Donald Trump is tearing down the barriers that for decades have blocked the global spread of nuclear weapons. In pursuit of an alliance with Russia, he is recreating the nightmare nuclear scenarios that haunted America in the 1950s and 1960s, and that decades of bipartisan American policy prevented from coming to life.
In the 21st century American Presidents have largely viewed the problem of new nuclear weapons as a “rogue state” problem. During the War on Terror, US policy worked to prevent terrorists or countries seen by the US as sympathetic to terror groups, specifically Iraq, Libya, Iran, and North Korea, from getting the Bomb.
Now, Trump’s efforts to please Putin by betraying Ukraine and undercutting America’s commitment to defend Europe threaten to drag the world back to the dangerous nuclear anarchy of the 1950s and 1960s when dozens of countries considered getting the most powerful weapons humankind has ever invented.
Keeping Americans in, Russians out, Proliferation managed
The NATO treaty signed in Washington 76 years ago this April 4th, was, in part, a treaty to stop the spread of these weapons. The United States was then the only country in the world with atomic bombs. President Harry Truman assured the European allies that he would use all of America’s military might to protect them from any attack from the Soviet Union. They did not have to get their own atomic bombs.
This extended deterrence was not, by itself, convincing enough for all NATO members. The United Kingdom got its own nuclear arsenal in 1952 as did France in 1960 despite the security assurances. Another framework was needed: the arms control and disarmament commitments embodied in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), negotiated in 1968 and ratified by the Senate under Richard Nixon in 1970.
That treaty and the associated mechanisms provided the diplomatic and legal framework that assured countries that if they choose not to get nuclear weapons, they would be part of the international norm. The nuclear-armed states promised to negotiate their reduction and elimination; the non-nuclear states promised never to get them. This gave countries the assurance that if they did not get nuclear weapons, their neighbors would not either. This was enough to convince Sweden, the last European country with a weapons program, to end its efforts in 1968.
Those two basic frameworks are now at risk. NATO allies believe that they can no longer depend on the United States to honor its treaty commitments to come to their aid if Russia attacks. Emergency meetings throughout Europe now focus on developing new, independent security arrangements. Leaders in Germany and Poland openly speak of acquiring nuclear arsenals. If they leave the NPT to develop their own weapons, the non-proliferation regime will collapse. There will no longer be the global political, diplomatic and legal restraints that we have taken for granted. There could be a dozen new nuclear-armed states, not just the “rogues” but our closest allies.
Germany’s likely next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said that “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, says “the Free World needs a new leader.” French President Emmanuel Macron has offered to discuss having his nation’s arsenal of 290 nuclear weapons serve as a Euro deterrent force — and Poland, Germany and Denmark say they are open to the idea.
But could a French or British nuclear umbrella open to replace the one Trump is closing?
Collapsing the Nuclear Umbrella
Consider Europe’s new dilemma. If Putin prevails in Ukraine — and Trump is doing his best to help him win his war — he will certainly pursue his territorial ambitions with Moldova, Romania, the Baltic States and Poland. He will certainly make new demands on all of Europe, backed by veiled or direct nuclear threats. Yale historian Tim Snyder writes that should Russia prevail, should Ukraine be defeated, then “nuclear weapons will spread around the world, both to those who wish to bluff with them” – the way Putin has done in his war on Ukraine – “and those who will need them to resist these bluffs.”
These nations might be able to rely on a French nuclear umbrella with Macron in power, but what if far-right leader Marine Le Pen becomes president? She has already said that “French defense must remain French defense.”
Could Germany step into the breach? It certainly has the ability to build nuclear weapons. But if the pro-Putin, far-right AfD party, already the second largest party in Germany, takes control, Germany’s weapons would certainly not protect other nations from Putin. Worse, if America walks away from NATO while bolstering these anti-American parties, “it will lead to a Germany once again led by fascists and willing to arm itself with nuclear weapons,” warnsNew York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
Poland could reasonably conclude that it must develop its own arsenal. Polish President Donald Tusk is already preparing for a post-NATO future, pledging to increase military spending, have every man undergo military training and adding, “We must be aware that Poland must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.” Sweden, Norway and others might feel the same.
From “Development of nuclear capabilities by fourth countries: likelihood and consequence”, a July 1958 assessment
We have seen this dynamic before. The first comprehensive national intelligence assessment of the risk of nuclear proliferation was in the Eisenhower administration in 1958. It assessed that 16 nations had the ability to produce nuclear weapons. Twelve were in Europe, including West Germany and Poland.
That is why President John F. Kennedy asked us to consider “what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament.”
In nonproliferation’s twilight, disarmament’s dawn?
Kennedy understood that non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament are two sides of the same coin. He tried to limit both existing arsenals (most dramatically with the 1962 Limited Test Ban Treaty) and prevent new ones. Reducing existing nuclear arsenals helps convince other nations not to get them; stopping new programs gives states the confidence to reduce their stockpiles. You cannot do one without the other.
This core truth must guide the three steps we must take to avert the nuclear nightmares Trump has unleashed. First, future presidents will have to recommit to the collective defense of Europe. Second, to prove we mean it this time, America must have an urgent action plan for reducing the global nuclear arsenals, launching negotiations with Russia and China that can eventually bring in as many of the other six nuclear-armed states as possible. Finally, the next administration must rebuild the interlocking system of treaties, controls and security agreements that Trump and Putin are tearing down.
To kill the nuclear nightmares now rising from the grave, Democrats will need their own Project 2029 plan, and be willing to implement it as rapidly as Trump has implemented his.
Rui Zhong is a writer and researcher living in the Washington D.C. metro area. She studies China, censorship, and technology’s role in nationalism and foreign policy
Donald Trump began his second Administration allowing Elon Musk to spearhead a sweeping ransacking of the federal workforce, beginning with foreign policy. Tasked with overseeing the rapidly dissolving network of embassies and formerly independent USAID offices is Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime Republican fixture within American foreign policy. Rubio is working with colleagues within the Trump administration to renege, avoid or otherwise thwart attempts to make good on financial and policy commitments in the international space. In conjunction with the Department of Justice, Rubio argued (in his secondary role as the terminal Administrator of USAID) that the United States had no obligation to pay out frozen aid contracts already committed to ongoing projects – and then declared the overwhelming bulk of them terminated
The thorough complicity of Marco Rubio and other institutional Republican stalwarts goes far deeper than mere verbal hypocrisy. Within Trump’s first administration, Rubio identified the problem of Trump’s conduct against Ukraine following impeachment by the House of Representatives, but ultimately declined to convict him.
“Can anyone doubt that at least half of the country would view his removal as illegitimate — as nothing short of a coup d’état?” Rubio wrote at the time in a blog post justifying his decision. “It is difficult to conceive of any scheme Putin could undertake that would undermine confidence in our democracy more than removal would.”
Five years later, Rubio’s entry and active participation in the second Trump Administration reflects a shift in conventional Republican culture, a highly visible reminder of the party’s transformation from one that first mocked, then reluctantly welcomed Trump, to one that is fundamentally about Trump. On international relations in particular, mainstream Republicans have changed to accommodate Trump, with Rubio only the latest member of the cadre to bend the knee.
Of all the selections by Donald Trump for the Cabinet of his second administration, Rubio has the longest tenure within Republican politics and conservative spaces. Foreign policy was one of the ways Rubio had appealed to moderates and even liberals, taking photo opportunities with Hong Kong dissenters and through his service on the human rights-centric Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
During his confirmation hearings, Democratic Senators praised the cordial lines of communication they maintained over the course of his fourteen-year Senate career. “You and I have also had a good working relationship for many years,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). “I believe you have the skills and are well qualified to serve as secretary of State.” The Senate voted to confirm Rubio 99 in favor with no dissents, greeting Rubio’s nomination to Secretary of State as the promise of a steady hand to steer foreign policy.
Most of his former Democratic colleagues likely did not envision Rubio rushing to sign off on decisions such as abruptly ending funding the Fulbright Program, nor his sullen silence as Trump and Vance berated Ukrainian President for lack of deference during a March 1st Oval Office Meeting. When asked about his opinion of the meeting by CNN, Rubio said: “I think he should apologize for wasting our time for a meeting that was gonna [sic] end the way it did.” Putin’s schemes were not mentioned. Likely, such topics are not encouraged under the Trump administration.
It is easy to understand why Democratic Senators might have expected Rubio to continue the hawkish but structurally normative habits of his Senate career. During Trump’s First Administration, then-Senator Rubio and most Republicans stuck to a baseline level of support for American soft power institutions and foreign policy practices. Non-political staffers were not subject to executive office oversight, and the Hill mostly consulted agencies for technical information in a neutral relationship. The second Trump administration began instead with a bombastic declaration to cut departments, a process rhetorically and explicitly guided by Elon Musk, through his role in the new Department of Government Efficiency.
Elevated to Secretary of State, Rubio capitulated to these cuts almost immediately, discarding the values-based steps he took to secure the cabinet nomination in the first place. As the White House cut State Department offices like the office of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, he accepted such closures as collateral damage in service of the same fictional concept of cutting government to efficiency pursued by Musk and his hit team of hired henchmen. At the time of the writing of this piece, Rubio also allegedly pursued the usage of AI to deport students that appeared “pro-Hamas.” He also moved to exempt a wide swath of policies from public commentary during draft phases, removing a mechanism that allowed for democratic input on policies under consideration. And he has, the New Republic reports, “terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of alleged Russian abductions of Ukrainian children—a potential war crime—to law enforcement officials in Europe.”
Rubio’s foreign policy doctrine and its wide-ranging surveillance and policy process changes would not look out of place in the authoritarian regimes he’d pursued hawkishly as a Senator.It is not unheard of for politicians to change opinions or policy positions as they rise in power and prominence, nor is it unorthodox practice for them to discard previously-held values at the apex of that political climb. Rubio’s opportunism, however, stands out because he presides over a particularly monumental and irreversible demolition project. If Rubio took the position under the hopes that he would guide foreign policy as he had from the Senate, he has instead been tasked with dismantling the very institutions needed to execute US diplomacy in the world. Partners, contractors and grantees in the United States and abroad cannot forget or experience in reverse the betrayal they feel at getting abandoned. Because Rubio put his face and name to the abandonment, there can be no lifeline offered from any other mainstream Republicans, unless an unforeseen sea change occurs.
