We had this conversation in his house, which had been destroyed in an Israeli air strike during the 2014 war. On the wall behind him was a poster of his son, who was killed by Israeli troops in 2008. I pointed out the incongruity. But Zahar was adamant in his belief that Gaza had been liberated (a belief that, in my experience, was not shared by many ordinary people in Gaza).

I sometimes tell this story to illustrate how deeply Hamas is wedded to ruling Gaza. It had political reasons to hold on to the enclave, of course, since relinquishing power would have been a victory for its rival Fatah. It had economic reasons too: taxing Gaza’s 2m people was lucrative. But there was also an ideological component on top of all that. The leaders of Hamas do not want to give up Gaza—no matter what consequences might result from its continued control.

Diplomats have spent 18 months trying to figure out how to change that calculus. Much of the world wants Hamas to cede power. Israel does, of course, as do its Western allies. That is also the view of many Arab governments: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, among others, would all be happy to see Hamas dethroned. Most importantly, so would many Palestinians in Gaza. It is hard to do reliable polling in the middle of a war. But there is limited survey data, and a mountain of anecdotal evidence, to suggest that Hamas is now deeply unpopular with its own people.

Hamas refuses to go. It is open to various ceasefire deals: a five-year truce with Israel, a “technocratic committee” to run civil affairs in Gaza. What it is not open to is an agreement that forces it to disarm and cede real power in the territory. It is willing to let Gaza be destroyed rather than let someone else rule Gaza.

For Israel—or at least for Binyamin Netanyahu and his supporters—this is a justification for continuing the war indefinitely. When he broke the ceasefire and resumed fighting last month, Netanyahu promised this time would be different. The Israeli army would hold more territory in Gaza; it would employ even more brutal tactics to batter Hamas into submission. The war would go on until Hamas laid down its weapons and went into exile.

More than a month later, thousands of Palestinians have been killed, the World Food Programme says it has run out of food aid—and Hamas has not budged. Yet America seems indifferent, as if Donald Trump believes Netanyahu’s empty talk about “total victory” being just around the corner.

Talking to officials in Jerusalem, Washington and elsewhere in recent months, many seem to have accepted Netanyahu’s premise that continued military pressure is the only leverage over Hamas. That is a self-serving argument for Netanyahu, who wants to continue the Gaza war for his own political reasons. It also completely misreads the power dynamics.

As long as the war is raging, Hamas has no reason to give up on Gaza. It is loath to concede its rule under Israeli fire and it can postpone a reckoning with its own people. Gazans might be furious with Hamas: recent protests against its rule are just the tip of the iceberg. But most of them are busy just trying to survive.

The moment the war ends, though, Hamas will have to face the consequences of what it has wrought. A ceasefire is not the end of the group’s problems. It is the beginning. Gaza is uninhabitable: Hamas will have to deliver on reconstruction or face the wrath of 2m angry people. The former cannot happen without international help. And the international community can make clear that no help will be forthcoming unless Hamas leaves.

A proposal to push Hamas out would have to come from America. The Israeli “opposition”—I use that term loosely—is probably too spineless to propose it, and certainly too weak to be taken seriously if it does. European and Arab leaders have similar problems. But Trump is popular enough in Israel, and powerful enough in the world, to give such a proposal real weight. It would go something like this.

First, Trump would publicly outline his plan. He would insist on a permanent end to the war: a cessation of hostilities, the release of all remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza, and a guarantee that Israel would not simply resume fighting once the last hostage was freed.

At the same time, he would insist that there be no large-scale reconstruction of Gaza until Hamas agrees to relinquish power. There would be humanitarian aid, of course, to deliver food and medicine and temporary shelter. But there would be no donors’ conference or “day-after plan” while Hamas remains. America and its allies would have to decide what that means in practice: Who needs to go into exile? Who needs to relinquish their weapons, and how, and to whom?

