The real reason Trump forced Netanyahu’s hand on a Gaza ceasefire.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

María Corina Machado, leader of the Venezuelan opposition, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, and the timing is kind of hilarious. If Machado ever succeeds in overthrowing her country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump will claim credit for that, like he’s claimed credit for so many recent international successes. (To be fair, Trump’s forceful anti-Madura policies, which the Nobel winner has supported, will have certainly played a role.)

Still, Trump must have been fuming on Friday over the news from Oslo—not only that he didn’t win for manufacturing the recent Gaza ceasefire breakthrough in negotiations between Israel and Hamas, but that he lost to her. Rather than graciously congratulating Machado, whose political cause Trump supports, the White House, fully in character, issued a statement blasting the Nobel committee for placing “politics over peace.”

Trump must have felt further crushed by the defeat because it came on the eve of that ceasefire and hostage-release deal in Gaza—a remarkable feat, which, as even many of his critics concede, he did a great deal to bring about.

However, it was always an absurd notion that Trump would win the prize. Asked on Friday morning why the American president didn’t get the prize, the Nobel committee’s chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, noted that they give the award only to “people of courage and integrity.” (While not 100 percent accurate, it’s still a fair description of why Trump may never win the prize.)

The plain fact is that, quite apart from his self-entitled lobbying (which, if anything, would only have further alienated the committee), Trump has not really brought peace—not to the seven war zones that he falsely claims to have settled, nor as yet anyway to Gaza.

The ceasefire and hostage-for-prisoner exchange—again, a legitimate cause for congratulations all round—mark but the first phase of a peace plan that Trump put forth, incorporating just a few of the plan’s 20 planks. And the region has seen Phase 1 of several peace plans without ever witnessing Phases 2, 3, or beyond. Many have forgotten that, in November 2023, one month into the war, President Joe Biden secured a ceasefire deal that freed 100 Israeli hostages, almost half of those kidnapped in Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid. Biden hoped that the truce could be extended, but neither side was interested in ending the war, nor could either sides’ allies pressure them to do so.

Other planks in the current 20-point plan call on Hamas to disarm and relinquish political power, Israel to withdraw completely from Gaza, both sides to extend the truce indefinitely, a multinational board to secure and rebuild the devastated land, and the resumption of broader talks for a two-state solution to the long-standing Israel-Palestinian conflict.

These are all logical prerequisites to any sort of peace, much less the “eternal peace” that Trump has said his plan augurs. The parties to the first phase of the peace plan have not yet agreed to any of these planks. They have been relegated to subsequent phases. Getting agreement on the basic principles, much less nailing down the details, will make the first phase seem easy in retrospect.

Is this time different? Will we see a second and third phase and beyond?

There are plenty of reasons for pessimism. First, pessimism is the natural state for any contemplations of peace in the Middle East. Too many hopes have been quashed, too many treaties derailed at the last minute, for any reasonably informed actor to be hopeful. Second, the combatants have not backed down from their maximalist aims: Hamas still seeks the destruction of Israel, many Israeli political factions crave an expansion of the Jewish state’s borders to include Gaza, and almost no Israelis are keen to see a Palestinian state wave its flag at the moment—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will never allow such an entity.

Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism—more so than anyone could have plausibly contemplated in the past decade. First, Hamas is severely weakened; it can barely be called an organized military force, and “tenuous” would be a generous term to describe its political control over Gaza. Second, Hamas’ network of support in the region has all but collapsed: Iran has no desire to confront Israel at the moment; Hezbollah and other Shiite militias in the region have been decimated; Assad’s regime in Syria is gone; partly as a result of all this, the leaders of Arab and Gulf states, most of whom have never been keen on Hamas or Palestinian radicals generally, have much less reason to fear popular uprising if they cut their ties to Hamas altogether.

Finally, there is the Trump factor. Until recently, Netanyahu has thought he had Trump in his pocket—and with good reason. Early on in his second term, Trump told him that he should do whatever it takes to “finish” the war quickly. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has publicly denied the existence of “occupied territories” and all but said Gaza and the West Bank should be ceded to Israel.

