Trump has just shown the world what America First really means

Donald Trump
Donald Trump always means what he says, but what he says isn’t always what he means - Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images North America

How dare Donald Trump state the obvious about the Palestinians. Gaza, Trump said at Tuesday’s press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, is an uninhabitable “hellhole”. Rebuilding Gaza’s physical fabric will take years. The Gazans are incapable of doing it. Any reconstruction that resets to Oct 6 2023 will “end up the same way it has for a hundred years”, with more terrorism and further destruction. Time to “do something different”. The United States can “take over” Gaza, and the Gazans move out while a “Riviera of the Middle East” rises over the rubble.

The media are shocked, just shocked. The Arabs and Europeans are doubling down on refloating a “two-state solution” that has been a dead duck for 20 years. China and Russia, the historic heavyweights of forced population movement, are smirking in the unaccustomed sunlight of the moral high ground. Everyone says the Gazans must live in the rubble and stay under the control of Hamas. No one asks why the Gazans should be suspended in the aspic of their leaders’ failure and fanaticism.

Trump always means what he says, but what he says isn’t always what he means. He is an erratic personality but a consistent character. He has consistently criticised the War on Terror as a disaster for America. His vindication is that his heresy, withdrawing the troops, became the Biden administration’s dogma. Trump is not about to invade the Middle East now.

When Trump muses about “long-term ownership” of Gaza, he isn’t donning the pith helmet and khaki shorts and proposing a 21st-century update of the British Mandate. He’s thinking of the developer’s long tail of revenue: freeholds, rents, service charges and golf buggy rentals. That’s why he refused to confirm whether he would send in American troops.

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He also refused to be drawn on whether his proposal means the end of the “two-state solution”. The question is like accusing an undertaker of murder because he builds the coffins. The Palestinians spurned their chance of peaceful co-existence with Israel in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2014. They killed the prospect of a Palestinian state on Oct 7, 2023.

Trump’s gambit is the first public statement of what happens next. American clients such as Egypt and Jordan encouraged the Palestinians’ disaster by demonising Israel and glamorising Islamist psychopathy as “resistance”. Egypt and Jordan helped to break Palestine. Why shouldn’t they own some of the responsibility for fixing it? The same goes for the moral frotteurs of Europe. If the Irish government really cared, it would offer a few thousand Gazans a flight out of their misery.

If Gulf monarchies such as the UAE and the Saudis want to join in building a second Dubai, why not? The original two-state pitch for Gaza was “Singapore on the Med”. A deal on the future of Gaza that fits into a regional peace deal is another blow to Iran’s pretensions to a nuclear-tipped empire. The foundation, the first round of Abraham Accords, survived Israel’s war with Hamas. After Oct 7, the Emiratis kept flights open between Dubai and Tel Aviv while European and American airlines severed flights to Israel.

There is no Trumpism, only Trump. This move confirms what he thinks “America First” means. On foreign policy, the MAGA movement divides between “primacists” and isolationists. The primacists want to restore America’s global leadership. They argue for rebuilding the defence industrial base and a toughened, “trust-and-verify” engagement with the world. The isolationists believe that America is done. They want to raise the tariffs and raise the drawbridge before any more foreigners come in. They take the hysterical gibbering of Tucker Carlson as the clarion of the End Times.

The primacists have the presidential ear, for now. But Trump remains ideologically promiscuous and twitchily pragmatic. He wants selective tariffs. He wants America to become the world’s oil and gas reserve. He also wants to revive American influence in the Middle East.

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The Republican majority in Congress must, like America’s allies, follow along as best it can. The MAGA contingent are still a minority among House Republicans, but Trump is now the boss because Trump owns the base. He has the popular vote. He holds the global initiative. And he has everyone’s attention.

As they say in Saudi, it’s good to be the king.

Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a columnist at the Washington Examiner