Second, he would compel Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire. The prime minister would obviously resist, since ending the war might be the beginning of his political downfall. But Trump has levers he can pull: Israel cannot continue the war without America’s military and diplomatic support. Netanyahu has spent years portraying Trump as Israel’s greatest defender in the West. It would be nigh impossible for him to turn around and defy the president.

Third, in parallel, Trump would compel would-be donor countries to accept his strictures around reconstruction. All are American allies; many would be receptive. Saudi Arabia was already projecting a deficit for 2025 (and that was before oil prices sank below $70 a barrel). Will it really want to borrow money to fund projects in a Hamas-run Gaza that might be blown up in a future war a few years hence? The UAE, which loathes political Islam, will need no convincing to sit idle. Qatar is far more sympathetic to Hamas but will not want to risk Trump’s wrath by defying him.

The UN estimates it will take $53bn over the next decade to rebuild Gaza. It cannot raise even a fraction of that sum with America standing in its way.

Yes, Hamas would try to claim victory after a ceasefire. There would be rallies and speeches and a whole propaganda effort aimed at portraying it as the winner. In reality, though, the group would be on the horns of a dilemma. It could continue to rule over a devastated Gaza, with no prospect of rebuilding and without the daily atrocities of the war to keep people quiescent. Or it could admit defeat and cede power.

This may sound callous: it holds 2m people hostage to the political calculations of Hamas. It is. But is it more callous than the alternatives?

The Gaza war started with three main goals: removing Hamas from power, returning the hostages to their homes and restoring a sense of safety for Israelis living in the towns and kibbutzim on the Gaza border. For more than a year, however, the war has made no progress toward any of those goals.

The war will not free the remaining hostages: only eight hostages have been freed by Israeli troops, compared to 139 who were released through diplomacy.

The war will not achieve the enduring military defeat of Hamas. The group lost most of its strategic capabilities in the first weeks of Israeli bombardment and ground operations. It cannot mount another attack on anything close to the scale of October 7th, and its arsenal of rockets has been largely spent or destroyed. What remains is a ragtag militia—and a continued war means a continued supply of angry young men willing to take up arms.

The war will not bring normalcy back to the Gaza envelope. Some families have gone back, but many others have stayed away: a conflict raging a few hundred meters away does not give people the calm they need to start rebuilding their lives.

The war that had broad support in Israel ended more than a year ago. What remains are other wars: the one Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival, and the one his hard-right allies are fighting to pursue their dreams of rebuilding Jewish settlements and ethnically cleansing Gaza. If America allows the war to continue, it is supporting these unsavory outcomes.

What if America demands a permanent ceasefire now with no preconditions? Even if Hamas allows a facade of “technocratic” governance, it would remain in power. That would put off plenty of would-be donors. They already have competing priorities: Lebanon needs help, and Syria, and Ukraine. A Hamas-ruled Gaza would be an unappealing destination for investment even if America does not threaten penalties on donors.

Trump has three options before him. All are callous—but only one offers the prospect of a better future in Gaza. He can allow Israel to continue with an endless war that no longer has any attainable, defensible goals. He can force an immediate ceasefire, without preconditions, that will leave a shattered Gaza in a netherworld between war and peace.

Or he can recognize that reconstruction aid, not military might, is the world’s greatest leverage over Hamas, and he can act accordingly.

I’ve heard that phrase a lot over the past decade. It’s a lament about the state of America’s policies in the Middle East, which seem to turn on a dime every four years. At a conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this month, one speaker said it from the stage; several others asked it in private conversations. Donald Trump seems to have upended America’s approach to the region, much as Joe Biden did four years earlier.

And yet, if you listened to the American officials in attendance—both current and former—it was sometimes hard to find much daylight.

To be clear: this is not to repeat the well-worn fiction that there is no difference between Biden and Trump. On trade, immigration, civil liberties and a host of other issues, Trump represents a profound break with both his immediate predecessor and decades of bipartisan precedent.

There might be some common threads. You can draw a line from Barack Obama’s complaints about European “free riders” to Trump’s outright hostility toward NATO. Overall, though, Trump is sui generis in America’s post-war history—except, arguably, when it comes to the Middle East.