But then Netanyahu went too far. He dropped bombs on Hamas leaders while they were in Qatar, not realizing—or in any case underestimating—how closely allied Trump felt to the leaders of that small oil-rich emirate. Qatar has long served as an intermediary between Hamas and the rest of the world, an arrangement that was encouraged by the United States. The emirate also hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Finally, and more personally, the emir of Qatar gave Trump a $400 million jet to adapt as his new Air Force One. Also, the Israeli prime minister, usually so politically canny, overlooked that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s close friend and fellow real-estate tycoon who now serves as his Middle Eastern envoy, has long had business interests in Qatar.

In response to Netanyahu’s incursion, Trump signed an executive order declaring, unilaterally, that an armed attack on Qatar would be regarded “as a threat to the peace and security of the United States” and that, in the event of an attack, the U.S. “shall take all lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military—to defend … Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”

This is tantamount to the treaty pledging U.S. support to the nations of NATO, if they came under attack.

Trump also had to have realized Netanyahu would never end the war in Gaza—something Trump seems to have genuinely wanted, in part so that he could win the Nobel Prize, in part for its own sake—and so he finally exerted pressure on Netanyahu. This has been the sort of pressure that Biden never really imposed, the sort of pressure that outside powers have had to exert, either on Israel or the Arab states or both, to end all the wars in the Middle East for the past 75 years.

While sitting together in the Oval Office, Trump made Netanyahu phone the Qatari emir to apologize for attacking his country and promising never to do it again. (Has Netanyahu ever apologized to an Arab for anything? I doubt it.) Then he made Netanyahu agree to sign the first phase of the peace deal—which, however limited, is very similar to accords that Netanyahu had refused to sign in the past.

Also, during the U.N. General Assembly, Trump met individually with other leaders from the region—the heads of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Gulf states—and, among other things, promised them he would never let Israel annex the West Bank. Once they realized he really was pressuring Netanyahu, that a peace deal put on the table might stay on the table, that the Israeli prime minister wouldn’t pull out of the deal after they’d committed to it, they signed on as well.

The next steps, as noted, will be much more strenuous than the steps taken up to this point. Both in pressuring Hamas and stabilizing Gaza, the Arab states will have to step up and act like regional leaders in ways they have never done before. And Trump will have to stay in the game—to keep pushing the Arab leaders and keep the pressure on Netanyahu, even as the prime minister feels resistance from the right-wing factions in his political coalition.

Will Trump stay interested? Details famously bore him, and from here on out, it will be details that pave the path to success or failure—and these are paths that haven’t been paved before. A lot of countries are involved, which might make a peace more robust, but which also might make achieving a peace more difficult.

This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only

Joe Biden Was Always Doomed

This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only

Brett Kavanaugh Is Leading the Supreme Court’s Embrace of Alternative Facts

This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only

This Republican Lawmaker’s Rant About Town Halls Is Really Something!

With One Damning Question, Ketanji Brown Jackson Defined the Supreme Court’s New Term

Not winning the Nobel Peace Prize might make Trump wave off the whole business of seeking peace. What’s the point of working so hard at this if I’m not honored? he might grouse. Then again, if he sticks with his plan to go to the Middle East on Sunday and witness the signing of the peace deal (such as it is) on Monday, and possibly speak before Israel’s parliament, the Knesset (he’s been invited, the first president to be asked since George W. Bush), the leaders will thank him and the crowds will cheer him. That’s what everyone in the world realizes they need to do to win Trump’s favor. If peace is to be built in the Middle East, it will require U.S. leadership, and as long as he’s president, that means leadership by Trump—a brand of leadership that we’ve never seen from him.

As Nahum Barnea, columnist for the Israeli mass-market newspaper Yedioth, quipped to the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, if peace really holds and paves the way for a two-state solution, then Trump will deserve the Noble Prize not only for peace but also for physics and chemistry.

Will he—can he—keep that in mind? And would that matter?

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.