Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. President Donald Trump is getting a lot of publicity, and rightfully so, for breaking the impasse in the Israeli-Hamas war.

We have on the table a blueprint for a ceasefire with the exchange of hostages from Hamas, surrendering the hostages they took on Oct. 7 two years ago, and then perhaps as many as, eventually, 1,700 terrorists, some of them convicted murderers, will be given back to what is left of Hamas. Israel will recede, somewhat, from its operations in Gaza to about holding or occupying about 50% with a proposed graduated withdrawal, as Hamas, supposedly, meets the conditions of the ceasefire that everybody envisions in phase two may lead to a peace.

Why is this happening now, though? It didn’t happen under President Joe Biden, a settlement in the Middle East. It did not happen under Trump’s first administration. It did not happen under President Barack Obama. It did not happen under President George Bush. There were about 10 things that had to happen. All these intricate pieces in this puzzle, the pieces of the peace, all fell into success in a way that made it possible. What were they?

The first thing was that Donald Trump came into office and he cut, embargoed, sanctioned Iranian oil. And then, more importantly, he made it clear to the Iranians they had to stop progress toward getting a bomb. That was one of the conditions that Israel demanded, and understandably so. And no one had ever really done that.

They hadn’t believed that the United States would dare enter Iranian airspace. And then, more importantly, Donald Trump allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in this tit-for-tat missile barrage that Israel and Iran had waged, he allowed them to go into Iranian airspace and to destroy Iranian air defenses, and to take out a lot of the generals and physicists and weaken Iran.

Once that happened, then the United States then came in and destroyed the facilities that were responsible for creating a nuclear weapon. That was a game-changer because it did two things. It removed the specter that Iran was invincible with all its money and with a bomb. And more importantly, it did a great favor to Israel, which Donald Trump would draw on later. Second, it allowed Israel—unlike the Biden administration—to destroy the ring of fire, to destroy Hezbollah as an immediate threat, to hit back at the Houthis, and to destroy Hamas.

If we had this conversation three or four years ago, people would say, “Israel is beleaguered. It’s doomed. It’s got Iran. It’s got the Houthis. It’s got Hamas, Hezbollah.” They’re gone. And the result is an enormous increase in the reputation and stature of Israel. It is now, like the United States, dealing from a position of uncustomed strength.

There’s a couple of other reasons. Donald Trump created personal relationships in the Arab community. He did not insult the Saudis, as Joe Biden had done during the 2020 campaigns. He did not alienate the Arab community. He did not alienate Benjamin Netanyahu. He gave them concessions. He praised them. He created personal relationships. He did trade deals. He used tariffs as carrot and a stick, pressures and leverages. And the result was he gained influence and brought a lot of different players into the context of the ceasefire.

There were the Egyptians. There were the Turkish delegations. There were the Gulf states. There was Jordan. In other words, he shared the responsibility to a number of Arab nations and to Israel.

And who did he not bring in? He did not bring in people and organizations in the past that had been utter failures. There was no United Nations contingent. There was no EU contingent. French President Emmanuel Macron might have an alternate peace plan, but he was not brought into the negotiations. And why weren’t they? Because they have no ability—like the League of Nations of the past—to enforce anything they say. And Donald Trump knew that.

There was a couple of other things. Donald Trump is not Joe Biden. He was dealing, again, from a position of strength. Once people saw what he did to Iran and once people saw what Israel did to Iran, they understood they mean business. And once they’ve looked at the moonscape in Gaza and what’s happened to the elite of the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist cadres, they knew that they did not want to get on his bad side.

So, there were carrots and there were sticks.

There are a couple of other things that were really important as well. Once Donald Trump started to intervene in these disputes all over the world—I’m talking about Ethiopia and Egypt, Kosovo and Serbia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Pakistan and India, and others—he was able to achieve ceasefires. That created momentum and confidence in his negotiating skills.

So, when he intervened directly to kind of craft a ceasefire, people in that region looked over at all these other areas and said, “Well, if they can have a ceasefire in Egypt or India or in the Balkans, then maybe we will be part of this successful record.”

And of course, what’s looming on the horizon is, if he is successful in the Middle East, you know what’s gonna happen next. He’s gonna use that same formula to address the war in Ukraine.

Again, “Art of the Deal” style, where you do not insult any of the major players. You develop personal relationships with them. You offer them trade and lucrative incentives concerning tariffs or no tariffs, and then you have a, not spoken about, but a pretty big stick, based on your former ability to make decisive decisions, whether killing Qasem Soleimani or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or destroying ISIS, or destroying, in this particular term, the Iranian nuclear facilities.

You add it all up and it’s a completely different approach, a completely different world. Much more players on the international scene have stakes in this to see it succeed than we saw in the past, either with Europe, prior American administrations, or the United Nations.

Does that mean it’s a guaranteed success? No. That means it has a good chance at a ceasefire that holds and a 50/50 chance of a lasting peace, which is saying a lot in the war-torn Middle East.

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