What does President Trump actually want to see in Gaza?
It’s a simple question, yet eight months into the Trump administration’s second term, the answer still isn’t clear. If anything, U.S. policy is muddled, confusing, and at times incoherent, a consequence of Trump’s competing impulses and a prime minister in Jerusalem who is the poster-child for obstructionism.
On the one hand, Trump wants the war in Gaza to end. The nearly two-year conflict is not only one of the worst humanitarian abominations in the 21st century but has long since become a perfect case study of what my friend and colleague Will Walldorf, a professor at Wake Forest University, aptly describes as “moral hazard”—an international relations term of art that occurs when a junior partner, assured of external backing from a great power (in this instance the United States), begins acting in ways that undermine the interests of the benefactor.
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