President Trump just announced that Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a 10-day ceasefire, effective today. A ceasefire. In the Middle East. Brokered by the guy CNN told you was going to nuke Denmark over a real estate deal.
Remember when every blue-haired foreign policy “expert” on MSNBC swore that Trump in the White House meant mushroom clouds by Tuesday? How’s that prediction aging, Rachel?
We need to talk about what actually happened here, because the media is going to spend approximately zero seconds covering it. Israel and Lebanon — two countries that have been lobbing rockets at each other like it’s a neighborhood fireworks dispute that got way out of hand — just sat down and agreed to stop shooting. And the reason they sat down? Trump’s diplomatic team made it happen.
Trump called it a “historic day.” And for once, that’s not even hype. It IS historic. Name the last time Israel and Lebanon agreed to anything other than mutual hostility. We’ll wait.
The thing about Trump’s foreign policy is that it works precisely because the other side knows he’s not bluffing. Obama drew red lines in crayon and then pretended he never said anything when Assad crossed them. Biden’s team sent “strongly worded letters” that probably went straight into Hezbollah’s recycling bin. Trump? Trump parks aircraft carriers and picks up the phone.
And that’s the formula. Strength plus engagement. Not weakness dressed up as “strategic patience” — which is diplomat-speak for “we’re going to do absolutely nothing and hope the problem solves itself.”
This ceasefire comes on the heels of the Iran deal, the broader Gulf normalization efforts, and a string of diplomatic wins that would make any previous administration’s entire four-year résumé look like a participation trophy. Trump is stacking foreign policy victories like he’s speedrunning a video game.
But here’s the part that should make every Democrat squirm. They spent four years — FOUR YEARS — telling America that Trump was an unhinged warmonger who would stumble us into World War III because he tweets mean things. They ran campaign ads about it. They wrote bestselling books about it. They had retired generals on CNN nodding gravely about the “existential threat to global stability.”
And what happened? The guy brokered the Abraham Accords. Then he brokered a ceasefire with Iran. Now he’s brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. The “warmonger” has more peace deals than the last three presidents combined.
Meanwhile, Biden — the “steady hand” — presided over the Afghanistan withdrawal that got 13 American service members killed and left $85 billion in military equipment for the Taliban to play with. But sure, tell us more about how Trump is the dangerous one.
The media blackout on this is predictable but still infuriating. If Obama had brokered this deal, they’d be commissioning oil paintings of him for the Smithsonian. There would be a Netflix documentary in production by Friday. Anderson Cooper would be weeping on camera.
Trump does it and the front page of CNN right now is probably something about how his tie was too long at a press conference.
We should enjoy this moment. A ceasefire in the Middle East is good for the world, good for the thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire, and good for American interests in the region. And it happened because we have a president who actually knows how to close a deal instead of just talking about “engagement” and “multilateral frameworks” until everyone falls asleep.
The peace president. The guy they said would start World War III. Somebody owes us all an apology — but we’re not holding our breath.