United States

We should not be surprised by the US security strategy...fundamentally Donald Trump has problem with the European Union...the contradictions come thick and fast but it's time frankly that the European Union and leaders in Brussels and across member state woke up to the reality of Donald Trump and stopped wishing he were different."

Negotiators are “trying to square circles that simply cannot be squared,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank in London. He wondered whether an international stabilization force could really dismantle Hamas, a target Israel was unable to achieve through two years of a “brutal” military operation. While Trump’s peace plan stipulates that Hamas will disarm, the group has reasserted control of Gaza during the first phase of the ceasefire and shown no immediate signs of disarmament. Disarming Hamas through military intervention is “not exactly something that any other power is going to be interested in,” he told NBC News. And when it comes to Gaza’s governance, Hellyer added, “Trump can create his board of peace,” referring to the group that would sit atop Gaza’s governing structure under Trump’s plan, but “you can’t simply enforce this stuff on the ground without cooperation from the population, unless you just want to turn it into a new type of occupation.”

Putin knows he can’t defeat NATO in a head-on fight...[so] his only hope is to defeat it politically by undermining its cohesiveness, which he tries to do all the time, said Ed Arnold, a former British army infantry officer who specializes in European security analysis for the RUSI think tank. The U.S.’s latest peace plan would go a long way toward dividing NATO...“That would create huge divisions within the trans-Atlantic partnership,” Arnold said. “Politically, Russia is on the cusp of winning."