Trump’s Middle East plan: Big dreams, grand vision - but lacking details for success

Like Oslo before it, the Trump plan soars in vision but stumbles on specifics.

Something can’t be good; it has to be the greatest ever. Something can’t be bad; it has to be the worst in history. Hyperbole and the use of exaggerated superlatives to describe virtually everything are the tools of his rhetorical trade.

Trump’s supporters find this endearing, even charming. His detractors – and this is an understatement – find it off-putting if not ridiculous.

But the president knows full well what he’s doing. In his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal, he wrote: “A little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration, and a very effective form of promotion.”

Throughout his presidency, Trump has taken that “truthful hyperbole” to the world’s stage, and now he has taken it to the Mideast.

In the Knesset last week, he had this to say: “This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of an age of terror and death, and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God. It’s the start of a grand concord and lasting harmony for Israel and all the nations of what will soon be a truly magnificent region.... This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.”

And ambition, even extravagant ambition, can be healthy. It’s refreshing to dream of a Middle East transformed, of nations not lifting up sword against nation, nor learning war anymore. But the dream must be tethered to reality. If not, you get the Oslo process all over again.

Persistence, determination, goodwill, and “taking yes for an answer” can take you only so far. In the final analysis, the devil is in the details. Oslo failed because too little attention was paid to those details and too much faith was placed in positive momentum to move the sides forward – too much faith in Shimon Peres’s belief that, in the end, everybody just wants the same thing: food on the table, material comfort, and a good life for their children.

Kushner said that when he first began working on Middle East diplomacy during Trump’s first term, he started by talking to everyone who had worked on it for the previous 20 years.

The “foundational idea” he came to, he said, was “that people just want to be able to live with security and live freely. They want to be together. They want to have economic opportunity. They want their children to be able to live a better life. And they want to safely and freely practice whatever religion they choose to practice.”

Kushner said that for him, it was all really about “just getting people to focus on how to make the future better, versus getting stuck in these old conflicts.”

It’s a wonderful thought, even utopian. But it reveals a distinctly American, perhaps Western, inclination to underestimate how ideology – and often theology, of the most absolutist kind – shapes lives in this region. Not everyone just wants a Cadillac.

For some, “making the future better” means ensuring that you aren’t part of it. That is what Israel faces with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood ideology that animates it – the same ideology that also courses through two of the plan’s key partners: Turkey and Qatar.

All of this has an unmistakable echo of another high-stakes peace process that began with dazzling optimism three decades ago: the Oslo Accords.

Both were born in moments of exhaustion after war and terror – Oslo followed the First Intifada. Both promised a “new Middle East.” And both, for all their grand vision, are remarkably short on the nuts and bolts needed to turn aspiration into something concrete.

The Oslo I Accord of 1993 opened with a flourish – a White House handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Nobel prizes, the language of reconciliation. But it rested on what was explicitly a “Declaration of Principles,” not a peace treaty. Everything truly difficult – borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security – was postponed for later.

Oslo was less a contract than a concept: a process whose very existence was supposed to build enough trust to fill in its own blanks. But the trust never came, and the blanks stayed blank.

Trump’s 20-point plan is still very much a work in progress. Nevertheless, it has echoes of the same structural weakness that doomed Oslo. It paints a sweeping picture – Gaza reborn as a “deradicalized terror-free zone,” Arab nations rebuilding it, trade flourishing – but leaves the operational details vague.

Who dismantles Hamas? Who demilitarizes Gaza? Who polices it? Who pays for reconstruction? Who decides when the Palestinian Authority has sufficiently reformed and can, as the plan calls for, “securely and effectively take back control of Gaza”?

The plan offers aspirations but few mechanics. Timetables don’t exist. Enforcement is left to “independent monitors,” but who these monitors are, how they will verify compliance, or what happens if Hamas cheats – all of these aspects are undefined.

The pattern is familiar: a belief that process will create substance, that momentum will manufacture trust. That belief drove Oslo’s architects, who thought that simply beginning a peace process would generate an irreversible dynamic. It now drives Trump’s team, which argues that starting the process is itself transformative.

Oslo’s architects believed that goodwill and mutual interest would bridge gaps. There is an echo of that here as well. But without specifics—without clear sequencing, verification, consequences, and a clear determination of who exactly does what—Washington’s goodwill will not be enough.

Trump speaks as if the mere announcement of peace is enough to make it so. Yet the text of the plan reads more like a wish list than an implementation schedule. It envisions “phases,” “reforms,” and “guarantees,” but none are defined. There are promises of “international mechanisms,” but not a single binding clause spelling out who does what, when, and what happens if they don’t.

The result is a plan that is long on inspiration but short on details – Oslo redux, with a heavier dose of superlatives.

Nowhere is that paucity of details more glaring than in the promise to demilitarize Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors.

The document proclaims that Gaza will undergo a complete disarmament, its tunnels and weapons factories destroyed. It even mentions amnesty for those who “commit to peaceful coexistence.” Stirring language – and utterly devoid of the “how.”

The plan envisions “independent monitors” but doesn’t specify which states or organizations will provide them, what authority they would hold, or how they would gain access to Hamas’s weapons caches. There are vague references to an “International Stabilization Force,” but no details are provided about which countries would be involved, who would command it, or whether it would have any real teeth.

For Israelis who remember Oslo’s security provisions, this is eerily familiar. Oslo promised phased Israeli withdrawals “commensurate with Palestinian security performance,” but never defined what that meant, who judged it, or how violations would be handled.

Trump’s plan risks repeating that same faith in process over performance. It calls for a “terror-free Gaza” without explaining how terrorist groups are to be dismantled; it speaks of “deradicalization” without defining who will run the schools or control the mosques. Oslo at least specified police force sizes and coordination committees. Trump’s plan doesn’t get into all of that.

Which doesn’t mean the Trump plan is not something positive, a breath of fresh air: it brought the remaining live hostages home, and half of the dead hostages Hamas is holding. It ended the fighting. But a lasting Mideast peace? We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

This plan could create a positive dynamic, but Israelis must look at it clear-eyed. Right now, Hamas has failed to live up to its commitment to return all the bodies, killed two soldiers on Sunday despite the ceasefire, is reasserting its control in the 47% of Gaza it still holds, and has given no sign that it will go gently into the good night. Nor is it clear who exactly is going to push it there.

This is all still being worked out. Until it is, and until the details are spelled out, Israelis would do well to stay hopeful but skeptical – and to avoid the kind of euphoria that followed the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, or its current equivalent: Trump’s Knesset address and the Sharm el-Sheikh conference that followed.

The Oslo architects believed that “details would sort themselves out. They never did, and the process unraveled. Trump’s plan risks following a similar trajectory.

Still, it would be unfair to dismiss the plan entirely as just wishful thinking. It brought the hostages home and ended the fighting with Israel in control of enough of Gaza to prevent another October 7. It also created a vision, and there is value in a vision.

But if Oslo taught anything, it is that peace cannot be built on vision alone. The road to success here is paved with clauses, committees, and checkpoints – in other words, with details.

Vance and Rubio, Witkoff and Kushner, are now in and out of the country trying to fill in those details. Without them, Trump’s “truthful hyperbole” risks becoming just that: hyperbole. Ambition can ignite diplomacy, but only detail can sustain it.