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| Palestinians gather around a fire, amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on Feb. 13. (Mahmoud Issa/Reuters) |
| President Donald Trump had two encounters this week that roiled global politics: A White House meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II and a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the former, Trump doubled down on a plan to take hold of the Gaza Strip while compelling 2 million plus Palestinians to leave, likely for permanent exile in neighboring Egypt and Jordan. The proposal is a nonstarter for the monarch and for virtually every government in the Middle East outside Israel. But Jordan counts on significant annual aid from the United States and Abdullah politely sat alongside Trump as the latter reminded the world of the possibility of that assistance being shut off. After their meeting, the Jordanian king issued a statement rejecting Palestinian “displacement.” Arab officials are putting together a different proposal for the administration and reconstruction of Gaza that will allow its population to remain. The next day, Trump startled allies in Europe with a call to Putin. The overture broke years of silence between the White House and the Kremlin, and preceded news of a potential U.S.-Russia summit facilitated by Saudi Arabia — raising the possibility of a deal hatched without either Ukrainians or any other Europeans at the table. In subsequent comments, Trump insisted his transatlantic interlocutors would not be sidelined, but also added that he wanted Russia back in diplomatic formats like the Group of Seven nations (no longer the Group of Eight since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014). European officials feared Trump and his lieutenants, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was in meetings on the continent, were openly giving away concessions to the Kremlin before meaningful negotiations. Both Hegseth and Trump have all but rejected the idea of Ukraine joining NATO, while the former said Ukraine would not realistically regain much of its territory lost to Russia.
Ukraine since Russia’s full-fledged invasion in 2022 has been locked in an existential fight for survival. Kyiv won’t accept foreign powers forcing concessions on it and is wary of Trump reducing Ukraine’s leverage in a hypothetical deal with Russia. “Your politicians have lost their dignity,” a Ukrainian military officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told my colleagues. “Ukraine’s betrayal after Afghanistan will have catastrophic consequences for America’s perception in the world,” he said, referring to the Taliban takeover that came after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump doesn’t seem worried about such perceptions, and has cast himself as an unorthodox peacemaker willing to have discussions and create solutions others could not. He also seems squishy on Ukraine’s sovereignty, suggesting that the country’s wealth of critical minerals should be reserved for the United States in exchange for security guarantees. In a TV interview earlier this week, he said there was a chance that Ukraine “may be Russian someday.” At a White House presser Thursday evening, Trump didn’t answer a journalist’s question about what concessions Russia should itself make in a peace deal, but reiterated his opposition to Ukraine joining NATO. The language coming out of Washington has frustrated officials in Europe. “It’s appeasement. It has never worked,” E.U. foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said. “It is clear that any deal behind our backs will not work. Any agreement will need also Ukraine and Europe being part of it.” “Trump always speaks about ‘peace through strength,’ and that is precisely the right approach with the Russians,” a senior European official told the Wall Street Journal. “But here we have not really seen the strength part yet.”
When it comes Gaza, Trump is even more dismissive. He believes the United States would simply assume responsibility for the territory, a “demolition site,” and make it into the “Riviera” of the Middle East, no matter the expulsion of its inhabitants. “We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it,” Trump said of Gaza, while scoffing at any question of paying for it — “there’s nothing to buy,” he told reporters. Palestinians do not see their homeland as “nothing.” Even amid the devastation of their homes, Gaza’s traumatized population does not want to lose its rights to the land. Tensions are fraying the fragile ceasefire between Israel and militant group Hamas, raising the prospect of a resumption of Israel’s bombardments that have already flattened most of the territory’s civilian infrastructure and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. “Palestinians do not need President Trump to talk about Gaza as if it were an empty hotel room that needs redesigning,” wrote Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet from Gaza, in the New Yorker. He pointed to the vast humanitarian need in the territory — assistance which Israel, despite ceasefire commitments, may still be restricting — and the urgent need to start clearing tons of debris. “The people who shape this future need to be us Palestinians,” he added, “not the people who made Gaza look like a demolition site, or who now seem to think that an entire people should be demolished, too.” Diplomats across the Arab world have echoed this position, as have European politicians and U.N. officials. “It’s strange at the moment to be in a period when statecraft seems to have been replaced by real estate craft,” Tom Fletcher, the United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, said of Trump’s plan in an interview Sunday after a tour of Gaza. “I was asking a lot of people what they thought, and every single one of them said, ‘We’re not going anywhere. We’ll rebuild our homes again and again and again as we always have done.’” Trump’s plans for Gaza are not just about the fancies of a real estate tycoon. His apparent belief that Gaza can be emptied of its population is celebrated by the Israeli right, as prominent politicians have for months eyed the occupation and settlement of Gaza, as well as the expulsion of its Palestinian inhabitants. It “rewards the policies of the Israel government that is the most extremist, right-wing in the history of the Israeli state,” Aaron David Miller, a veteran former U.S. diplomat who worked for decades on Israeli-Palestinian issues, told my colleague Karen DeYoung. And if the political aspirations of Palestinians are irrelevant to Trump, so too are the political anxieties of Ukrainians — much to the pleasure of those in the Kremlin’s inner circle. “We are entering a new 21st century, and it’s not going to look like the 20th,” Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian tycoon who is under U.S. Treasury sanctions for his role financing pro-Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine, told my colleagues. “We are returning to the era of traditional big states, great powers and to a balance of interests.” | ||||||||||