His tone is certainly different: it is hard to imagine Biden threatening to rain hellfire on Hamas or Iran. And there was a moment during the transition when it seemed as if Trump’s actual policies would diverge sharply from his predecessor’s. He pushed Israel to accept ceasefires, first in Lebanon and then in Gaza, and seemed bent on pursuing a big piece of regional diplomacy that might win him a Nobel Peace Prize. He used America’s leverage in a way that Biden was unable or unwilling to.

What has he done since then, though? He gave Binyamin Netanyahu a green light to resume Israel’s war in Gaza last month, over the objections of a large majority of Israelis. He is negotiating a new nuclear pact with Iran rather than pursuing regime change or a military strike against its nuclear facilities, as some of his supporters once hoped he would. He is bombing the Houthis in Yemen. And he is largely ignoring the rest of the region beyond the Gulf: I can’t tell you what Trump’s policy is in Egypt or Jordan or Tunisia, because he doesn’t have one.

All of this looks rather similar to his predecessor. Sure, there are differences in style and substance. Biden bombed the Houthis every few weeks; Trump has done so every day for more than a month. But in general the Trump policy outlined above is not dissimilar from Biden’s policy over the previous couple of years.

Nor is Trump the only example of continuity. If you think back to 2020, Biden made a few big promises as a candidate. He was going to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” in response to its assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. He was going to revive the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump abandoned in 2018. And he was going to put human rights at the “center” of America’s foreign policy.

None of that happened. For the first 18 months of his term he petulantly refused to talk to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince—but he never actually did anything to isolate Saudi Arabia. Then in the summer of 2022, with oil prices above $100 a barrel, he flew to Jeddah hat in hand and begged MbS to boost oil production (he was rebuffed). He made some half-hearted attempts to negotiate with Iran but never took it seriously. And the bit about centering human rights, well, I don’t need to tell you how that went.

Biden’s actual policies in the Middle East—as opposed to the rhetoric about his policies—were not much of a break with Trump’s first term.

Henry Kissinger famously quipped that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. That seems increasingly true of American policy in the Middle East. Take Biden’s “pariah” promise on the campaign trail. It was purely a sop to Democrats. Progressives were angry about the Khashoggi murder and the war in Yemen, while Democrats of all stripes were repulsed by the kingdom’s embrace of Trump during his first term. Threatening to downgrade ties with the Saudis played well with the base.

It was also, as I said at the time, an act of diplomatic malpractice. Saudi Arabia did a lot of awful and/or stupid stuff during the years after MbS became crown prince. But it was still one of America’s oldest Arab allies and the world’s swing oil producer. The idea that Biden could simply ostracize it—that he could go four years without needing anything from Saudi Arabia—was never serious. Yet it persisted until the moment when real-world interests trumped domestic politics.

They may now be doing the same with Iran. Trump spent his first term pursuing a maximalist deal at the urging of hawkish supporters in Washington and their Israeli allies. The effort was doomed from the start: None of the serious Iran-watchers I know thought Trump would get his way. Yet Biden went on to implicitly adopt the same concept at the start of his term. Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, promised to strike a “longer and stronger” deal with Iran. Predictably, he failed.

Trump may now be able to strike a deal. Many of my contacts think it is probable—certainly more probable than it looked a month ago. If he succeeds, it will be because he decided to ignore the hawks, embrace the art of the possible and negotiate an agreement that will look quite similar to the one he once called “the worst deal ever negotiated”.

George W. Bush was the last American president to have a comprehensive policy toward the Middle East. Unfortunately, the centerpiece of it was a disastrous invasion of Iraq. Since then the aim has been to disengage. Obama wanted to “pivot to Asia”; Biden’s aides were told to keep the Middle East “off the president’s desk”. Policy was consequently shaped by events and domestic politics: America reacted to short-term developments rather than pursue a long-term strategy.