Immediate monetary disbursement and assurance given to grantees, allies and partners are the absolute minimum of what would be needed to restore this historic crisis of confidence in the U.S. foreign policy institutions. Money obligated to agreements are a cornerstone of maintaining the reputation of the United States as an implementation partner on the most fundamental diplomatic, consular and development policies. Based on current trajectories of agencies and programs being cut, frozen or suspended, Rubio and the purportedly “stabilizing” element of the Republican party can be written off as uninterested, unwilling or unable to curb the impulses of Musk and Trump.
Tamara Pearson is an Australian-Mexican journalist, editor, activist, and literary fiction author living in Puebla, Mexico. Her latest novel is The Eyes of the Earth, and she writes the Global South newsletter, Excluded Headlines.
A state of constant fear becomes normalized when you live alongside organized crime, Hortensia Telésforo, an activist in the Indigenous community of San Gregorio Atlapulco, Mexico City, argues. “And that is a way of slowly dying,” she said, noting that social, collective, and community care is one of various antidotes to such fear.
But the Trump administration claims to be combating drug production, organized crime, and Mexican cartels by designating them “foreign terrorist organizations.” The move risks increasing racism and prejudice against Mexico while avoiding addressing the actual causes and consequences of organized crime, including preventing addiction or supporting people with addictions, the guns supplied to such groups, or the poverty and low wages that facilitate cartel recruitment.
The cartel designation came into effect on Friday, with six transnational, but Mexico-based cartels named: Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Carteles Unidos, Cartel del Noreste, Cartel del Golfo, and La Nueva Familia Michoacana. The new DEA chief, Derek Maltz, said he hoped to build a multinational “army of good to fight evil” against the Mexican drug cartels – clearly identifying the program with the demonization of Mexico.
But, “Calling them terrorists … is a fantasy. It’s clear they (the Trump administration) don’t understand the problem. All the U.S. president, Trump, does is blow his own trumpet and seek economic benefits, and he uses the terrorist designation and tariffs like a newspaper for hitting a dog on the nose. If you don’t do what I say, I hit you,” Luis Cardona, a journalist who investigated the cartels for decades, until he was kidnapped and tortured, tells me. He continues to comment on the issue, from an unknown location, under protection, his house “like a prison, covered in barbed wire and video monitoring” and with a bodyguard. He is currently dealing with two death threats, he said.
Cardona said he was taken to a field, where he was told he would be killed. He described how, in 2012, he had been writing about 15 cases of youth who were murdered because they refused to work in the poppy or marijuana fields. He received death threats, and was captured by different groups on three occasions, before he was kidnapped. “They tortured me, they were going to kill me. They took me to an open field, telling me they had already killed many people there, and today, hidden graves are being found there.”
He said he was kidnapped by police dressed as soldiers, something he was sure of because he had listened to their radio communications and knew the key words they used, and he also knew which groups used which guns. He was released though, thanks to pressure by journalists.
Mexico and the U.S. sending troops to the border is just “theater,” Cardona said, and the terrorist label “demonstrates a very childish understanding of the situation.”
Why the cartels are thriving
There were a total of 30,057 homicides in Mexico in 2024, according to official figures – typically lower than reality, as they only include those reported by state prosecutors’ offices, and exclude the roughly 10,000 forced disappearances (2023), or other unregistered homicides.
These rates have grown consistently since the U.S.-led “War on Drugs,” also known as the Merida Initiative, began. It was a campaign of military “aid” and intervention into Mexico from 2008, and it saw a sudden increase in cartels and gangs by 900% from 2006 to 2012, and forced disappearances went from 18 per year in 2004 to 3,111 in 2010.
“Declaring a war doesn’t work, we’ve already been through that. The war on drugs generated thousands of deaths of innocent people and a state of emergency that violated human rights, and nothing improved,” Raúl Caporal, lawyer and human rights and migration consultant told me.
Meanwhile, in the U.S, 48.5 million people battled a substance use disorder in 2023. The country has the highest overdose rate per million people in the world, according to one study (which compared dozens of countries, not all). Cardona argued that Mexico’s proximity to the U.S. and such high demand also contributes to the proliferation of cartels.
Further, serious restrictions on migration and access to asylum, “has been a big opportunity for organized crime … the illegal trafficking of migrants is another branch of their business, and migrant routes north coincide with drug trafficking routes,” Caporal said. “Migrants are easy prey to organized crime that then sends them on to their sales operatives in the US,” Cardona explained.
In fact, a recent investigation found that cartels are “adapting their strategies to exploit new policies from Washington” and are increasingly using industrial-size extortion rackets and kidnapping large numbers of migrants as soon as they arrive in Mexico, to the point where such actions have become the norm.
People who refuse to cooperate with crime groups, such as journalists and activists are in danger, and frequently killed. Youth, faced with forced recruitment, flee their communities, and those already marginalized and isolated towns then lose large proportions of their working-age population. There is a climate of normalized extortion and corruption, with small businesses frequently subjected to “user rights” payments – weekly or monthly payments to gangs in exchange for security (ie not being beaten up or worse). Currently, businesses in parts of Guanajuato are closed due to fear of extortionists, allegedly linked to the Cartel de Sinaloa, which La Jornada reports have demanded payments of 40,000 pesos (US$2,000).
Organized crime also has a strong impact on governance, particularly on local governments in areas the groups want to or do control. For example, recently the CJNG allegedly kidnapped a mayor and his family in Jalisco state in order to force him to choose a head of police that favored the cartel.
Cardona estimated that around 80% of Mexican politicians collude with organized crime, but stressed, “It isn’t just corruption, if they don’t take part in negotiations with them, then they are killed, or their families are.”
Photo by Tamara Pearson
Community not coercion
It is unsurprising that cartels would thrive in a broader context of inequality (both within Mexico, and between Mexico and the US), violence, consumerism, trauma, U.S. intervention, and apathy. Tackling such a complex issue involves promoting education and values, Cardona argues, and providing people with dignified and well-paid employment.
Those who leave school early or can’t find reasonably-paid employment end up “working as informal workers and may fall into the clutches of the cartels. Wages are so low here it makes you laugh,” he said, acknowledging that the minimum wage has increased under the Morena government, but is still “miserable.” Hence working with the cartels, rather than super exploitation by local corporations or European and US-owned transnationals, can be more economically attractive.
Community dynamics also have a strong influence on whether organized crime dynamics thrive. The small group that controls the area I live in, for example, charges street venders a piso (user rights) and allegedly pays off police or politicians. This group has such a hold on the area that neighbors are afraid to speak up. Authorities have cracked down on them a few times, but then retreated, negotiating behind closed doors. The fact that no one (including media and politicians) dares to publicly criticize the group contributes to the tolerance and apathy towards them and helps to normalize their presence.
Telésforo was at a protest last September in her community that was repressed by paid and armed hooligans, while local police watched on.
“Such treatment becomes normalized,” she told me in an interview. “The population becomes accustomed to believing that is how they should be treated … while the methods of organized crime groups are extolled, almost admired,” she said.
Telésforo is a community leader in the Indigenous town of San Gregorio Atlapulco, in Xochimilco, Mexico City. After local politicians had appropriated a large, hill-top community space for their private parties and networking, the Atlapulco assembly reclaimed the space. They are now running it as the House of the People Tlamachtiloyan, with workshops, forums, Indigenous and human rights education, and more. But following this, as well as community resistance to the contamination of chinampas (Indigenous agricultural system involving small built-up islands), Telésforo received a court citation in August last year, as an attempt to criminalize such organizing.
Photo by Tamara Pearson
In many parts of the country, demand for alcohol and drugs, and therefore sale of drugs and the strength of cartels, is being boosted by replacing community and identity with a culture of consumerism and alienation. Telésforo explained how Indigenous and traditional celebrations, patron saint days, carnival, and neighborhood festivals can support community organization and identity, but “corrupt people in the government have used such events in order to tear apart the social fabric.”
She described how Indigenous customs are being stylized for popular consumption, community organizers of the events are being replaced with external companies, and the focus shifted to selling drinks and drugs. “This capitalist vision is that if you consume, you have a place in a world, and if you don’t consume, you aren’t anyone,” Telésforo said. Such a vision of self-worth then vindicates drug consumption or production as status.
Strong community and other types of organizing can, on the other hand, promote respect and self-worth through responsibility and participation. Rather than normalizing excessive consumption and violence, Telésforo believes preventing and reducing organized crime and cartels starts with people “recognizing themselves as active community members and considering how they can contribute … how we can organize in order to foster better relationships and protect our rights.”
In Tlamachtiloyan, “we are holding events that enable us to re-find ourselves as a community, re-establish social connections, and we are overcoming fear, because that’s what organized crime does … it creates a lot of fear … but this space is a way of saying that we take care of each other, and of what is ours,” she said.
“We diagnosed ourselves, as a community, and found that we have been getting sick – not just physically, but mentally … Among the youth, there is a normalization of this idea that your life isn’t worth anything, so if you get involved in crime and they kill you, well, you’ve already lived.”
The number of children and teenagers across Mexico recruited into organized crime is estimated by studies in a wide range, from as few as 35,000 to as many as 460,000. These studies consistently find that such recruitment most often takes place in areas where extreme violence and organized crime are already part of daily life, and where there is poverty, marginalization, high school-dropout rates, and low provision of public services.
On the other hand, “people who are mentally and physically healthy rarely get into issues with addictions, or wanting to get lots of money very easily,” Telésforo stressed. To prevent and reduce organized crime, “we should create a culture of taking care of our water, our environment … because with a mentality of taking care of things, it is unlikely that someone will end up being extremely irresponsible.”
Photo by Tamara Pearson
Moral and legal impunity sustains organized crime
There is a 93% impunity rate in Mexico for homicides (that is, only 7% of homicides result in a conviction). Only 6.4% of crimes in general are even denounced, and of those, only 14% are resolved, due to the corruption, lack of resources and staff, and ineffectiveness of the judicial system.
