President Trump’s twenty-point Gaza peace plan deserves credit for what it has achieved: halting active hostilities after two devastating years of war and securing the return of hostages. These are not trivial accomplishments.
But as Washington prepares to move the agreement into its second phase, we must ask whether this represents genuine strategic realism or merely another exercise in Middle Eastern magical thinking.
The plan’s architecture is comprehensive on paper—immediate ceasefire, demilitarization of Gaza, deployment of an international stabilization force, transitional governance by Palestinian technocrats, large-scale reconstruction and a conditional pathway toward Palestinian statehood.
It checks all the boxes that peace plans are supposed to check. The problem is that checking boxes is not the same as having a coherent strategy for implementation.
The reality gap
Consider the International Stabilization Force, which sits at the heart of this endeavor. The UN Security Council has authorized it. Trump has touted it. And yet, more than two months after the ceasefire, not a single nation has formally committed troops.
Countries like Indonesia and Azerbaijan, which initially expressed interest, have grown conspicuously silent. The reason is obvious: no country wants to be seen cooperating with Israeli forces while those forces remain in occupied Gaza, and no Muslim-majority nation is eager to fight Hamas on Israel’s behalf.
This brings us to the fundamental contradiction embedded in the plan: it calls for Hamas’s disarmament while providing no realistic mechanism to achieve it. You cannot demilitarize an armed movement through international fiat, particularly when the international community is unwilling to use force and Hamas shows no inclination to disarm voluntarily.
The plan’s architects seem to believe that creating organizational structures—a Board of Peace, an executive board, a technocratic government—will somehow substitute for addressing the actual power dynamics on the ground.
Governance in a vacuum
The proposed governance structure is a case study in administrative optimism. Trump will chair a Board of Peace including approximately ten Arab and Western leaders. Below that sits an executive board featuring Tony Blair, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and officials from participating countries.
Below that, a Palestinian technocratic government of 12 to 15 individuals with “management and business experience” but no affiliation with Hamas, Fatah or any other Palestinian political faction.
This sounds reasonable until you ask the obvious question: on what authority will this technocratic government govern? The Palestinian Authority, which theoretically has legitimacy in the West Bank, has been systematically weakened and lacks credibility in Gaza.
Hamas, which actually controls Gaza through force of arms, is to be bypassed entirely. And the international community, which is supposed to provide security guarantees, cannot muster a single battalion.
Governance requires not just organizational charts but actual power—the ability to make decisions, enforce rules, provide services, and maintain order. A government of technocrats, however capable, cannot govern without either popular legitimacy or the capacity to exercise force. The plan provides neither.
The statehood mirage
Perhaps most revealing is the plan’s treatment of Palestinian statehood. The agreement states that if reconstruction proceeds and the Palestinian Authority implements specific reforms, this “may” create conditions for “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
This carefully hedged language represents the minimum necessary to secure Arab and European support while giving Netanyahu and his far-right coalition the comfort that nothing concrete has actually been promised.
The result is a formula that satisfies everyone diplomatically while committing to nothing substantively. Palestinians are told their aspirations are “recognized” while being offered no timeline, no borders, no capital, and no guarantees. Israelis are told there will be no Palestinian state unless impossible preconditions are met.
And the international community congratulates itself for brokering a “comprehensive” peace plan that defers the most difficult decisions indefinitely.
Where Trump gets it right (and wrong)
There are elements of the Trump administration’s Middle East analysis that reflect genuine strategic realism. The recognition that American energy independence has diminished the region’s centrality to US interests is long overdue.
The acknowledgment that hectoring Arab monarchies about internal governance has been counterproductive shows a welcome departure from democracy-promotion orthodoxy. The understanding that regional partners must take greater responsibility for regional security aligns with a more restrained conception of American power.
But recognizing that the Middle East should not dominate American foreign policy is different from believing you can broker a sustainable peace agreement through personal relationships and transactional diplomacy.
Trump appears to think that because he has cultivated ties with Arab leaders, they will provide the troops, funding, and political cover necessary to make this plan work. He seems to believe that his willingness to threaten Hamas with “complete obliteration” will substitute for a realistic assessment of what force can and cannot achieve in Gaza.
Perils of personalized diplomacy
The plan is deeply personalized around Trump himself. He chairs the Board of Peace. His son-in-law sits on the executive board. His special envoys negotiate the details. This creates several problems.
