Trump is negotiating with terrorists. It’s not a bad strategy.
President Trump’s decision to engage in direct communication with Hamas seems to upend a longstanding U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorist organizations. In fact, his decision continues an existing tradition of U.S. foreign policy. He is engaging with groups he considers terrorist organizations, either directly or through intermediaries.
What Trump has done is remove the middle man, but he isn’t the first president to decide that talking with terrorists was in the best interests of our country. As the Trump administration upends decades of U.S. policies in other areas, it’s important to differentiate between the ones that are likely to cause real harm and equally important to give credit to those initiatives that make sense.
This is right because it’s fair, but also because it grants a degree of credibility to critics who shouldn’t ever appear as being opposed to a policy simply because it was suggested by a president with whom they often disagree. Each individual policy has merits and flaws. Even if Trump gets a lot wrong in foreign policy, he sometimes gets things right.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has believed that any direct communication with terrorist organizations would encourage their hostile behavior. Negotiation with terrorists over the release of hostages would encourage them to take more hostages and negotiations after they blew up a building would encourage them to blow up more buildings.
There is a sound logic to our policy of not negotiating with terrorists, but no rule applies perfectly in every situation. The U.S. has recognized the need to engage with these organizations from time to time. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the U.S. engaged directly with the MEK, an Iranian dissident group designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization and with Colombia’s FARC rebels, also designated by the State Department as terrorists.
The FARC example is particularly applicable to recent developments with Hamas, since Secretary of State John Kerry, acting on orders from President Obama, spoke directly with the FARC to facilitate a peace agreement between the organization and the Colombian government, ending decades of civil war. Trump’s engagement with Hamas intends a similar end, the cessation of hostilities between two warring factions.
Like a doctor, the first rule of any foreign policy should be to do no harm. This was the thinking that generally kept the U.S. from engaging with terrorist organizations but it’s not clear how any engagement with Hamas could possibly make the situation in the Middle East worse. The fear that Hamas might be emboldened through negotiations will not alter current realities. The organization is already operating at its maximum political and military capability and lacks the power to take additional actions.
Moreover, it’s not in the interests of the organization to escalate the current crisis since it understands that Israel is almost certainly willing to reengage in full-scale military operations in response to major provocations. Hamas also understands that, unlike the Biden administration, Trump is likely to fully support Israeli actions if they follow an escalation by Hamas.
Absent direct U.S. involvement in resolving the conflict, it’s not clear how that conflict will ever end. It may ebb and flow, but the U.S. is the only power capable of forcing enough concessions from both sides to create an enduring peace. Doing so is more difficult if we only speak indirectly to one of the two major combatants.
Trump’s plan to evacuate Gaza was morally and practically wrong, but it may prove useful to focus Hamas’ attention as direct negotiations get underway.
In Gaza, Trump has rightly assessed the realities on the ground. Hamas exists and Israel lacks the ability, for military and geopolitical reasons, to meet Prime Minister Netanyahu’s goal of seeing it eradicated. Refusing to speak with the organization directly wishes away its existence and robs the U.S. of a chance to make substantial progress on what has been an intractable issue.
It’s possible that at the end of our negotiations with Hamas, we fail to change the situation on the ground and the conflict will continue its sad trajectory. But that outcome is almost entirely assured if we do nothing to alter the status quo and for that reason above all others Trump is right to engage Hamas directly.
Direct negotiation need not mean recognition and we can make it clear through sanctions, public statements and continued military support for Israel that we are not a friend to Hamas. But the continuation of the current Gaza conflict, which is now spreading into Palestinian areas of the West Bank, is standing in the way of progress in the Middle East on other fronts.
The conflict is a key reason why relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel remain informal and a distraction that fractures the U.S.-Israeli-Arab coalition against Iran. This last point is especially important as the U.S. makes new efforts to dissuade Iran’s development of nuclear arms.
The status quo regarding the conflict in Gaza isn’t working. For all the places Trump may be making foreign policy mistakes, his willingness to talk to Hamas and see what happens is one place he’s probably right.
Colin Pascal is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and military intelligence officer. He spent most of his 20-year military career filling strategic intelligence assignments, including as the chief of Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence for Operation INHERENT RESOLVE in Iraq and Syria, and served as an assistant army attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
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