But from the Arab spring to October 7th, events are outpacing America’s ability to react. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria last year caught the bureaucracy flat-footed. The unexpected weakness of Iran, and the comparative strength of Israel, has now forced Trump into early negotiations for which his team is plainly not yet prepared. That is the clearest continuity between three very different heads of state. Which America will show up? One that would prefer not to.

Which is not to say the effort is doomed to fail. Trump raised a few eyebrows earlier this week when he claimed that a nuclear deal was one of the simpler issues on his foreign-policy agenda.

“We’ve got a problem with Iran. I’ll solve that problem. It’s almost an easy one.”

The thing is: he’s not wrong. Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, hasn’t had much luck brokering ceasefires in Gaza or Ukraine, in part because he is just a mediator between warring parties with their own interests and demands. But when Witkoff meets with the Iranians, he is the other party to the negotiation. To a striking extent he is the only other party, since the Europeans who played such a big role in negotiating the JCPOA, the previous nuclear deal, seem to have been sidelined.

That makes the whole thing easier. If Trump wants to make a deal, he can make it; he doesn’t need to convince someone else to accept it.

On Friday, before the first round of Iran talks, Witkoff told the Wall Street Journal that America wasn’t dead-set on dismantling Iran’s nuclear program: “Our red line will be, there can’t be weaponization of your nuclear capability.” That was smart to say on the eve of the meeting. If the goal was dismantlement—which Iran categorically rejects—there would have been nothing to discuss. Setting the bar lower gave the Iranians confidence that this would be a real negotiation.

But then Witkoff muddied the waters. In an interview with Fox News on Monday night he implied that a deal would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium to 3.67% purity, much as the JCPOA did. Less than a day later, though, he walked that back, saying in a statement that Iran must “stop and eliminate” its uranium-enrichment program.

It seemed as if one of two things happened. Either Witkoff caved to pressure from Iran hawks in Washington, or he didn’t understand the distinction around enrichment. My understanding is that it was the former. The hawks were already upset that dismantlement was not the goal. They were furious to hear Witkoff concede on zero enrichment as well—especially at the start of the negotiations, before Iran offered any concessions of its own.

But this also wasn’t the first time Witkoff said something seemingly off-script. There was an odd moment earlier this month, for example, when he responded positively to a tweet from Iran’s foreign minister, only to delete it a few minutes later.

Watching the Gaza ceasefire talks go round in circles over the past two months, I started to develop a theory about Witkoff: much of what he says is chimerical. His public statements aren’t meant to reiterate America’s positions or convey updates about negotiations. They’re a sales pitch, a spiel, a long-running effort to tell people what they want to hear (or what they don’t).

In February he said that regional real-estate developers would soon hold a summit to discuss Trump’s Gaza riviera fantasy. I never heard a shred of evidence that this was in the works. Claiming it was, though, might have given Arab leaders added incentive to draw up their own plan for post-war Gaza, which is what they hastily did. A few weeks later Witkoff sounded pretty upbeat about that plan, even though it was unrealistic and glossed over hard issues like what to do with Hamas.

Last month he told Tucker Carlson that Hamas was not as rigid as people think: “They’re not ideologically intractable.” That was a surprisingly sympathetic thing to hear from an American official. It was also hard to square with the experience of the past 18 months, in which Hamas was willing to let Gaza be destroyed rather than relinquish its hold on power. He also said that Netanyahu was defying the will of the Israeli people by resisting a hostage deal. Again, surprising to hear (but accurate).

No matter: The next day, on Fox News, he said that Hamas may have “duped” him in negotiations. Less sympathetic (and oddly self-reproachful).

Lately he has been telling the families of Israeli hostages that a big ceasefire deal is close (“a matter of days”). Never mind that the last round of talks, in Cairo, ended in failure—for the same reasons as umpteen rounds before.

The charitable view is that Witkoff is triangulating his way through negotiations. One day he’s empathetic toward Hamas and critical toward Netanyahu; the next day he describes Hamas as untrustworthy. He seems to have no fixed views on anything (except, I’m told, a genuine concern for the plight of the Israeli hostages). There’s also a less charitable interpretation, of course: that he’s out of his depth and bluffing his way through complex geopolitical issues.

