course. But also for the sake of Israel.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: Charles Murray talking through a range of existential questions; reader dissents over the authoritarian threat; listener dissents over the pods with Michael Wolff and Katie Herzog; eight notable quotes from the week in news, including two Yglesias Awards; 22 posts on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of Hitchens humor; a lovely window from Vietnam; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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Back On The Dishcast: Charles Murray
Charles is a writer, social scientist, and longtime friend. He currently holds the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His many books include Losing Ground, The Bell Curve (co-authored with Richard Herrnstein), Coming Apart, Facing Reality, and Human Diversity (which we discussed on the Dishcast in 2021). His new book is Taking Religion Seriously. If you think you know who Charles is from the way the MSM has described him for years, this conversation may surprise.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how science has revived old ideas of God over the past several decades, and the connection between psychedelics and agape. (Charles is the second guest we’ve had who has come out as an LSD experimenter on the show; Rod Dreher was the other one.) That link also takes you to commentary on our episodes with Michael Wolff on Trump’s psyche and Katie Herzog on addiction. We also air a bunch of reader discussion on Trump’s authoritarianism, trans issues, and Bari’s move to CBS.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Karen Hao on artificial intelligence, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, David Ignatius on the Trump effect globally, Mark Halperin on the domestic front, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
You make clear how much of Trump’s agenda you’re on board with, at least in principle. Given “woke capture,” you’ve come around to feeling that government should “have a say in how universities decide to run themselves.” Your word for “what’s happening now” is “accountability.” Not stopping an inch short of victim-blaming, the institutions Trump is attacking “did most of the damage to themselves.”
You also specifically endorse the talk afoot about measures to ensure “intellectual and ideological diversity.” But how to ensure ideological diversity without an ideological test? It’s one you are apparently okay to have the government enforce. But you do offer a modified proposal of your own: that every humanities department “have at least one professor not in the critical theory cult.” I wonder just how such a threshold will be enforced in faculty hiring policy. Will it be okay if prospective hires have read Hegel — provided they have not read Horkheimer?
Read my responses to that dissent and three others here. More criticism is over on the pod page. As always, please keep it coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And follow more Dish discussion in my Notes feed.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the protests in Portland, the AI bubble, and tech loneliness. Below is one example, followed by a new podcast:
Josh Barro just launched a new pod with Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s part of the entry last week from the Alaskan super-sleuth who provides an ecotourism report each week:
Doug and Kristine Tompkins made fortunes founding or growing the outdoor retail brands The North Face, Esprit, and Patagonia from their self-described dirtbag climbing and skiing roots. They fell in love with Chile, and about 30 years ago they began to buy and protect chunks of its wild areas. It would probably take many nights of campfire discussion to disentangle the mix of dopamine-chasing adventurism, business acumen, deep ecology philosophy, American conceit, and narcissism that motivated their life’s trajectory, but if you were forced to make a poster of billionaires who have brought actual positive change to our post-capitalist morass, they might be candidates.
Like compatriots Rick Ridgeway and Yvon Chouinard, these exceptional people have lived bold outdoor lives, developed or nurtured eco-related ideals in how they travelled or the gear they made, and still been indisputably good at business. They appear self-aware that much of their wealth comes from stuff people bought more for status and fashion than technical needs, but since we all wear a uniform of one sort or another, it might as well be a jacket made from recycled plastics that will last three decades and keep you warm in snotty weather. Better yet if it costs more … heh.
The Tompkins’ conservation philanthropy — donating over two million acres to Chile’s National Park system — is equally impressive, and separates them from many in their class. A testimonial film about their lives has been portrayed in National Geographic’s Wild Life, which came out in 2023:
Unfortunately, Doug Tompkins died kayaking on a Chilean lake in 2015 when rudder failure capsized his boat in a storm with 40 knot winds and six foot waves. But his capable widow (former CEO of Patagonia) has continued their quest through their foundation.