“There was a lack of recognition from the start by the government that there were cartels, and that ultimately gave them a strong amount of impunity,” said Cardona. Further, officials and media who are, by force or desire, colluding with cartels, are hardly going to denounce the problem.
This silence, along with their use of violence, is a “guarantee of their existence” Cardona argued, describing how organized crime uses threats, physical attacks, through to disappearances and murder against anyone who stands in the way of their profits or operations.
“Now this is all basically normalized … to the point where the population has learned to live with criminals,” he said.
Beyond legal impunity, moral impunity promotes such tolerance. When President Sheinbaum recently kept Francisco Garduño as the head of the National Migration Institute (INM) even though he was charged in 2023 with illicit exercise of public service after 40 migrants were killed in a fire in a state migrant “center” in Ciudad Juarez, she sent a message about the extreme amount of tolerance for human rights violations. Migrants were locked inside the center and unable to escape the fire, and top migration officials were accused of failing to ensure their safety.
Such a culture of impunity teaches us not to bother denouncing individual criminals in court.
“This idea that you can do whatever you want and nothing will happen, is part of, and leading to a lot of apathy,” Telésforo said.
Countering cartels involves “increasing the amount of responsibility we all feel towards a region,” she said, describing how Indigenous peoples and others are ending permissiveness by leading by example and showing that you don’t just let those with power do what they like in your community. Otherwise, criminals “don’t care if someone sees them or not.” Communities, she argues, should be spaces people are accountable to.
Protect human rights rather than guns and militarization
At least 70% of firearms recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing from 2014 to 2021 were U.S.-sourced. According to Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico, that means that in 2019, for example, more people were killed by U.S. guns in Mexico than in the U.S. Effectively, U.S. manufacturers, including Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt, Glock, and Ruger, are supporting the violence committed by cartels in Mexico.
Sheinbaum said Mexico would expand its lawsuits against these companies if cartels are classified as terrorists. Various U.S. arms companies have also profited from the genocide in Gaza, for example, so it is ironic that the U.S. government feels entitled to pass judgment on other countries.
The “terrorist” label implies military solutions to the drug cartels problem, as does Trump’s recent demand, met by Sheinbaum, that Mexico send 10,000 more troops to the border. But militarization of the borders and of Mexican society only serves to criminalize migrants and communities. Further, security forces are renowned for collaborating with organized crime and for extorting migrants – not for protecting them. They treat them as an enemy, killing six and injuring 10 in just one incident last October, for example.
On the other hand, “Opening the borders would remove a lot of the pressure to end up working for these criminal organizations, but really its about legalizing (regularizing) migration and recognizing the human rights of all people, to dignity,” Cardona said.
Likewise, Caporal stressed the need to “strengthen the justice systems, rather than militarization. That should be the starting point, a perspective of social justice, of creating a culture of peace.”
The more rights migrants have, including access to transit or humanitarian visas in Mexico (currently limited) and access to requesting asylum in the U.S. (severely restricted by Biden and halted now by Trump), the less vulnerable they would be to cartels, and the harder it would be for cartels to make money trafficking them.
Photo by Tamara Pearson
Real impact of the “terrorist” designation
Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations may result in concrete measures with an outside impact on those already hurt by cartels – from complicating remittances and financial transactions, to throwing a wider net for the prosecution of people or groups suspected of assisting cartels (including migrants forced to pay ransoms), human rights restrictions, or even incursion. Even if none of those consequences come to pass, the designation serves Trump as an ideological attack designed to frame Mexico and Latin America as an enemy to be controlled rather than sovereign peoples to be collaborated with.
The designation is clearly no solution to addictions or violence, experienced here in Mexico or in the U.S. For many of my compatriots in Mexico, already crushed by fear, it is common to take refuge in the ease and perceived safety of apathy, or in the delusion that consumerism can bring status. And yet, activists and movements are particularly clear that avoidance, silence, and numbing only protect the perpetrators, and are not so different from drugs. Having marched and protested for 10 years now to demand justice for the 43 students disappeared or killed by organized crime and security forces, and for six years for murdered activist Samir Flores, and so on – it is their determination to speak up that counters the moral impunity of organized crime and that will actually prevent further violence.
Omar Shaban is the founder and director of Palthink for Strategic Studiesand the inaugural Leahy Fellow at the Center for International Policy.
On January 19, 2025, Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire, with the goal of ending a devastating round of conflict in Gaza that lasted nearly 15 months, amid complex international and regional contexts and conflicting interests. As of publication, the two sides are set to discuss the terms for implementing phases two and three of the agreement, though without guarantee of success or long-term enforcement. While the agreement has been described as a step towards calm, it does not yet represent a definitive solution to the conflict. Rather, it may be part of a long-term strategy that seeks to reshape the political and military landscape in Gaza and the region.
Successive official statements by international parties and mediators show that the agreement still contains ambiguity in its terms, raising questions about its viability and prospects for implementation.
The objectives of the agreement and its undeclared dimensions
American statements indicate the war is not over yet: Despite the announcement of the agreement as a first step towards calm, statements from the forthcoming Trump administration representing Israeli intentions reveal hidden goals beyond the ceasefire, for example statements by Trump’s new National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. He said that the complete demilitarization of Gaza and the destruction of Hamas remained goals, and that war could resume once Israeli and American hostages were released. He went even further by declaring, “If Hamas violates this agreement, we will support Israel 100 percent to return to war.”
Ambiguity about the fate of military leaders: The ceasefire’s clauses on medical treatment, which refer to the daily departure of 50 wounded soldiers with three escorts through the Rafah crossing, with the approval of Israel and Egypt, will need to be monitored closely and transparently, as it could potentially serve as a cover for the deportation of Hamas military and political leaders from the Gaza Strip.
This condition has already been put forward by Israel and the United States as part of any settlement. In the absence of transparency, it appears that the agreement may include secret arrangements that preserve Hamas’s face while serving Israeli and U.S. strategic goals. This raises the question of the various powers’ ability to impose such a clause on Hamas inside the Gaza Strip, which has made successive statements about its refusal to leave the Gaza Strip under any justification.
Last Minute Consensuses: Mutual Concessions or Interim Tactic? The announcement of a series of last-minute resolutions of differences between Israel and Hamas, and the imminent meeting of the Israeli cabinet to approve the deal, indicate intense regional and international pressure to ensure the implementation of the agreement. But the nature of these concessions is unclear, fueling speculation that some of the undeclared clauses may be more influential than those announced.
The main challenges in the agreement
Ambiguity in later stages: The agreement is divided into multiple phases, but the details of the second and third phases (such as reconstruction, full withdrawal, and final ceasefire) remain vague and subject to further negotiations. This opens the way for postponing these essential items, if all of these are subject to the ability of Hamas to implement everything contained in the provisions of the first phase, i.e. there is a severe test for Hamas to gain the confidence of mediators, especially the United States, in the first phase. The second and third phases are also fraught with many obstacles, with fundamental differences in perception between Israel and Hamas.
Israel makes it clear that, as part of the phase II negotiations, it will be possible to end the war only under the following conditions:
Release all abductees.
Hamas leadership agrees to exile (via safe exit) to a third country.
Agreeing to dismantle its military capabilities.
Avoid any active political participation in the form of Hamas in Gaza “the next day.”
According to Israeli officials, if Hamas agrees to these terms, Israel will not have to return to fighting, but if it refuses — and in Israel they estimate that Hamas will refuse — there is a high probability of resuming fighting.
Lack of real guarantees: The agreement lacks genuine and binding oversight mechanisms to ensure its transparent implementation, making it vulnerable to violations by the stronger party. US-Israeli statements linking the continuation of the truce to Hamas’s commitment reflect a reliance on the balance of power rather than a clear international or legal framework. This lack of guarantees opens the way for Israel to interpret the terms of the agreement in a way that serves its security and strategic interests, as happened in previous experiences such as the Oslo Accords.
Exclusion of the Palestinian Authority: The exclusion of the Palestinian Authority deepens the internal Palestinian division and makes the agreement a solely bilateral one between the Israelis and Hamas. This deprives the agreement of any overall national legitimacy and weakens the chances of turning it into a genuine political settlement.
Internal Israeli politics: Israel’s internal differences are currently felt strongly between Netanyahu and the right-wing led by Smotrich and Ben Gvir, the latter of whom resigned over the signing of the agreement between Hamas and Israel and stipulated that the return to the government is primarily contingent on Netanyahu’s commitment to return to fighting in Gaza after the first phase.
This calls into question Netanyahu’s ability to retain the government. Although there is consideration of the opposition’s promises to secure a safety net in the event that the far right withdraws from the government, Netanyahu is well aware that the opposition bloc led by Yair Lapid will work to save the government only until the deal is completed, and then it will withdraw at the first opportunity so as to collapse the Netanyahu government. The opposition is also seeking power in its own right and to do so must collapse the government in order to go to elections and compete for the parliamentary majority. These dynamics show that domestic politics may play a decisive role in determining the future of an agreement. Netanyahu may resort to disrupting or reinterpreting the agreement as a way to strengthen his domestic political position.
Other weakness of the agreement
The current agreement is more akin to a declaration of principles than to a permanent settlement, as its continuation depends on the commitment of the parties to implement the first phase smoothly. It is only the first step in a series of mysterious stages. Which is perceived as an unfinished frame.
The agreement lacks clear implementation guarantees and effective international oversight mechanisms. This reflects Israel’s continued policy of exploiting agreements as tools to manage negotiations and conflict, not resolve it.
The exclusion of other Palestinian parties threatens to turn the agreement into a “temporary truce” and the lack of any overarching national dimension makes it more difficult to achieve sustainable peace.
The announcement of the agreement from Doha and not Cairo reflects a regional competition between mediators, especially competition for the expected regional role in the US strategy for the region, which may exclude the party that does not seem to have much influence in imposing its conditions or influence on Hamas. This rivalry may weaken coordination and increase the fragility of the agreement, especially with the possibility of undeclared clauses and the ambiguity of the second and third phases, which may reflect differences in interests between regional parties.