Triangulation might be fine for mediating conflicts. When Witkoff speaks about an Iran deal, though, he’s not a mediator. He’s expressing the official position of the United States.

The Iranians already suspect that America is an unreliable negotiating partner—that it will make commitments and then renege on them. An about-face on a major issue, less than a week into the negotiations, will only reinforce that suspicion. The administration is now also publicly committed to a goal (zero enrichment) that will be very hard to achieve.

And this is where we get to a deeper issue. Witkoff’s defenders like to say that he speaks for Trump. That seems true. Unlike most of Trump’s underlings, Witkoff has regular, direct access to the president (they speak on the phone several times a day) and the latitude to say basically anything.

It does no good to speak for the president, though, if the president doesn’t know what he wants. I’ve written before that Trump wants a deal with Iran and doesn’t want to push for dismantlement. I’m less convinced that he has strong opinions about, say, the appropriate level of uranium enrichment at Natanz. In a normal administration, you would have had an interagency process to work these questions out before the talks started. But this is not a normal administration: the president is not a policy guy.

Witkoff will need to be a lot more on-message in dealing with Iran. Equally, though, he needs to know what the message is.

Jordan signed a free-trade agreement (FTA) with America in 2000. It was the first Arab country to do so. The deal required both countries to eliminate customs duties, which they did over the following years. Before the FTA Jordan charged tariffs of 30% on American hamburger and up to 48% on American sneakers. Today those rates are zero.

Don’t take my word for it: you can check the tariffs yourself from the US government’s own data. Even where Jordan ordinarily charges tariffs on goods, it makes exemptions for US-made ones.

Contrast Jordan with Egypt, which is fond of putting walls around its domestic economy. It has no free-trade agreement with the US. If you’re an American manufacturer of wooden office furniture (the customs categories are really specific), you’ll face a 60% tariff on your exports to Egypt, the same rate as everyone else: there are no exceptions to the levy. Egypt has a big furniture industry and uses tariffs to protect it. The same goes for a bunch of other sectors, from 10% on cheese to 30% on motors.

The White House insists the tariffs announced on April 2nd are “reciprocal”: if you charge us, we charge you. You would thus expect it to impose much higher levies on high-tariff Egypt than zero-tariff Jordan. In fact, the opposite happened. Jordan was hit with a 20% tariff rate, implying that it imposes a 40% burden on American goods. Egypt got away with only the 10% base rate applied to all countries.

We know, of course, that these tariffs aren’t actually “reciprocal”. The White House calculated them with the crudest possible formula: dividing America’s trade deficit with a country by that country’s exports to America. (In a moment of real comedy, Trump’s deputy press secretary confirmed this was the methodology while he was attempting to deny it.)

That is why Jordan was hit harder. America has become Jordan’s largest export market, accounting for 21% of its total exports. A lot of American textile firms, in particular, piled into the country after the FTA was signed. Jordan now exports more than $1.7bn worth of clothing to America each year—more than 11% of its total goods exports to the entire world. It runs a trade surplus with America, while Egypt runs a deficit. Hence the divergence in Trump’s tariff rates.

That’s also why Syria was hit with a 41% tariff. It is a desperately poor country with an economy ruined by a decade of civil war. It exports little to America and can afford to import even less. In percentage terms, it runs an enormous trade surplus. Never mind that its entire balance of trade with the US is a piffling $13m (mostly spices and pickles): if you just divide two numbers, devoid of any context, it looks like Syria is an economic juggernaut determined to exploit long-suffering American pickle producers.

If you are a Jordanian official, you are probably desperate to get these tariffs reduced or removed: they are a painful blow to your economy, which depends on exports to America. How might you do that?

Were they truly about “reciprocity”, you could ask to have them lifted immediately. After all, you cannot drop tariffs on US-made goods lower than zero. Perhaps the White House would counter that you still have some non-tariff barriers to trade. The president, for example, has a novel theory that value-added taxes are a kind of tariff. That is nonsense (they apply to all goods, even domestic ones). Still, the administration might ask you to lower it. But you will politely ignore that request.

