In 2021, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to journalists Dmitri Muratov and Maria Ressa. Another name, more high-sounding, was on the list of candidates of the Norwegian committee: that of Donald Trump. The former US president was named for his role in signing the Abraham Accords, a series of peace treaties between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. A dazzling diplomatic advance in the Middle East, for which the Republican billionaire believes he has never been duly rewarded. It is true that the invasion of the Capitol by his supporters that same year did not help his case for the Nobel…
For his second term, Trump is resuming his role as chief diplomat in the region, with brutal methods and, for the moment, formidable efficiency. The Republican storms, insults, threatens. Then passes deals. After his victory on November 5 against Kamala Harris, he promised to “rain hell” on the Middle East if the ongoing wars had not been resolved by his return to the Oval Office on the 20 January.
As a result, on November 26, Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon, after months of bombings. It is not the Jewish state which is bowing to the elected president but Iran, sponsor of Hezbollah, fearing American fire while Tehran has suffered a series of military setbacks in recent months.
The “madman theory” makes Netanyahu bend
On the eve of his inauguration ceremony in Washington, the guns should now fall silent in the Gaza Strip. Almost a miracle, as negotiations have been slipping for fifteen months between Israel and Hamas. Joe Biden’s diplomats were tearing their hair out to make the Israeli government listen to reason, drawing red lines that Benjamin Netanyahu’s men crossed one by one, without consequence. A resounding failure of traditional diplomacy.
Then comes Donald Trump and his crazy theory dear to Richard Nixon: making his enemies – and his allies – believe that hell can really fall on them, as the president of the world’s leading power can be unpredictable. Last weekend, the president-elect dispatched his special envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff, a real estate tycoon with no diplomatic experience. After a visit to Qatar, he went to Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem on Saturday, refusing to wait until the end of Shabbat to discuss. According to local media, the Israeli Prime Minister emerged shaken from the interview. Before signing, six days later, a peace that he had refused for months. Even Biden’s State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, acknowledged the “absolutely key” role played by the Trump team in the final phase of the negotiations.
“The pressure from the future Trump administration on Netanyahu was the most decisive element in reaching this agreement, underlines Hugh Lovatt, Middle East specialist at the European Council on International Relations. Many Israelis accuse Netanyahu of having deliberately undermined ceasefire negotiations in the past, in an attempt to avoid a political crisis with its far-right coalition partners.” Israeli fundamentalist ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are once again threatening to leave the government if the agreement with Hamas comes into force. But Netanyahu is more afraid of Trump than of this infernal duo. For now.
The real test of this Trumpian diplomacy will take place in 42 days, at the end of the first phase of the agreement, which provides for the release of thirty-three hostages in the Gaza Strip against that of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Far-right Israeli ministers are urging Netanyahu never to enter phase 2, which envisages a total withdrawal of IDF troops from the Palestinian enclave. The Israeli Prime Minister will then have to choose between maintaining his government and the anger of Trump, hyperpopular in Israel since he decided to install the United States embassy in Jerusalem in 2018. An impasse which could precipitate new elections within the Jewish state.
Trump’s other possible “mega deals” in the Middle East
However, this is only the beginning. With his new diplomatic team, Donald Trump intends to reshape the Middle East in his own hands. After peace in the Gaza Strip, he hopes to conclude a “mega deal” in the vein of the Abraham Accords, with peace agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a country that protects Islam’s holy sites. “This ceasefire agreement shows that only the Trump administration has sufficient leverage to force Israel to make necessary compromises,” said Hugh Lovatt. Together, Europeans and Arab states should convince Trump that ending the ceasefire Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by granting full self-determination and independence to the Palestinians, constitutes the only path towards normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.”
Here too, Trump will have to twist the arm of the current Israeli government, which refuses any progress towards a Palestinian state. Conversely, far-right settler Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance, hopes that the Republican president will recognize the Israeli annexation of entire sections of the West Bank. During his first term, the New York billionaire recognized the annexation of the Golan by the Jewish state. A colony there now bears his name.
Netanyahu also wants to rely on Trump to resolve the Iranian threat. In 2024, Tehran has multiplied its military and strategic defeats, seeing its allies swept away in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria. The Iranian “axis of resistance” is looking gloomy, and Israel intends to take advantage of it. The teams of the next American president have leaked his possible decisions in this matter to the press, including the most extreme: bombing Iranian nuclear sites, even if it means risking all-out war.
However, the author of the bestseller The art of negotiation (The art of the deal, published in 1987) could be tempted to reach a historic agreement with the Iranian regime. After all, he is the president who threatened to raze Pyongyang to the ground before shaking hands with Kim Jong-un on the North Korean border. “The return of Trump could be either a cataclysm or a golden opportunity for the Islamic Republic, judges Vali Nasr, former advisor to the US State Department and specialist on Iran at Johns Hopkins University. It is possible that he is relaunching his policy of maximum pressure, both economic and military, but Trump has always shown himself interested in a deal with Iran. He is not like other American presidents who refuse to speak to their enemies or to them. terrorists He had made a deal. with the Taliban…”
In his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump the diplomat may not have finished surprising us. On the condition of not invading Canada or Greenland, as he has already threatened to do…
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