President Donald Trump may have had his “only Nixon could go to China” moment.
There is no telling how long Trump’s diplomatic breakthrough in Gaza will last or whether it will truly inaugurate an era of peace in the Middle East.
Nor is it a foregone conclusion that Trump can continue to soar above the clouds as a unique hawk-dove hybrid before the risks of Middle Eastern quagmires send his aspirations crashing down to earth.
But at least some of the reasons Trump has so far succeeded where the former President Joe Biden failed—and make no mistake, the release of the still-living Israeli hostages held in captivity by Hamas for over two years and a ceasefire in Gaza are successes—are reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s opening to China.
Nixon’s anticommunist credentials were unassailable. Even a considerable part of his outreach to Communist China was a product of his desire to gain an upper hand in the Cold War. Nixon wanted to drive a wedge between Beijing and the Soviet Union, exacerbating a growing split within international communism.
Similarly, Trump’s sympathy for Israel’s plight—and antipathy toward the Jewish state’s enemies—is well documented. He moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in his first term. That was also when his team negotiated the Abraham Accords, seeking peaceful relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. He gave Israel what it wanted in terms of fighting Hamas and the space to challenge Iranian proxies on other fronts. He did not join the rush of other Western leaders to embrace a Palestinian state during the depths of the Gaza war. Trump even directly intervened, however briefly, directly with strikes against the Iranian nuclear sites.
Like the current burst of Gaza diplomacy, the true success of that last operation cannot really be measured in the space of a few cable news cycles, however much the punditocracy wishes it were so. But all of the above combined to give Trump credibility with most Israelis and a majority of Israel’s strongest supporters in the United States.
At the same time, Trump acknowledges more daylight between U.S. and Israeli interests than other pro-Israel voices. He has applied more pressure on, and expressed more public criticism of, the Israeli government than any Republican president since George H.W. Bush. He has simultaneously tried to help Israel win wars while nudging the Israelis to quit while they are ahead.
In some ways, the two are connected. Former Biden aides and allies grouse that his administration pursued deals with similar terms, occasionally implying some kind of corrupt bargain between Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the only impediment to peace.
But the fact was that Biden needed blunter instruments, like the cessation of arms shipments to Israel, to try to influence Netanyahu’s behavior. Trump’s source of leverage came from his leadership of the more pro-Israel political party in the United States and the fact that his continued support was indispensable to Netanyahu. Both Trump and his political coalition had demonstrated more of a recent commitment to Israel’s security than the Democratic Party over which Biden was losing his grip.
Now Trump clearly wants to will his way to phase two, with a permanent end of the war. Some of that will entail things, like disarming and defanging Hamas, that Netanyahu might like if it can actually be done. But it is not clear his and Trump’s endgame here are entirely the same, and Trump has made commitments to Arab states as well.
As has been the case with Russia and Ukraine, Trump will probably exert maximum pressure on whichever side he feels is the biggest obstacle to his goals. That has not always brought success, as when trying to end the war in Ukraine. It may soon reach its limits in the Middle East as well.
When Nixon went to China, both the conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans and the right-wing congressman John Schmitz made some version of the joke that they objected only to his return trip.
Some erstwhile Trump allies in either the pro-Israel community or more restraint-oriented parts of the America First movement may say the same about his Middle East jet-setting. Or, future generations may instead say “only Trump could go to Gaza.”
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