You do charge a hefty 60% sales tax on imported cars, which serves as a way for your cash-strapped state to pad its revenues by taxing people with enough money to afford a private car. Maybe you could offer an exemption for American vehicles. But that would upset your other trading partners, who might demand similar exemptions. You’ll blow a big hole in your budget (which, by the way, America supports with an annual financial-aid package).

What’s more, the tax doesn’t seem to have deterred your citizens from buying American cars. Roughly 11% of Jordan’s car imports by value are US-made, around four points higher than America’s share of the global auto-export market.

So there’s not much you can do on reciprocity. Again, though, we know that isn’t the real issue: the balance of trade is. But you are a lower-middle-income country that runs a $1.4bn trade surplus (3% of your GDP) with America. It’s unclear how you can gin up enough extra demand for American products to balance the ledger.

Your largest imports are oil, which you mostly get from your neighbors (because they are, you know, nearby); cars, which you already buy a bunch of from America; and gold. Maybe the king could require every Jordanian drive a Chevy Tahoe.

There’s another option, of course: you could export less to the US. That would be painful in the short term. Your factories have spent years building a supply chain that serves the needs of American buyers. But there are probably fashion houses in Europe, Asia and the Gulf that would be happy to manufacture clothes in Jordan. Maybe over time you can start to reorient your supply chains away from America.

Meanwhile, your high-tariff neighbor Egypt has an incentive to do nothing. On the one hand it has little reason to ease tariffs on American goods: it received a preferential rate from Trump despite being protectionist. At the same time, it might be cautious about trying to grow its exports. The tariffs on Jordan could be an opportunity for Egypt, which has its own big textile industry, to scoop up new business. But that risks pushing it toward a trade surplus with America, which might upset the man in the White House.

No one benefits from any of this. Countries like Jordan will take an economic hit precisely because they lowered trade barriers with America and built competitive firms. Countries like Egypt will have no reason to fix the myriad inefficiencies and barriers that hobble their own economies—not if we’re in an era when exporting goods to the world’s largest economy is seen as a bad thing.

And what about America? It’s not about to discover some enormous untapped vein of demand for US-made goods in Jordan. Even if Jordan can balance its trade, it will add a mere 0.07% to American exports. Nor will it put thousands of Americans to work sewing cheap sweaters. Whether that is even a desirable outcome is a separate question: we’re back to an era before the theory of comparative advantage.

What it will do is damage America’s relationship with a close regional ally—and encourage that ally to start delinking its economy from America’s. Also: Weakening Jordan’s already sluggish economy, at a moment when the country and the region are a tinderbox, seems like a risky idea!

There are other, stronger examples of this elsewhere: high tariffs on a country like Vietnam, for example, seem utterly bonkers at a time when Trump also wants to contain China and push American firms to move their supply chains elsewhere. The tariffs themselves make no sense. And if you put them in a broader geopolitical context they almost seem tailor-made to sabotage, rather than promote, American interests around the world.

An introductory note: This will be a home for periodic writing that is too long for Twitter and too niche or off-topic for my day job. Much of it will focus on the Middle East, but I hope to venture a bit further afield as well.

By now we are almost a week into Signalgate, the Trump administration’s “who among us hasn’t accidentally added a journalist to a group chat full of classified attack plans” scandal. The commentary in Washington has focused primarily on the blunder itself. I want to look at something different: what the scandal reveals about Trump’s approach to the Middle East.

I went to Washington a few weeks ago for meetings, and one of my takeaways was that his regional policy is a bunch of competing poles with no center. The debate over Yemen bears that out. When it comes to foreign policy, the Trump administration is not a unitary actor.

In 2023 the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, came up with a helpful taxonomy of foreign-policy views in Trump’s Republican party. It divided them into three feuding tribes:

• The hawks (or “primacists”, to use a more neutral term), who think America should aspire to remain a globe-bestriding superpower;

• Their opposite number, the isolationists (or “restrainers”), who want America to limit its foreign military commitments and focus on its near abroad;

• In the middle, the “rebalancers”, who argue for reducing the American role in Europe and the Middle East in order to prioritize Asia.