First, it ties the agreement’s legitimacy to Trump’s political fortunes rather than to institutional frameworks that can survive political transitions. Second, it suggests that maintaining the ceasefire depends more on Trump’s personal attention and pressure than on creating self-sustaining mechanisms for conflict resolution.
Third, it reinforces the perception that this is an American-Israeli plan with Arab and European buy-in, rather than a genuinely regional initiative with American support.
The comparison to Trump’s first-term “Peace to Prosperity” plan is instructive. That plan also promised to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through economic development and regional normalization while deferring the question of statehood.
It went nowhere because it ignored the political realities that make the conflict intractable. This plan risks repeating that mistake by assuming that administrative structures and reconstruction funding can substitute for addressing questions of sovereignty, security, and power.
What success would actually require
A genuinely realistic approach to stabilizing Gaza would require several elements conspicuously absent from the current plan:
First, honest acknowledgment that Hamas cannot be wished away or administratively bypassed. Any sustainable governance arrangement will need to either incorporate Hamas into some form of power-sharing or create a Palestinian security force capable of marginalizing it—neither of which this plan addresses.
Second, serious pressure on Israel to define its long-term intentions. Is Gaza to be reoccupied? Annexed? Kept in permanent limbo? The plan assumes Israeli forces will withdraw, but provides no mechanism to ensure this happens or to define what comes next.
Third, realistic commitments from regional partners. If Egypt and Jordan are to train Palestinian security forces and contribute to an international force, they need clear terms of reference, rules of engagement, and assurances about burden-sharing. Vague promises of participation are not enough.
Fourth, meaningful progress toward addressing Palestinian aspirations for statehood. This need not mean immediate recognition, but it requires more than conditional, distant possibilities hedged with endless qualifications.
Nobel Peace Prize paradox
Several analysts have suggested that Trump’s urgency in advancing this plan is driven partly by his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize. Whether or not this is true, it points to a deeper problem: the conflation of peace agreements with actual peace.
The international community has developed an unfortunate habit of celebrating the signing of agreements as if they represent final solutions rather than fragile beginnings of difficult processes.
The Oslo Accords were celebrated as historic breakthroughs. So were the Camp David talks, the Wye River Memorandum, the Road Map, and countless other initiatives. Each represented genuine diplomatic achievement.
None produced lasting peace because none addressed the fundamental incompatibilities between the parties’ core demands. Trump’s plan risks joining this litany of celebrated failures—lauded for its comprehensiveness, undermined by its evasions.
The Path Forward
None of this is to say the ceasefire should be abandoned or the plan dismissed entirely. Halting the fighting matters. Returning hostages matters. Creating space for reconstruction matters. The question is whether the international community can use this space to build something sustainable or whether we are merely postponing the next cycle of violence.
For the plan to succeed, several things must happen. Trump must be willing to exert sustained pressure on Israel, not just Hamas, to comply with the agreement’s terms. Arab states must move beyond diplomatic statements to concrete commitments of troops, funding, and political capital.
European powers must insist on accountability mechanisms and progress benchmarks rather than allowing the agreement to drift into indefinite transition. And all parties must be honest about the gap between the plan’s aspirations and the region’s realities.
Most fundamentally, advocates of restraint in American foreign policy must resist the temptation to applaud this plan simply because it claims to represent a different approach from previous administrations.
Strategic realism means honestly assessing what American power can achieve, what regional partners are willing to undertake, and what objectives are genuinely attainable. It means recognizing that ending American military involvement in the Middle East is not the same as securing sustainable peace—and that half-measures dressed up as comprehensive plans often make things worse.
The danger is that this plan becomes yet another example of what happens when ambition exceeds strategy, when organizational complexity substitutes for clear thinking, and when the desire for a diplomatic win overrides sober assessment of what is actually possible.
For those of us who have long advocated for a more restrained American foreign policy, the challenge is to articulate an alternative that avoids both the missionary interventionism of previous decades and the transactional deal-making that mistakes agreements for solutions.
Trump’s Gaza plan is comprehensive. It is ambitious. It enjoys broad international support. What it lacks is strategic coherence—and in the Middle East, that deficit has a way of asserting itself, usually at the worst possible moment.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