Trump’s recent comments about the future of the Gaza Strip, both in regards to who should have political control over it and the fate of the Palestinians of Gaza during reconstruction, could undermine the implementation of the agreement in its later stages. It could also cause a crisis in neighboring countries like Jordan and Egypt, essential stakeholders in seeing de-escalation happen.
Opportunities and motives for the continuation of the agreement
Feeling the American determination and the role of the Trump administration and Baden in drafting the agreement through: – The balance between the two US administrations The agreement is not the product of the efforts of one administration but a combination of multiple factors, including international pressure on Israel after the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and the role of regional mediators such as Qatar and Egypt. – Biden: Quiet diplomacy The Biden administration has worked to continue efforts through diplomatic channels, taking advantage of relations with mediators (Qatar and Egypt). Biden’s statements about the continuation of the ceasefire during the second and third stages of negotiations, even if the duration of the first phase exceeds the specified time, shows the administration’s desire to avoid the collapse of the agreement.
Trump: Maximum pressure policy
Trump relies on a “big stick” policy, as his statements and those of his advisers show unlimited support for Israel in the event of renewed war. But on the other hand, it was indirect pressure that pushed the parties to the agreement, and Trump himself is proud that his presence is what prompted this agreement to crystallize, not to mention his personal determination to the demands of calm in the Middle East, and that he has broader projects in the region, which are projects subject to strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and normalization with Israel, in order to devote himself to the great economic project and compete with the next China, which is the main goal that he does not manage in the coming stages, and he has no time to drain America, financially or militarily, in any future wars, economic peace depends on calm in the Middle East. Versus China’s competition.
As the agreement is not the product of the efforts of just one administration but a combination of multiple factors, including international pressure on Israel after the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and the role of regional mediators such as Qatar and Egypt. That means the ceasefire agreement is most likely to sustain. The ceasefire agreement has regional and international back up.
Biden’s quiet diplomacy: Biden administration has worked to continue efforts through diplomatic channels, taking advantage of relations with mediators (Qatar and Egypt). Biden’s statements about the continuation of the ceasefire during the second and third stages of negotiations, even if the duration of the first phase exceeds the specified time, shows the administration’s desire to avoid the collapse of the agreement.
Trump’s Maximum pressure policy: Trump relies on a “big stick” policy, as his statements and those of his advisers show unlimited support for Israel in the event of renewed war. But on the other hand, it was indirect pressure that pushed the parties to the agreement, and Trump himself is proud that his presence is what prompted this agreement to crystallize, not to mention his personal interests and determination to the demands of calm in the Middle East, and that he has broader projects in the region, which are projects subject to strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. There is also the prospect of further Arab normalization with Israel, which he has repeatedly affirmed he has interest in building upon.
The Trump administration’s desire for the return of the Palestinian Authority: News reports have suggested that Trump will restore the Palestinian National Authority to run the Gaza Strip despite Israel’s opposition. Palestinian Authority officials said that President Trump asked the PA to control the crossings in the Gaza Strip, in a conversation with the Director General of the Crossings in the Palestinian Authority, Nazmi Muhanna, and the Attorney General of the Ministry of Civil Affairs in the Palestinian Authority, Ayman Qandil, who went to Cairo at Trump’s request, in order to close the details of this file and prevent Hamas or any other party from control, and this means that Trump has a vision about the future of any agreement with Saudi Arabia, which conditions normalization on the understanding of the solution of the Palestinian state and the need for its control over the Gaza Strip as part of any upcoming agreement.
However, political arrangements at the Rafah crossing remain dependent on Israel’s statements about maintaining a security presence in the Philadelphia axis, raising questions about its intentions towards a complete withdrawal or easing of the blockade of Gaza. Where control of the crossing may remain controversial, issues related to humanitarian aid are subject to the possibility of being used as leverage in later stages. At the same time, Trump’s ambiguous and incendiary comments about US control over the Gaza Strip could also embolden the Israeli government and undermine the Authority’s bid to reassume governance in the enclave.
Positions of key regional mediators:
While the announcement of the agreement was made in Doha instead of Cairo, despite the vital Egyptian role, there are differences between the two governments’ positions. Qatar has a great interest in ensuring this agreement by any means, as this is its first experience with regard to stopping a war in the Gaza Strip, which gives it an important place in any future Middle Eastern arrangement.
The Palestinian file historically represents an important issue for Egypt, especially through previous strategic interventions in this file, as it is an Egyptian national security file. This is especially true for the Gaza Strip, not to mention its real desire to stop the war in any way, in order to restore its economic losses and the return of navigation in the Suez Canal, which was severely affected by the support for the Palestinian people that was approved by Ansar Allah (Houthis) in Yemen, which targeted ships in the Red Sea, affected navigation in the canal, and in turn affected the canal’s revenues dramatically. Egypt has been able to prove that it is still an influential and strong player in this file through the Rafah land crossing, which is the only exit to the Gaza Strip and controlled by Egypt, where one of the conditions of the ceasefire agreement was to return to the management of the Rafah crossing through Egyptian supervision, and that Israel has the right to supervise the lists of injured military travelers who are required to be treated outside the Gaza Strip.
Hopeful recommendations
Future moves by Israel and the United States will determine whether the subsequent phases bring about a real calm, or be used as a cover for re-escalation. The following are recommendations that, if they were implemented, could be used to sustain the ceasefire and provide a framework for long-term peace.
Involve all Palestinian parties: The PA and the PLO should be included in any future negotiations to ensure the inclusiveness of the agreement. In the longer term, PA reform and new elections are essential for the PA to be seen as legitimate and effective.
Establishment of an international monitoring mechanism: the need for an impartial international body to supervise the implementation of the terms of the agreement and prevent violations.
Strengthening regional coordination: Push Qatar and Egypt to coordinate their efforts to avoid competition and achieve real stability in mediation.
Rebuilding international trust: engaging the United Nations and international actors to ensure a transparent and sustainable negotiating framework.
Affirm the territorial integrity of the whole of Palestinian territory including the Gaza Strip as part of a future Palestinian state.
Is the agreement the beginning of a solution or a temporary break?
While the agreement is seen as an opportunity to stop the bloodshed in Gaza, the ambiguity of its terms and the continued Israeli and American goals in reshaping the Palestinian landscape keep it within the framework of the temporary truce. The absence of international guarantees and the deepening of Palestinian and regional divisions make the future of the agreement dependent on complex political balances that could return the region to the cycle of escalation at any moment.
Van Jackson is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. This essay was originally published at Un-Diplomatic, Jackson’s newsletter, and is republished here with permission.
Team Biden might have left office believing that it kept America out of World War III, but it made so many decisions with a militarist bent that it’s far too early to declare even that much.
Zero-sum biases plague US foreign policy, especially toward China. And Trump has inherited a China-obsessed war machine that’s even more lethal than the one he presided over during his first term. So if the end of everything were to happen in the coming years, Biden’s choices to heighten rather than ameliorate rivalry with China—the world’s other greatest power—will almost certainly have been among its conditions of possibility.
For our planet to survive this era, the United States needs to adapt to China (and the world) in a more relational and less predatory way. But not only is that a tall order; the US national security state itself actively impedes it. A breakthrough toward a more just and stable world will require resorting to politics, not simply the bureaucratic production of policy. And while violence is intrinsic to how Trump operates, he is, ironically, making himself essential to keeping us out of World War III even as he makes it more likely over the long run.
The “Competition” Consensus
Substantial evidence now exists that, whatever disagreements about China may reside within the US foreign policy community, they are minor, tactical, relative to the larger shared consensus in favor of viewing China as a threat and a competitor that ought to be America’s foreign policy priority.
While power hoarding and military superiority have been a means and end of US foreign policy since at least the 1980s, it is newly incompatible with the world as it actually exists. We are no longer in the “unipolar moment.” A foreign policy that tries to claim a lopsided share of global power in a multipolar world pushes the US to be more aggressive, revisionist, as it flails against the tide, unable to secure the position of domination it long took for granted.
Because US goals are so extreme and mismatched to reality, the result is what we have seen over the past four years: heightened ethnonationalisms, the securitization of everything, a breakdown of economic interdependence in favor of a shift toward economic decoupling, and a fixation on preparations for major-power war unseen since the Cold War.
In Washington, these ingredients for Armageddon find expression in the simple shorthand “great-power competition”—a phrase that Trump has scarcely uttered but that all of his foreign policy appointments have repeatedly stressed. Marco Rubio, for example, declared great-power competition the priority of an “America-First foreign policy” in his first cable instruction to the State Department.
The anti-China consensus that Trump presided over in his first term—but that in fact started under Obama—not only endures but is a profound obstacle for those wishing to avoid World War III. A shift to something more peaceful and enlightened than geopolitical rivalry is unlikely to come from within the US national security state, which has fully retooled for conflict with China.
The hawkish groupthink that pervades how Washington relates to China is hard to break when the US national security state has banked the legitimacy of its institutional existence on indefinitely chasing China’s shadow around the world while optimizing for a war that no sane person should want. The solution to Sino-US rivalry lay in adopting a different approach that rejects primacy in word and deed, but the ability to do that can only come from political forces outside the national security state.
What Is to Be Done
The most enlightened policy wonks in Washington advocate for “competitive coexistence” or “congagement” (competition and engagement in parallel). This is more or less what Biden attempted. But pursuing the brutality of great-power rivalry with guardrails never made much sense, and neither did his China policy. Sure, a new Cold War in which adversaries talk to each other is preferable to a Cold War without direct communications; nobody should want to live in a state of perpetual Cuban Missile Crisis.
But zero-sum statecraft is a dead end. Any policy agenda premised on a net-antagonistic relationship between the great powers facilitates a process of hawkish outbidding within domestic politics, and as we have seen the past decade, that divides America rather than unites it.
A more stabilizing, war-averting existence would accommodate power realities rather than resist them at the point of a gun. The reason why it is so hard to take America off the path to World War III is precisely that the things that need to be done to better the world situation do not lend themselves to simple policy interventions.
