Trump wants a second ‘day after.’ The Arabs should know better

Nearly a year ago, on the sidelines of last year’s UN General Assembly meetings in New York, US President Donald Trump gathered a number of Arab and Muslim leaders to present his plan for ending the war on Gaza and arrangements for “the day after” in the Strip.

Trump laid out his vision for the post-war phase: a Gaza administration with no role for Hamas, partial involvement of the Palestinian Authority, reconstruction of the Strip, and new security and political arrangements contingent on Hamas handing over the remaining Israeli captives and the bodies of the dead. In return, he pledged to stop Israel annexing parts of the West Bank, to withdraw its forces gradually from Gaza, and to increase humanitarian aid.

“Everyone left the meeting full of hope. For the first time, we felt that a serious plan was on the table. President Trump wants to end the war, leave this horrific chapter behind, and move toward a better future in the region,” one Arab attendee said after the meeting.

Arab and Muslim leaders did not stop at accepting Trump’s plan for “eternal peace.” Some took it upon themselves to sell it as the only route to ending the Israeli massacre in Gaza, and pressed the Palestinian resistance as hard as they could to accept an American initiative whose real purpose was to rescue Israel from its international isolation.

The American plan delivered to Israel what it had failed to achieve through war. Yet Tel Aviv never honored its own obligations. It took back its hostages and the bodies of its dead, but did not withdraw or halt the systematic killing of Gaza’s population. In the West Bank, it pressed ahead with expanding settlements, seizing land and imposing new facts on the ground, while settler terror, demolitions and displacement continued unabated.

A new deception?

The “day after” that Trump promised never arrived. The tragic conditions on the ground persisted and worsened by the day, both in Gaza, where the humanitarian crisis keeps deepening, and in the West Bank. Not one of the leaders who attended Trump’s meeting lifted a finger. Their response went no further than statements of condemnation, statements that lift no injustice from the Palestinian people and stop no chain of Israeli crimes and violations.

Those who met with Trump know full well that the man will not deliver on his promises, whether because his own convictions align with the Zionist project, or because he owes debts to the Zionist right in the United States that he cannot walk away from. They all know he has no qualms about making promises and then abandoning them, about pushing whichever narrative serves him in the moment and switching to another the instant his interests shift. And yet they gave his plan their blessing, because none of them can afford to be seen publicly rejecting an initiative from “His Excellency the President.”

Now “the day after” returns to New York, but this time not through the gates of Gaza. It comes instead through the gates of the war Trump and his partner Netanyahu launched on Iran, a war that has since grown into a broad regional conflict, its fallout reaching the Gulf, Bab Al-Mandeb, and the trade and energy routes that run through them.

The Arabs have already been bitten once in the past year. Are they really walking back into Trump’s den? The man is calling them back to the table, asking them to help him decide what the region should look like after a war in which he himself is one of the principal combatants.

The previous experience sits right in front of them: everything he promised on Gaza evaporated into thin air. Israel is still committing its crimes under American cover, and the obligations of “the day after” hang suspended on the outcome of Israel’s own Knesset elections. So why should Arabs assume an Iranian “day after” would be any different?

This isn’t only a matter of distrusting Trump’s intentions. It’s about understanding his interests. The American president wants out of this war at the lowest possible political and military cost, especially with midterm Congressional elections drawing near.

Trump needs something to hand the American voter, something he can sell as a victory, after a war now in its seventh month that hasn’t ended the way he promised, hasn’t achieved a single one of its declared objectives, and has done serious damage to America’s own interests and standing besides.

Trump is rummaging through the Arabs’ quiver, looking for a way out of the hole he’s dug for himself. He needs their money, their oil, their markets, their security arrangements, and their capacity to absorb the fallout of the war. He may even need to present them as partners in shaping “the day after,” so it doesn’t look like the United States lit the fire and then left the region to burn, and pay for it.

A few weeks ago, he spoke openly about Gulf states needing to pay for what Washington considers American protection of the oil-rich region. In other words, he is pressing the Gulf states to cover the cost of an adventure he launched on the strength of a shortsighted American vision and self-serving Israeli assessments.

A one-way arrangement

Even as Trump looks to his Gulf allies for a way out, allies he wants to saddle with the responsibility for his own adventure, he feels no embarrassment about openly abandoning them. He refused to come to the aid of Saudi Arabia, supposedly one of Washington’s most important allies in the region, even after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked him to intervene militarily against the Houthis as they closed in on strategic territory at the mouth of the Red Sea. He called him twice. Nothing came of it.

It didn’t stop there. At the very moment Saudi-backed forces were under a sweeping Houthi assault, American officials were sitting down with Houthi representatives in Muscat to negotiate.

Do Arabs need any further proof that Washington sees the region through no lens but its own interests and those of its partner, Israel?

Trump is not fighting this war to save the Middle East from Iran, whatever he claims. He is fighting it according to his own American and Israeli calculations.

Arab states are not being asked to side with Iran, nor to ignore its threats and its regional ambitions. But they have no obligation to hand Trump and Israel a blank cheque.

Iran is an adversary Arab states can deal with, negotiate with, and manage on their own terms. Through arrangements with other regional and international powers, they can settle their disputes with Tehran, even forge economic and defense agreements that secure the region’s own security and interests, interests that intersect with the American-Israeli agenda.

But if this American-Israeli war becomes a pretext for handing Washington the keys to the region all over again, that would mean the Arabs learned nothing from what happened in Gaza.

Arabs should not walk into the New York meeting Trump summoned them to days ago in the posture of the weak, waiting to see what the American president lays on the table. They need, first, to draw up a reckoning against a United States that has grown accustomed to taking without paying, and that has consistently sided with our Zionist enemy at the expense of the very countries pumping trillions of dollars into the arteries of its economy every year.

Arabs have to ask themselves, first and foremost: are we the ones who will shape our region’s future, or will we remain merely financiers and contractors carrying out arrangements drafted in Washington and Tel Aviv?

The Arabs swallowed the bait once. They pressed the Palestinians, made concessions, blessed Trump’s plan, and waited for “the day after.” It never came.

Now Trump is back with the same bait. He is asking the Arabs to help him end the war and pull him out of the Iranian quagmire, and he is laying out his vision for a new “day after.” But who can guarantee this new “day after” won’t turn out to be just another copy of the one in Gaza?

The war on Iran may mark the beginning of a shift in the international order. “The day after” may yet see American unilateralism recede and a multipolar world rise in its place, which is exactly why Arabs need to rethink their bets, stop mortgaging themselves to the United States, and look for a more independent footing in a changing world.