President-elect Donald Trump has already tipped his hand about how he's going to handle trying to free the hostages still trapped in Gaza, wrote Zeeshan Aleem for MSNBC — and it's all but doomed to fail.
Specifically, Trump is going to go for flash and thunder, as he made clear in aTruth Social rant this week demanding Hamas surrender.
“If the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity,” he wrote, adding that if the hostages aren't freed, their captors will be "hit harder than anybody has been hit."
This outburst is indicative of the way Trump always approaches foreign affairs, Aleem wrote: "He’ll likely lean into what some call 'the madman theory of foreign policy' — the idea that unpredictability and an apparent willingness to use force aggressively can help a political leader intimidate his opponents and achieve his geopolitical goals. But it’s unlikely to be effective here. That’s because Trump’s pledge to hit Hamas 'harder than anybody has been hit' isn’t a break from the current strategy but a continuation of it."
The United States, after all, has hardly been unsympathetic to Israel's push to defeat Hamas with military force. The Biden administration has urged restraint against civilians, and pushed Israel into various rounds of peace talks, and Trump may well abandon even those guardrails — but overall, he wrote, "For over a year, the U.S. has been supporting Israel’s war on Hamas and its destruction of Gaza with intelligence, military advisers and huge amounts of weaponry and ammunition."
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Hamas has been drastically weakened in this war, including the killing of its leadership, but they have demonstrated they are willing to accept massive losses to military and civilian life, and are using the destruction to recruit and radicalize new fighters. Moreover, Aleem wrote, the war ending also requires pressure on Israel and on Netanyahu specifically, who has prolonged the war to try to stave off the corruption charges that could end his political career: "Netanyahu has deliberately set vague criteria for the conditions for an end to his military operation: It’s unclear how and whether Hamas can ever be totally 'destroyed.'"
For all these reasons, Aleem concluded, Trump's threats are not going to produce a breakthrough on the hostages.
"Trump might think it makes him sound like a madman who shouldn’t be messed with. But implying that he might try to help brutalize Gaza is the most predictable thing a U.S. president could promise right now," he wrote.