Suspending military competition, especially in nuclear modernization, is essential but literally the opposite of what a foreign policy of great-power competition demands. Keeping China interdependent with the world—rather than trying to sever it from the US and world economy—encourages Chinese restraint in foreign policy, but is contrary to the economic nationalism that has become en vogue. Increasing domestic consumption in China would help alleviate the need for Xi Jinping to rely on ethnonationalist appeals to sustain his political legitimacy, but only the CCP can take that decision. And US financing of Chinese green tech for export in exchange for China extending sovereign debt relief to the global South would catalyze a virtuous cycle: Making good on a global green new deal—>resolving China’s overproduction of electric vehicles and solar panels—>and growing consumer markets in the global South to provide a new source of global growth. But coordinating a grand green bargain of this ambition presumes habits of cooperation and mutual good will that do not exist.
None of these ideas amounts to pulling a lever or pushing a button—that’s the wrong way to think about changing the world. Rather, they are worldmaking projects that cannot happen within a strategy of primacy, whether described as an “America-First foreign policy” or a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Such slogans mask the assumption that security is a scarce resource that must be hoarded at others’ expense. And that is just not true.
A Politics of Peace
Overcoming Washington’s hawkish groupthink requires agents of change capable of contesting, overriding, or redirecting the national security state’s anti-China fetish. The tragedy and the silver lining in this regard are the same: Trump.
American militarism cannot be tamed by those who are its purest embodiment. As General Charles Horner once quipped, “…don’t count on the Pentagon to change the Pentagon…it has to come from outside…The executive branch has to provide leadership.” Where, then, to turn?
Popular sentiment against war and China-bashing is worth cultivating. Organized labor has been mostly aligned with anti-militarism and peace activists in recent years—the transformative potential of labor and peace is immense. But the reality is that Trump is showing every sign of weakening labor activism and criminalizing peace protests. The alternative, materialist prospects for overcoming the China hawks, then, lay with two other forces: the imperial presidency and the capitalists most dependent on a globalization-style world.
To take the latter first, the capitalist class is disunified and consists of sections that either benefit or are harmed by the ethnonationalist world of rivalry that is emerging. American exporters (especially in agriculture) as well as firms who rely on foreign markets to survive (like Hollywood) thrived in the old world of neoliberal globalization. Crucially, they still need an interconnected world for their business models to work. That makes them a well-resourced power bloc on behalf of, if not peace, then at least keeping war at bay and limiting the encroachment of “national security” into every aspect of the economy.
A different section of capital directly benefits from great-power rivalry and the preparations for World War III it entails. The defense technology industry, cryptocurrency speculation, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and semiconductor production are among the few promising growth sectors for Silicon Valley venture capital (VC). In a peaceful world, these investments have little promise but a world of nationalist conflict puts them in the black.
What all this means is that, as a political force, some capitalists, in lobbying for restraint on the Trump administration out of their own interests—as Elon Musk has appeared to do on behalf of Tesla’s business in China—will be doing work that rubs against the great-power competition enthusiasts who run Washington.
The decisive force in the balance between war hawks and everybody else is Trump himself. Trump’s key political appointments on China—Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Elbridge Colby, Mike Waltz, and a slew of lower-level staff— have so far all been extreme hawks favoring great-power rivalry. And yet, Trump talks as if he is a conditional dove on China.
Trump had a friendly call with Xi Jinping upon inauguration. The opening tariffs he imposed on China (10%) were lower than what he had previously foreshadowed (and lower than what he announced for Mexico and Canada). In his inauguration speech, Trump laid down a desirable rhetorical marker: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end. And, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be. A peacemaker and a unifier.”
Marco Rubio, taking his cue from Trump, had a call with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on January 24 where he reportedly said that: “The United States does not support ‘Taiwan independence’ and hopes that the Taiwan issue will be peacefully resolved in a way accepted by both sides of the Taiwan Strait.” This is jarringly restrained and defies popular expectations. China, so far, is even responding to the Trump administration more favorably than it ever did to Team Biden.
Donald Trump is no dove. He did much to propel the anti-China hysteria that today plagues Washington during his first term. And the national security state, now led by Trump’s China hawks, is poised to continue pursuing great-power rivalry, which is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with the world’s fate.
How ironic, then, that we are all somewhat trapped, relying on Trump to be a much-needed voice of restraint in Sino-US relations because the national security state and the Democratic Party have refused the job. It is an unhappy situation, but such are the dire straits that US policymakers have foisted upon us.
Pere Aragonès i Garcia is a former President of Catalonia, having served from 2021 to 2024.
There is no doubt about the crucial importance the coming years will have for history and how Donald Trump’s renewed presidency, which is just beginning, will unfold—not only for U.S. citizens but also for other regions of the world, especially Europe. It is an uncontested victory that we must understand well. In a context of accelerated global changes—geopolitical, economic, demographic, climatic, and technological—the difficulties this may generate for the rest of the planet, and for Europe in particular, are clear. We must remain vigilant and react decisively and swiftly.
One of the main concerns from this side of the Atlantic is the impact on democratic institutions and the rule of law during these rapidly changing times. Trump’s traditional disregard for the separation of powers and shared rules, as evidenced by his role in the January 2021 Capitol assault, poses a problem not only for the U.S. but for the world as a whole. Europe is all too familiar with the implications. The European far-right and right-wing populism see Trump as a reference point, both for the substance of his policies—financial deregulation, protectionist nationalism, and opposition to civil rights—and for his style. His disdain for democratic institutions, attacks on the media and press freedom, and use of falsehoods as political tools are now being emulated by many representatives of the reactionary movement in Europe.
This is why now, more than ever, we must reaffirm a firm defense of democracy, respect for the system of checks and balances, and the preservation of rigorous, ethical political debate, free from lies. This is more necessary than ever.
At the same time, in a world that is increasingly globalized yet more multipolar, with the rise of new global powers such as China and India, a U.S. commitment to defending multilateralism and a rules-based world order is more critical than ever. This includes the need for a democratic Syria that respects its internal diversity. Moreover, we urgently need to work tirelessly and without excuses toward a definitive peace in both Gaza and Lebanon, with all parties assuming their clear responsibility. We cannot look the other way, nor can we afford the indiscriminate killing of civilians. It is intolerable. History will judge our generation if we fail to do everything possible to end these atrocities, whether in this conflict or wherever our capabilities can reach.
Regarding Europe, it is essential that the historic transatlantic defense alliance maintains a strategic partnership rooted in democratic values, the defense of a just international order that upholds human rights, and the ability to preserve peace and democracy. The destabilization of this alliance, as could be anticipated during Trump’s presidency, is exactly what Vladimir Putin desires to accelerate his plans for Ukraine and possibly beyond, including in Moldova, the Baltic states, or the Balkans. At the same time, this would weaken the European Union’s position, forcing it into strategic dependence on Russia—something that must be avoided not only for geopolitical reasons but also to preserve democratic values on the continent. This would be harmful to Europe, its allies, and, consequently, the United States. Similarly, seeking internal advantages at the expense of other democratic states, as recently seen in the Greenland issue, is equally damaging. All territories have the right to be respected and to freely determine their future without external interference.
Europe and the U.S. must strengthen their strategic economic alliances for mutual benefit. We are witnessing a global economy undergoing a profound disruption of value chains, with an increasing risk of strategic dependency on non-democratic states for raw materials and intermediate products. Technological development, decarbonization, combating climate change, and the production of goods and services must be well-governed. At the same time, a political and economic relationship with the Global South must be based on mutual respect, inclusive development, human rights, and democracy. This is, and must remain, a demand of the citizenry.
We cannot afford delays, especially in implementing progressive economic policies that guarantee quality jobs for everyone. However, the coming years are likely to head in the opposite direction. Prioritizing internal interests and opting for isolationism and unilateralism would be a grave mistake. Should this occur, we must remain calm and return to the path of collaboration as soon as possible, standing firm democratically and convincing citizens through bold, transformative progressivism—not just ideology.
During President Biden’s term, significant strides were made, such as adopting climate policies that placed decarbonization as a cornerstone of economic and international policy. The U.S. and Europe must act together, aiming for much more ambitious measures to mitigate climate change. A U.S. president who denies scientific evidence, as Trump does, is paving the way for the acceleration of irreversible global warming. This affects all of us and especially our future generations. There is no time to waste.
Above all, defending human rights must remain a shared value between Europe and the U.S. In a demographic context where migration flows toward Europe and the U.S. will persist—albeit at varying intensities—any migration policy must incorporate a humanitarian perspective. Europe, where the struggle between border closures at the expense of human rights (championed by the right and far-right) and a pragmatic, humane migration policy is ongoing, needs a U.S. where individuals’ rights to forge a future in freedom and security are not only promoted but fully guaranteed. Progressives must be coherent and responsible, addressing this complex issue without succumbing to pressure from ultra-populism.
The American people have spoken clearly. Donald Trump is the new president, and if he fulfills his commitments, the coming years will be challenging for rights, freedoms, and relations with Europe. We must stand firm and build global democratic alternatives.
From Catalonia, where we work to defend rights, freedoms, and a fairer world, and where we continuously strive to improve the welfare state and equal opportunities, we recognize the importance of maintaining and strengthening the understanding and solidarity with progressive and Atlanticist United States. We will be here, ready to steer in the right direction, now and when the time comes. From Europe, we echo Eleanor Roosevelt’s words: “True patriotism springs from a belief in the dignity of the individual, freedom and equality not only for Americans but for all people on earth, universal brotherhood and goodwill, and a constant striving toward the principles and ideals on which this country was founded.”
Sina Toossi is a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy.
In the wake of a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Middle East stands at a critical juncture. The recent agreement, brokered with the involvement of both the outgoing and incoming US administrations, has halted hostilities for now, but its durability remains uncertain. Amid this tenuous peace, Israeli leaders, emboldened by President-elect Donald Trump’s historically supportive stance, reportedly see a prime opportunity to push for direct war against Iran—a goal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pursued for decades.