When it comes to the Middle East, the latter two camps seem to collapse into one. Both want a diminished American role in the region: different reasons, same result.

The isolationist camp has been skeptical of Waltz, a longtime hawk who claims to have undergone a recent conversion. Signalgate was a perfect opportunity to wound him. For the “restrainers”, the problem was not just that Waltz screwed up by adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to the chat. There was a deeper issue: why was he even talking to Goldberg, a journalist known for hawkish views on the Middle East? Surely he was planning to leak things and undermine his ideological foes. (Trump himself seems to share this concern.)

Thus Waltz finds himself on the defensive. Even though he committed the original sin of adding Goldberg, it was Hegseth who committed the arguably greater sin of sharing classified attack plans in the chat. But the latter’s job seems secure—because his views are closer to those of the “rebalancers”, who have more sway in Trumpworld.

Waltz’s allies have tried to fight a rearguard action focused on the substance of the chat rather than the chat itself. On March 27th Jewish Insider reported that unnamed Republican senators were unhappy with Vance’s isolationist arguments against bombing the Houthis. Not long after, the vice-president went nuclear on the site’s editor-in-chief:

This went beyond the usual Trumpian attacks on the press. Why would the vice-president make such a harsh personal attack on the editor of a niche publication, over an issue as obscure as mixing up the names of militant groups? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Jewish Insider has published a series of pieces criticizing Vance’s ideological allies at the Pentagon.

Other examples abound. Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, does not seem to have deeply-held views on foreign policy. But his instinct for making deals tends to put him at odds with the hawks. An acquaintance in Washington described Morgan Ortagus, his deputy, as the “pro-Israeli eyes on Witkoff”. Trust does not run deep in Trumpworld: this is an administration fighting with itself.

What’s striking about the leaked chats is their focus on politics. Vance (to his credit) at least raises concerns about the second-order consequences of bombing Yemen: it could affect oil prices or drive the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia. But there is no other talk about the efficacy or real-world implications of a strike.

Neither side can make their real arguments. Hegseth alludes to that difficult when he says this is “not about the Houthis”. He wants to pursue a narrow goal (reopening the Red Sea for commercial shipping) that is very hard to achieve without pursuing a broader goal (removing the Houthis from power in Yemen). But he cannot talk about the latter without sounding like too much of a hawk.

Vance plainly does not want to do the strikes, but there is no American greatness in arguing that a campaign against the Houthis might be long and strategically ineffective. Instead he is left to mutter about volumes of trade through the Suez canal.

The whole debate is refracted through the funhouse mirror of intra-conservative politics. Which is the real MAGA policy, standing up for freedom of navigation or telling those freeloading Europeans to deal with it themselves?

All of this is a trial run for the much bigger (and more factious) policy debate around Iran. My sense, from conversations in Washington, is that Trump and Witkoff both want a new nuclear deal. That worries the hawks, who think this is a moment to keep the boot on Iran’s neck.

At the same time, I am skeptical that Trump and Witkoff will get their deal—in large part because Iran does not seem to understand that times have changed, that this is not 2015, that they have a narrow window to conclude an agreement before they face a serious military threat (more on that in a future post). That worries the isolationists, for obvious reasons.

During the first Trump administration, everyone was more-or-less united around their demands for a new agreement. There is no unity this time around. In the past week Waltz has demanded “full dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, while Witkoff has called for a “verification program” to ensure Iran is not building a bomb. Very different things! The former is impossible to achieve in a negotiated agreement; the latter is wildly insufficient to satisfy many American lawmakers, to say nothing of the Israelis.

Another striking thing about the past few weeks: Republicans keep talking about Signalgate. The sensible thing to do, politically, would be to let the scandal die. But the scandal is a proxy for a larger fight, and both sides of the ideological divide want to use it to tip the balance of power in their favor.