Peace board can’t be worse than the mullah coddlers
Bibi would help us restore a sense of national self-confidence and purpose.
Trump would give us back our energy sanity, return us to a commonsense position on gender. Maybe our acknowledgments of country would get shorter.
Blair would invade Iraq. Again. As I say, it’s a toss-up.
How will they each fare in Gaza?
They are its new overlords.
Could they be any worse than the dark theocracy of Hamas?
A generation of Palestinians has grown up knowing only tunnelling and anti-Semitism. Trump at least promises them “eternal peace”.
Will his plan deliver it?
Hard to defend Blair’s Middle East strategy when he was British prime minister (1997-2007).
He was the catalyst of George W Bush’s attempted reformation of the region. He gave it the moral purpose the Texan was looking for.
This toppled bad regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the bad dudes came back.
Kabul is again run by the Taliban. Baghdad fell into Iran’s orbit.
So, the precedent for Blair as new viceroy to Palestine is not a good one.
His critics will heap further scorn on the whole venture as an exercise in neocolonialism. Others will observe the apparent incompatibility between Trumpism and Blairism, that MAGA is a reaction against the world view of Blair.
The former prime minister is a Catholic missionary.
September 11, 2001, was the opportunity to redeem mankind: “The kaleidoscope has been shaken,” he declared. “The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.”
Trump ain’t that.
As University of Birmingham international security professor Patrick Porter argues, Trump wants “domination without (or with less) commitment”. The world is to be exploited for wealth and prestige.
Blair’s godly humanitarian interventionism is anathema to this.
That the Middle East should now be subject to some sort of Blair-Trump axis seems remarkable.
That is until we remember how Blair has this charm to win US presidents to his cause – something even John Howard could not approximate.
Bush wanted a humbler foreign policy. After 9/11, Blair helped him make a 180 on that. Blair has this uncanny ability to fuse his moral fervour with American realism. Trump is his next target.
As in Iraq, this latest Anglo-American venture may not work. But again, I ask: what is the alternative?
Barack Obama never got this close to something better. His 2011 intervention “from behind” in Libya ruined that nation. His ambivalence towards Syria locked its people into a civil war. The great hope for regional peace, the first president with an Arab Muslim name, left the Middle East worse than he found it.
Joe Biden never recovered from his 2021 surrender in Afghanistan. He signed no meaningful peace deal while in office. Trump is now on his second. The Abraham Accords in 2020 did more for regional stability than any Arab-Israeli treaty since Camp David in 1978. His war on Iran a few months ago did not change that benighted regime. But neither did the mullah-coddling of his Democrat predecessors.
Biden was impotent as Hamas rape gangs rolled into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Kamala Harris laughably made Israel’s response to this horror a litmus test of its legitimacy. The rise of global anti-Semitism happened under the Biden-Harris watch.
Why not the Trump plan? His Board of Peace (on which Blair will sit) can hardly do a worse job than Western moralising under a progressive mandate has already done.
Anthony Albanese will be a long time waiting for an invitation to join it. He has consistently refused to recognise the civilisational stakes of Israel’s multi-sided war. At every turn he has chastised the region’s only liberal democracy while unwittingly appeasing its enemies at home and abroad.
Turns out Trump has a plan that does not involve the building of a regressive Islamist autocracy on Israel’s border – the almost certain consequence of Albanese’s misplaced recognition. Do the Queers for Palestine brigade imagine any Palestinian state won’t resemble a demi-hell for LGBTQI+ people?
It is less the leftism of Canberra, Paris and London, and more the realism of the Arab world that makes this new peace plan so intriguing. Eight Arab and Muslim states, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, backed Trump’s plan, saying in a statement they “welcome the role of the American President and his sincere efforts aimed at ending the war in Gaza”.
No finger-wagging from a progressive leader has brought peace this close; Penny Wongism freed not a single hostage.
Even Arab leaders who, for decades, used the plight of Palestinians to conceal their own dodgy human rights records have recognised how fundamentally Israel has rewritten the region’s geopolitics. Bibi did them all a favour by attacking Iran and its proxies. Us too – though most of our cultural elite refuse to admit it.
When Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, to bring world peace in 1918, the French prime minister exclaimed: “Meme le Bon Dieu n’en avait que dix!” (“Even the Good Lord only had 10!”) Trump has 20. That may be over-ambitious.
However, they are more thoroughly grounded in a hard-nosed realism than anything coming from the progressives at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Trump will not cajole Hamas out of the Gaza Strip. Rather, if it doesn’t down tools, free the 48 remaining hostages (living and dead), “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas”.
The US President’s Nobel Peace Prize may not be as distant as his detractors imagine.
Recall how the massed ranks of Euro-liberals gave Obama his prize in 2009 before he’d got within a whiff of any peace – and just before he condemned Libya and Syria to civil war.
Obama, the great cosmopolitan-in-chief, gave us none of the peace that the allegedly amoral isolationist, Trump, seems on the verge of. While Obama toured the Middle East apologising for Western colonialism, Trump, armed with little scholarly grasp and only an instinctive feel, has more effectively knocked heads together.
We can reflect on the irony that the President who last week was mocked by the left for criticising the UN is this week the leader who brought peace closer in Israel-Palestine than a thousand UN resolutions have done. The New York Times headlined this as “Trump and Netanyahu Tell Hamas to Accept Their Peace Plan, or Else”. But it is the “or else” that may make all the difference. We’ll see.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
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