America’s adversaries — the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese — are watching closely to see what Trump will do.
Phil Klein is correct that Trump’s ultimatum to Hamas has fundamentally changed the game in this conflict.
Hamas was testing President Trump’s patience by declaring it was postponing hostage releases indefinitely due to phony claims that Israel violated the cease-fire agreement. Well, Trump has responded by throwing down the gauntlet: If Hamas does not release the hostages by noon on Saturday, he now says, “all hell is gonna break out.”
Trump, critically, is not saying that Hamas has to agree to release the next batch of a few hostages under the current cease-fire agreement. No, he is saying all of the roughly 70 of them who still remain (a mix of those dead and alive). He declared, “Not in dribs and drabs — not two, and one, and three, and four, and two.”
It’s no doubt true that Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, et al. believed that, by engaging in prolonged negotiations with Hamas, holding Israel back, and pushing various cease-fire proposals almost from the very beginning of this war, they were carrying out an enlightened, humanitarian foreign policy. Unfortunately for all of us, however, the Biden administration’s peace feelers had the direct effect of giving Hamas the hope that they could buy time, save face, win concessions, and, in the end, escape utter destruction.
The stated American policy that “we do not negotiate with terrorists” has always been, alas, a polite fiction. Successive American and Western governments have negotiated with terrorists, bought them off, traded horses with them, and paid kings’ ransoms to get our people back. Israel, of course, agreed in 2011 to release 1,027 Palestinians, many of them brutal, murderous jihadi terrorists, for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, taken hostage in a cross-border raid in 2006. One of those Hamas terrorists set free was Yahya Sinwar, who a decade later was the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
And make no mistake, over the last year and a half, the Biden administration in effect incentivized a similar strategy of terrorism and hostage-taking by negotiating with Hamas (all with the “help” of “friends” in Qatar).
Now, it’s an unambiguous good that President Trump is turning the page on that failure. He should be applauded and supported in that policy. I think most Americans would agree that Hamas ought to release the remaining hostages, immediately, and that, if the terrorists choose not to, that U.S. policy henceforth should be the utter destruction of Hamas and all who aid it.
It’s worth voicing one note of caution, however, as a matter of realpolitik. After such a muscular announcement, should Trump fail to enforce his “red line” with concrete action, the result won’t be merely the continued suffering of the hostages now held in captivity. It won’t merely be the weakening of the American and Israeli position. Intended or not, it will be the weakening of Trump’s position as commander in chief in general.
We shouldn’t doubt that other of America’s adversaries — the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese — are watching closely to see what Trump will do. If Trump follows through, and punishes Hamas for defying him, the result would be a salutary deterrent effect on the anti-American axis.
If Trump fails to follow through, it will be the first major mistake of his second term. And it very well could have long-lasting reverberations.