Exacerbating these tensions is the possibility of Trump doubling down on his “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran, which dismantled the Obama-era nuclear deal and inflicted crippling sanctions on Iran’s economy. Reports from The Wall Street Journal reveal Trump is even weighing military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Yet, in his inaugural address, Trump remarked, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” This juxtaposition highlights a critical decision between diplomatic de-escalation and military action
Trump would be wise to pursue diplomacy. Granting Netanyahu the U.S.’s backing for such a conflict would further destabilize the region, heighten already white-hot anti-American sentiment, and derail Trump’s broader agenda. For Iran hawks, these shifting circumstances may seem like the ideal moment to act, but such enthusiasm dangerously ignores the lessons of Israel’s recent wars and the complexities of the region’s current security landscape. If Israel failed to decisively defeat a smaller non-state adversary like Hezbollah, how could it expect success against a well-fortified state like Iran? A preemptive strike would almost certainly provoke massive retaliation, fail to topple the Islamic Republic, and risk igniting a far-reaching, devastating conflict.
Instead of courting disaster, U.S. and Israeli policymakers should seize the moment to pursue diplomacy. Renewed negotiations and a verifiable nuclear agreement could deliver real security while steering the region away from catastrophic war.
Hezbollah’s Survival as a Cautionary Tale
Advocates of a strike on Iran often overlook a critical lesson from Israel’s recent conflict with Hezbollah: even with a relentless military campaign, Israel failed to decisively neutralize a much smaller non-state adversary. Over months of intense fighting in Lebanon, Israel launched an extensive air assault and a punishing ground invasion aimed at crippling Hezbollah’s arsenal. While Hezbollah suffered significant losses, including the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah and senior commanders, its ability to strike Israel was not eliminated. Throughout the bombardment, the group continued firing rockets, missiles, and drones deep into Israeli territory. Major population centers, including Tel Aviv, were hit just days before the ceasefire, causing casualties, widespread displacement, and severe economic and psychological insecurity.
This experience offers two key lessons for policymakers. First, Israeli military superiority is not the absolute guarantee of success it is often assumed to be. Second, if Israel struggled to decisively defeat Hezbollah, a non-state militia, it is unrealistic to expect a knockout blow against a fortified state like Iran. Iran’s defense systems, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone stockpiles are far more robust and dispersed. Recent history underscores that a swift, clean military solution is less a viable strategy and more a dangerous illusion.
Iran’s Retaliatory Capabilities and the Costs of Escalation
Critics of diplomacy also often underestimate Iran’s ability to defend itself and respond effectively to an attack—a miscalculation fraught with danger. Over the past year, the back-and-forth strikes between Iran and Israel have vividly demonstrated Tehran’s growing military capabilities and its capacity for retaliation. For instance, on October 1, Iran launched a coordinated missile and drone attack on Israel, bypassing advanced Israeli air defenses and inflicting both material damage and insecurity. In response, Israel struck back on October 27, targeting Iran’s Russian-made S-300 air defense systems, ballistic missile production facilities, and solid fuel manufacturing infrastructure for long-range missiles.
Hawks portray the Israeli strike as a decisive blow, leaving Iran vulnerable to a low-cost U.S. or Israeli attack. Yet even Israeli officials disagree. The Nagel Committee in Israel recently confirmed that the country does not have the capability to launch a decisive attack on Iran’s military and nuclear facilities without U.S. support. Former IDF spokesperson and air defense commander Ran Kochav reinforced this reality, cautioning, “I would cautiously say they [Iran] still have strength left; it’s not as if this morning they have no air defense system at all and are completely exposed.” Retired Major General Yaakov Amidror warned an attack without U.S. coordination would risk severe retaliation requiring American intervention.
Despite Israel’s recent attack, many of Iran’s air defenses remain intact, bolstered by advanced systems reverse-engineered from Russian, Chinese, and U.S. technology. In recent military drills, Tehran has showcased its readiness, simulating responses to airstrikes and unveiling new underground “missile cities” alongside advanced drones and missiles. These moves send a clear signal: Iran is prepared to retaliate forcefully against any attack.
A large-scale assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities would all but guarantee a massive retaliatory campaign—one that could escalate beyond Israel’s borders to U.S. forces and partners in the region. At best, military strikes might set Iran’s nuclear timeline back by a few years. But at worst, such an action would ignite a far-reaching conflict that compromises energy security, endangers U.S. personnel, undermines regional stability, and strains diplomatic ties withallies who have no appetite for another protracted conflict in the Middle East.
Why a Foreign Attack Won’t Topple the Islamic Republic
A persistent idea among hawkish policymakers is that a foreign military strike could trigger the collapse of the Islamic Republic. But this belief overlooks a powerful force within Iran: nationalism. History shows that foreign aggression tends to unite Iranians against the invader, fostering a sense of shared solidarity that could bolster, rather than weaken, the ruling theocracy.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long attempted to stoke dissent within Iran, even addressing Iranians directly multiple times in recent months to portray himself as some sort of savior against their repressive government. However, the aftermath of Israel’s October strike on Iran reveals the futility of this strategy. Instead of sparking mass opposition to the government, the attack plunged ordinary Iranians into fear and uncertainty. Civil society leaders and groups, pro-democracy activists, and politicalprisoners alike issued stark warnings: war would derail prospects for democratic change, not hasten them.
The reaction from everyday Iranians was equally telling. Many took to the streets—not in protest against the regime, but to mourn the soldiers killed in the assault. These moments of collective grief underscored a broader truth: foreign attacks are broadly seen as assaults on the nation itself, not just its government.
Far from weakening the Islamic Republic, a military campaign is likely to strengthen its hold, at least in the short term, and deepen the challenges faced by those fighting for a freer and more democratic Iran. The lesson for policymakers? Toppling the regime from the outside isn’t just wishful thinking—it’s counterproductive.
A Better Path Forward: Diplomacy and a Deal
With the risks clear, the pressing question remains: How can policymakers prevent Iran’s nuclear program from advancing while avoiding a devastating regional war? The answer lies in reinvigorated diplomacy.
The 2015 nuclear deal provided a proven framework for freezing and even rolling back key elements of Iran’s nuclear program. Next October, the UN sanctions “snapback” mechanism—a crucial part of that deal—expires, and if triggered by France, Germany, and the UK, it would automatically reinstate sanctions. Iran has warned that such a move would force it out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), destroying remaining safeguards and leaving diplomacy in tatters.
This looming deadline demands urgent action. If the Europeans trigger snapback, the reimposition of UN sanctions and Iran leaving the NPT would dramatically increase tensions and make future negotiations infinitely harder. Policymakers must prevent this domino effect by re-engaging diplomatically now.
Diplomacy offers tangible, achievable benefits that make it the most viable path forward. A revived or updated nuclear deal can reimpose verifiable restrictions and intrusive inspections on Iran’s nuclear program, significantly hindering any covert pursuit of a nuclear weapon. It also creates critical channels of communication that can help address broader regional flashpoints, reducing the risks of miscalculation and violent escalation. Furthermore, by incorporating economic incentives, diplomacy has the potential to empower civil society within Iran over time, avoiding the backlash and rally-around-the-flag effects that often result from military action or coercive measures.
Policymakers in the U.S. and Europe have a narrow but critical window to prioritize negotiations. Restoring or updating a nuclear deal—while leveraging the pressure of sanctions and Iran’s own economic vulnerabilities—offers the best path to curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions without plunging the region into chaos.
Kate Hixon is the Advocacy Director for Africa at Amnesty International USA and Kehinde Togun is the Managing Director for Public Engagement at Humanity United and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for International Policy
Following his second inauguration, President Donald Trump has another chance to enact his foreign policy vision and we urge him to include addressing one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. With more than 11.4 million Sudanese displaced and over 18,000 killed, the conflict in Sudan presents grave challenges to the new administration. Sudan’s continued collapse is not only an immediate human rights threat to civilians but also risks further destabilizing an already fragile region—a major risk to the United States and its own security interests. The Sudan conflict will also continue to be intertwined with the administration’s Middle East policy; many of those supplying weapons fueling ongoing atrocities were key allies in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas. Despite these complications, President Trump has a legacy-defining opportunity by immediately prioritizing Sudan before even more civilians are killed.
Background
Conflict in Sudan broke out on April 15, 2023, months after two divisions of the Sudanese state militia ended their power sharing agreement, following the removal of their civilian partners from the transitional government in October 2022. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan wanted the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”) integrated into the traditional army faster than the RSF was prepared to submit control. For the first time in Sudan’s history violent conflict seeped into the capital and quickly spread to the peripheries as well. Soon most of Sudan’s hospitals were out of commission and nearly two million people had fled the country, with millions more displaced internally.
President Biden initially issued two statements around the closure of the U.S. Embassy and evacuation of Americans. However, it was nearly a year and a half before he addressed the Sudanese people directly. Despite pressure from Congress, it took nearly a year for the Biden administration to appoint a Special Envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, and it did not go unnoticed that the envoy reported to Assistant Secretary for Africa, Molly Phee, instead of the Secretary of State. Intentionally or unintentionally, the administration’s message was that Sudan wasn’t a senior-level priority. Yet every few weeks, new reports of atrocities emerged, with the UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide warning that the “the situation today bears all the marks of risk of genocide, with strong allegations that this crime has already been committed.” In its final days, the Biden administration finally made a genocide determination. The administration also sanctioned leaders of both RSF and the SAF.
Despite co-leading several failed attempts at ceasefires with Saudi Arabia and ultimately standing up a larger Alliance for Lifesaving Peace (ALPS) working group; President Biden leaves office having made no material difference for the lives of the Sudanese people. Meanwhile, up to 24 million people are at risk of acute hunger with famine declared in some areas, and weapons continue to pour into Sudan into the hands of belligerents on both sides who continue to commit war crimes and harm civilians. The number of Sudanese refugees is growing in Chad, Egypt, South Sudan and Ethiopia where many face further human rights violations from their host state. South Sudan’s own moribund economy has been directly impacted by the halt of the flow of oil – causing further instability to an already precarious situation. Today, there is a greater risk of the conflict spreading and further destabilizing the Horn of Africa and harming even more civilians.
What Trump Can Do
Despite all the challenges the international community faces, there are several steps the new Trump administration can take within the first 100 days to stop civilian suffering in Sudan. Prioritizing these actions now would meaningfully impact the conflict before it reaches the grim two-year milestone.
