If even the head of the government of the Qatari emirate, which theoretically holds the purse strings of Hamas and harbours its leadership, claims that it will be difficult to disarm the jihadist movement, as the agreements would stipulate, we can consider Trump’s open secret of peace officially revealed .

It does not matter whether Al Thani in saying this reveals the self-sabotage of an agreement, of which Qatar would be with Turkey and Egypt the main guarantor, or reveals an objective difficulty in implementing the twenty points of the plan.

What matters is the now established fact that Trump’s mediation did not bring peace to a thousand-year-old dispute, as the White House tenant had claimed with his usual modesty, but merely a return to the status quo ante, i.e. to 6 October 2023, sealed by the exchange between Israeli hostages and Palestinian terrorists and Trump’s de facto recognition, proclaimed urbi et orbi, of Hamas as a temporary police force in the Strip.

An agreement that freezes the conflict

Neither the US nor the Arab states that are supposed to exercise internal and external security functions and thus reassure Israel seem to have any intention of getting their hands into the nest of snakes in Gaza and actually disarm Hamas. The US has already said it will not do it, the Arab states have not said, but neither have they done anything so far. There is no sign of the Palestinian technical government, nor of the international board of peace, nor of the temporary stabilisation force ‘to be deployed immediately in Gaza’.

It is obvious that this situation preludes a freeze and not a political evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It will lead to the continuation of a low- or medium-intensity war, will not allow for any material and civil reconstruction of Gaza, and will chronicle a tension that will play into the hands of extremists of all stripes: against Israel, but also within Israel.

It is not surprising that Trump prefers chaos, any chaos to a rule-based order because chaos admits as the only order the rule of power, which Maga America recognises, inside and outside the United States, as the only sane, natural ‘constitutional’ principle uncorrupted by the belligerencies of political correctness.

As someone who would be perfectly fine with Putin’s peace in Ukraine, it is not surprising that Trump is now perfectly fine with Hamas’s peace in Gaza, after having supported with equal impudence the plan for the forced ‘de-Palestinisation’ of the Strip and its transformation into an American protectorate and a Mediterranean Las Vegas.

Trump’s nihilistic view of the international order

Believing in nothing, Trump can say or do anything, and rejecting any principle of law he can accept any principle of force, because he is persuaded that American power is able to reap the greater benefits the less it is restrained by multilateral networks and multinational alliances, which imply some institutional obstacle or limitation to its full deployment.

Trump not only thinks he must act as a legibus solutus ruler, he thinks America’s greatness can only be best affirmed in a legibus solutus world. Trump is comfortable with and often has words of esteem and sympathy for all tyrants on earth not only because he envies their ‘freedom’, but because he recognises their ordering function and historical rationality.

This is why he now thinks that since he cannot make Gaza a Las Vegas, he might as well make it a no-man’s land, leaving Israel to control one part of it and continue to suffer the threat of the other, once again under the control of Hamas, as long as there is a swift return to a less paralysing ‘normality’ and an endemic war that is less visible and alarming in the eyes of the world. Anything goes for Trump, as long as it is compatible with his nihilistic strategy towards any form of international rule of law.

However, the situation in Gaza is one of those cases where it is shown that leaving things to their ‘natural’ evolution does not establish a favourable balance for the strongest, but ends up in global political entropy.