First and most urgently, President Trump must appoint his own Presidential Envoy for Sudan. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has previously made a bipartisan demand for this and the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act codifies a Special Envoy for Sudan. Former Special Envoy Perriello—an energetic advocate—was never formally nominated nor was he seen as a senior Envoy with the ear of key Biden administration officials. As a result, he was hampered by a lack of influence with the external actors with whom he needed to negotiate. Outside of the U.S., counterparts did not view his appointment as a signal that Sudan was a top priority for President Biden. President Trump therefore must appoint a senior official who will be understood to truly be the administration’s emissary. Furthermore, formally nominating someone—and doing so early—would signal long term interest in addressing the crisis in Sudan, as the appointment will not be restricted by Senate rules on non-confirmed envoys.
Secondly, the Trump administration must immediately and forcefully convey that there will be consequences to governments that choose to continue to send weapons in clear violation of the arms embargo on Darfur. They must also message that beyond violating the Darfur arms embargo, international humanitarian law (IHL) precludes sending weapons to other parts of Sudan, as all states are prohibited from transferring or permitting private actors to transfer weapons to a party of an armed conflict – whether a state or non-state armed group – where there is a clear risk that this would contribute to the commission of international humanitarian law violations. President Trump should have these conversations directly with leaders of countries who are either directly or through shell companies arming the belligerents. The Trump administration will have both open-source information such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports on these weapons flows as well as classified intelligence so that the leaders cannot deny responsibility. It’s imperative that this information be shared to avoid the lack of accountability that existed in the Biden administration. Furthermore, President Trump’s reported close personal relationship with authorities in the UAE could be seen as an advantage if they’re more amenable to responding to a request from him than the previous administration.
In parallel, the administration must immediately begin laying the groundwork for an expansion of the U.N. Darfur arms embargo to cover the entirety of Sudan. The Security Council and its political composition make this a daunting task, and there are several key steps the Biden administration failed to take that would have laid the groundwork for success. However, there is a useful playbook to follow from the previous Trump administration when UN Ambassador Nikki Haley successfully led an effort to adopt an arms embargo on South Sudan. Haley herself made a call to the President of Sierra Leone and coordinated with like-minded UNSC partners to lobby Security Council governments and secure support. The senior level lobbying to multiple partners sent a strong signal that this was a U.S. priority. This level of diplomatic engagement was lacking under the Biden administration and President Trump would do well to instruct Cabinet officials to begin to signal that securing an expanded arms embargo is a top priority and work closely with Security Council partners to achieve it.
It will also be important for the Trump administration to reset relationships with the African Union and African states on the Sudan portfolio. When the conflict broke out the U.S. instinctively turned to its Gulf partner, Saudi Arabia, to coordinate on addressing the conflict and initial talks were held in Jeddah. The Biden administration rationale was the close links several of the Gulf states had with Burhan and Hemedti; yet it was a mistake to do so as it resulted in sidelining the African Union. While the African Union has its flaws that have hindered its own response to the Sudan crisis, it is a vital partner for addressing the conflict—the AU also has mechanisms that if brought to bear could hold the belligerents accountable. For example if the African Union decided it was in the best interest of civilians in Sudan to expand the arms embargo, it is significantly less likely that China or Russia would veto the expansion. Furthermore, with more African countries directly impacted by this conflict, the AU has an incentive to see the conflict cease to harm civilians or risk further destabilizing the region.
Finally, President Trump must prioritize responding to the humanitarian crisis. International aid agencies have been hindered in their response by bureaucratic obstacles from the Humanitarian Aid Commission, as well as security risks that make aid delivery difficult. Meanwhile Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms—created and led by Sudanese themselves to respond to their own crisis—continue to be the first line of response for the majority of civilians in need of assistance. While previous USAID Administrator Samantha Power took some steps to help further support these Emergency Response Rooms, bureaucratic hurdles continue to prevent these groups from being funded sufficiently. President Trump should order USAID to present a plan that will allow the U.S. to have a more flexible approach to funding these local groups. The administration must also lobby Congress to ensure that there is sufficient humanitarian funding for Sudan, as the response remains woefully underfunded. Taking these concrete steps will greatly reduce the extent of famine in Sudan – unfortunately, it is already likely too late to prevent it all together.
Conclusion:
While the new administration has multiple priorities, it is essential that addressing the conflict in Sudan be at the top of the list. Civilians in Sudan have endured suffering for nearly two years due to international indifference. Without more robust action, and a proactive approach from top to bottom, not only will civilians in Sudan continue to suffer but the risk for regional instability increases. President Trump must take advantage of his relationships with many of the proxies involved in the conflict to stop the weapons flow into Sudan and protect civilians.
Stephen Semler is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and author of the Polygraph newsletter on Substack.
The Israeli government is slated to meet today to ratify the recently-announced ceasefire deal with Hamas, despite mixed messages from Netanyahu on implementation and resistance from some of his most extreme ministers. The Israeli government is slated to meet today to ratify the recently-announced ceasefire deal with Hamas, despite mixed messages from Netanyahu on implementation and resistance from some of his most extreme ministers. For its part, Hamas remains committed to the ceasefire agreement, and has reportedly urged president-elect Donald Trump to pressure Israel to honor its initial commitment. Pressure is what had been missing from Joe Biden’s approach.
The framework of the deal is nearly identical to the ceasefire agreement Biden presented from May. At the time, Biden stated that Israel had initiated the proposal, but Netanyahu dismissed it as a “nonstarter” the next day. Netanyahu then derailed negotiations by introducing new demands, such as the permanent occupation of Gaza’s border with Egypt, which appeared to be aimed solely at undermining the deal. Negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage release stalled thereafter. The fact that the agreement announced Wednesday is nearly identical to the one proposed in May suggests that Israel has since abandoned some of the key demands that previously sabotaged the deal.
What changed? As far as US actions are concerned, Biden and Trump both credited themselves for the diplomatic breakthrough, and are now jockeying for the greater share of it. “I laid out the precise contours of this plan on May 31, 2024,” Biden declared in a statement. “My diplomacy never ceased…to get this done.” That’s true, but Netanyahu publicly rebuffed the plan, embarrassing the administration. Yet, when presented with a nearly identical proposal seven months later by Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, Netanyahu agreed to it.
The difference was Trump’s willingness to pressure Netanyahu—pressure Netayahu knows he is better off not to resist. Arab officials reportedly told The Times of Israel that Trump’s envoy “swayed Netanyahu more in one meeting than Biden did all year.” While Netanyahu brushed off Biden, Trump “bulldozed” him into accepting the deal, according to Haaretz. A diplomat familiar with the negotiations told The Washington Post that Trump’s intervention was “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.” Former Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski acknowledged this dynamic, writing, “This was Biden’s deal…but he couldn’t have done it without Trump.” Malinowski credited the breakthrough to Trump’s blunt warning that the war must end by January 20, contrasting this with Biden’s reluctance to exercise similar leverage.
The Biden administration pretended it was powerless to shape Israel’s behavior over the last year. For instance, in February, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller claimed, “There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate other countries’ sovereign decisions.” Meanwhile, the administration was sending Israel new weapons shipments every 36 hours, on average. These shipments empowered Netanyahu’s government to reject ceasefire agreements and pursue its preferred course of action instead, namely, continuing its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Without the unprecedented levels of military aid approved by Biden, Israel’s war machine would have ground to a halt. Retired Israeli General Yitzhak Brik underscored this, stating, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs—it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” Instead of forcing Israel to accept a ceasefire, the Biden administration spent tens of billions in US taxpayer dollars incentivizing Netanyahu not to. Achieving the current breakthrough did not require Trump’s election but rather a change in course from the policy Biden enacted and Kamala Harris endorsed on the campaign trail.
The path forward is clear: Trump must sustain pressure on Israel. Without it, the massacres that have continued even after the ceasefire announcement are likely to persist. If Trump’s administration fails to maintain this pressure, Netanyahu’s statement from last month may become a grim reality: “If there is a deal—and I hope there will be—Israel will return to fighting afterward. There is no point in pretending otherwise because returning to fighting is needed to complete the goals of the war.”
Fortunately, the United States holds immense leverage over Israel. It is crucial to question whether the Trump administration will use it effectively to ensure the ceasefire progresses past its initial stages and leads to a lasting ceasefire, one that involves the unconditional release of hostages and political prisoners, a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and implementation of security and reconstruction efforts needed to allow Gazans to return home.
Over the past months, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given several interviews in which he repeatedly claims that Hamas, rather than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been the key obstacle to achieving a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza. This messaging has been echoed by other Biden administration officials and surrogates.
At a workshop in Geneva in November, a recently retired US ambassador, who had just returned from meeting White House officials, claimed, “There are currently three ceasefire deals on the table and Hamas isn’t responding to any of them.” The veteran diplomat acknowledged the suffering in Gaza but blamed it on Hamas’ “rejection” of an agreement to end the war.
To my surprise, a former senior Israeli security official in the room rushed to challenge this claim, which he described as a “shameful attempt to rewrite history and blame Hamas rather than Netanyahu for the obstruction of ceasefire talks.”
A few weeks later in Doha, I met a senior Arab official who emphasized to me one of the most crucial things Biden can do in his “lame duck” period is name and shame Netanyahu for systematically foiling ceasefire talks. But the official quickly added the White House is “instead rewriting history.”
Since July, all of the sources I have spoken to confirmed that Hamas had accepted Biden’s ceasefire proposal that was endorsed by the UN Security Council, which is premised on an 18-weeks long ceasefire divided into three phases, at the end of which there would be a permanent end to the Gaza war after all hostages have been released. The same sources, as well as Israeli media, and the Egyptian mediators have consistently blamed Netanyahu for obstructing the talks and refusing to end the war.
Even in the latest ongoing round of negotiations, senior Israeli security officials are sounding the alarm that their Prime Minister is still sabotaging the talks. Yet, the White House keeps insisting that Hamas is “the obstacle.”
The reality is that since July, US president Joe Biden has completely stopped pressuring Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire-hostage deal. Rather than tell the truth about Netanyahu repeatedly foiling the talks, the outgoing president and his administration are choosing instead to try and rewrite the history of what has really unfolded over 15 months of negotiations.
The Full Story
For the first four months of the Gaza war, the Biden administration opposed a full ceasefire, instead opting at best for a temporary “pause” to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, which was briefly achieved in late November 2023. Biden said earlier that month: “a cease-fire is not peace… every cease-fire is time [Hamas members] exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing.”
However, growing US domestic pressure, as well as Israel’s failure to locate and rescue the hostages combined with the sense that Israel had accomplished what it could militarily in Gaza eventually lifted Biden’s ban on using the word “ceasefire” by March 2024.
Talks began to mature with Qatari and Egyptian mediation throughout the spring, as the US exerted significant yet clearly inadequate pressure on Netanyahu, who had foiled two summits in Paris in January and February by procrastinating, severely limiting the mandate of Israeli negotiators, instructing ministers to attack any deal taking shape and publicly vowing to continue the war.
In early April, a concrete proposal was put on the table by the Qatari and Egyptian mediators and the US envisaging a ceasefire of three phases, six weeks each, in which hostages (including those deceased) would be gradually released in return for incremental withdrawal of Israeli forces from all of Gaza, an end to the war, and increased humanitarian and reconstruction aid. The first phase would have seen the release of 33 Israeli hostages.
Serious negotiations then took place in Cairo and Doha, with American officials making a genuine effort to narrow the gaps between the two sides. One senior Arab government source told me CIA director Bill Burns was at some point sitting literally in the room next door to where the Hamas delegation was negotiating in Cairo, and repeatedly amended the proposal with his own handwriting to get a deal done.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu sought to undermine those negotiations throughout April by consistently insisting on an imminent full invasion of Rafah and a continuation of the war after a pause. He also leaked sensitive classified information to extremist ministers in his government to derail the talks and restricted the mandate of Israeli negotiators.
A senior member of Israel’s negotiating team said in April that “Since January, it’s clear to everyone that we’re not conducting negotiations. It happens again and again: You get a mandate during the day, then the prime minister makes phone calls at night, instructs ‘don’t say that’ and ‘I’m not approving this,’ thus bypassing both the team leaders and the war cabinet.”
Throughout this period, Biden refrained completely from publicly calling out Netanyahu for explicitly sabotaging the talks.
On May 5, Hamas accepted the April proposal with reservations and amendments, but before the Israeli negotiating team got to formulate a response, Israel’s prime minister rushed to denounce Hamas’ position as “delusional” and ordered the immediate invasion of Rafah on May 7.
Biden, who had promised to halt arm supplies to Israel if it violated his “red line” of invading Rafah, decided to instead suspend one shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and nothing more.
The Only Realistic Deal
On May 31, Biden gave a televised speech presenting what he described as the outline of an Israeli ceasefire proposal submitted four days before. A senior Arab official confirmed to me in August that Biden’s proposal was in fact articulated by the Israeli team who turned to the White House after Netanyahu’s immediate answer was negative. That proposal had incorporated significant principles from Hamas’ May 5 response that Netanyahu had described as “delusional.”
Biden’s speech was designed to give Israel a victory narrative, stating that “At this point, Hamas no longer is capable of carrying out another October 7th.” He warned “Indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’… will only bog down Israel in Gaza, draining the economic, military, and human resources, and furthering Israel’s isolation in the world.”
11 days later, the proposal was formally endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2735. However, Netanyahu rejected Biden’s speech as “not [an] accurate” reflection of Israeli positions, and repeatedly asserted his insistence on the continuation of the war. The White House chose again to blame Hamas for the deadlock instead of pressing Netanyahu.
After lengthy negotiations, on July 2 Hamas accepted an updated Biden proposal with minor amendments, particularly relating to assurances that the ceasefire would lead to ending the war instead of a mere pause, according to multiple senior Arab and Palestinianofficials involved in the talks.Hamas were informed that the US and Israeli negotiating team were both on board. However, a few days later, Netanyahu issued four new “non-negotiable” conditions that mediators and even Israeli security officials saw as intentionally sabotaging the deal. The conditions were: resuming the war after a pause “until [Israel’s] war aims are achieved”; no IDF withdrawal from the Philadelphia corridor between Rafah and Egypt; Israel would restrict the return of over one million displaced Gazans to the Northern half of the enclave; maximizing the number of living hostages to be released in the first phase.
Israel then quickly escalated its attacks in Gaza. On July 13 it killed Hamas’ chief military commander Mohammed al-Deif in a strike that killed over 100 civilians. On July 31, Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hamas’ top negotiator, Ismael Haniya in Tehran. The day before, he ordered the assassination of Hezbollah’s top commander Fuad Shukur.
Multiple sources told me Hamas informed mediators that it still endorsed the July 2 ceasefire formula and UNSC resolution 2735. Biden called the Haniya assassination “not helpful” but that was it. Senior White House officials would then leak to Israeli media that Biden “realized Netanyahu lied to him” about the ceasefire-hostage deal, but the president himself never publicly called out Netanyahu.
Buying Time and Gaslighting
In August, ahead of the Democratic National Convention, the US opened a renewed round of negotiations, having received Iranian and Hezbollah promises of refraining from retaliation if a deal was reached.
Instead of building upon Biden’s proposal and pressing Israel to compromise, the Americans simply incorporated Netanyahu’s four impossible conditions as “a bridging proposal.” They attempted to entice Hamas to the table by getting Israel to reduce its veto on which Palestinian detainees it would release in a deal (Hamas presented a list of 300 heavily sentenced individuals, “the VIPs.” Netanyahu vetoed 100 names, including Marwan Barghouti, and insisted on only releasing prisoners with less than 22 years left in their sentence. The Americans lowered this veto to 75 names then 65 in August, per a senior Arab mediator).
Since then, the White House has attempted to re-write history and promote an official narrative blaming Hamas for Netanyahu’s systematic foiling of the talks.
A Palestinian source directly involved in the negotiations told me then that Hamas’ leader Yahia Sinwar sent them clear instructions to stick to the July 2 Biden proposal instead of getting stuck in a limbo of endless negotiations. Hamas refused to show up for the August round of talks as long as Israel rejected the most important two stipulations of Biden’s proposal: gradual IDF withdrawal from Gaza and ending the war.
Remarkably, the Americans pressed Egypt and Qatar to issue a false statement on August 16 that emphasized “talks were serious and constructive and were conducted in a positive atmosphere,” although there were no talks to begin with.
A senior Arab official involved in the negotiations told me both Israel, Qatar and Egypt objected to the idea of issuing this statement, but the Americans argued it was necessary to create domestic pressure on Netanyahu to narrow the gaps. The actual goal, according to this official, was likely to make it harder for Iran and Hezbollah to retaliate and to allow Kamala’s Democratic National Convention to pass peacefully without disruptions.
The official added that Netanyahu had been sending his advisor, Ophir Falk, to the talks to undermine Israel’s negotiating team, and that the US asked mediators on multiple occasions to prevent him from attending the meetings.
As soon as the DNC ended, Biden blamed Hamas again for the failure of the talks, and effectively stopped trying to get a deal, with US officials declaring in September that a ceasefire deal has become unlikely during Biden’s term. Since then, the White House has attempted to re-write history and promote an official narrative blaming Hamas for Netanyahu’s systematic foiling of the talks.
Amid the deadlock, Qatar declared in early November that it was suspending its mediation role, which a senior Arab official told me was intended to create domestic pressure on Netanyahu. The Qataris also suspended Hamas’ office in Doha and Hamas leaders left the country by mid-November.
A New Round, Little Hope
In early December, Hamas’ entire leadership were suddenly invited to Cairo then Doha for renewed negotiations. Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz quickly expressed unusual hope and optimism about a “real chance” for a deal this time.
However, multiple sources directly involved in these talks told me by then there was no real possibility of a breakthrough. The Hamas delegation kept waiting in Cairo until the last minute, with senior Hamas negotiator Bassem Naim being the last official departing from Egypt to Doha late at night on December 5, hoping for a positive change of position from the Israeli team, who still only offered a temporary pause.
A senior Arab official told me president-elect Donald Trump had asked the Qataris and Egyptians to get a deal done before he takes office. The official, however, added that Israel’s Prime Minister is not budging while at the same time issuing false positive statements of a breakthrough and progress to buy time and pretend to seek a deal until Trump is in office, where Netanyahu can trade the Gaza war for something big in the West Bank.
Between Doha and Cairo, a senior Palestinian official directly involved in the negotiations told me in December that “there are serious talks, there’s progress and discussions of details, but until today no one presented a final proposal to sign.” He added “Unless Netanyahu does something that takes us back to square one, there is great optimism that we can reach something within a short period.”
Israeli officials asserted the same night that a deal could be reached within two weeks, but warned that Netanyahu is still not “granting a sufficient mandate to the negotiating team,” adding “It will not be possible to return everyone without an end to the war.”
More than a month later, no deal is yet in sight, as Israeli security officials say Netanyahu still insists on delaying the withdrawal from the Philadelphia and Netzarim corridors, restricting the return of displaced Gazans to the north, continuing the war after a partial deal, and demanding a higher number of hostages in the first phase. This led the mother of Israeli hostage Matan Zangauker to lead a demonstration in front of Israel’s Knesset on Monday to protest “a partial deal with a return to fighting,” which she said would be “a death sentence for Matan and everyone left behind”.
Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said the same day “Our presence in Gaza today, which means that we are not making a comprehensive hostage deal, is contrary to the political and security interests of the State of Israel.”
The real history of these negotiations reveals a troubling truth: while President Biden has consistently blamed Hamas for the failure of ceasefire talks, his own failure to hold Netanyahu accountable has allowed the conflict to drag on. Biden is now trying to hide this failure by absolving Netanyahu of any blame, despite a mountain of evidence showing how he repeatedly sabotaged peace efforts. Recognizing this distortion is crucial, to inform the public in order to mount greater pressure where it’s needed the most to return all hostages and end Gaza’s apocalyptic suffering, and to prevent further manipulation from future administrations.
