Gaza, Iran, and Seeing the Whole Board
There's a lot more going on that you're seeing. Here's the big picture.
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by Rod D. Martin
August 1, 2026
Yesterday, President Trump announced that Hamas has agreed to be fully disarmed and hand over the government of Gaza to a new body under Trump’s Board of Peace.
Some of you are telling me the Gaza deal can’t last. You’re not seeing the whole board.
There are two default assumptions at work here.
The first is that Islamist radicals can just spontaneously produce missiles, guns, and money from thin air. They can’t.
The second is just black pilling, which is frankly stupid. So you’re demoralized: big whoop. You’d have been more demoralized in the summer of 1940, or for that matter of 1942. And you’d have been just as wrong. Get over yourself. Look at the facts.
First, Israel beat the crap out of Hamas, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on Earth. They are as murderous with their own people as with the Israelis, and have been for decades. It is no accident that since Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians in 2006, the Christian Arab population there has been “reduced” by 2/3. And that’s not a lot different from the West Bank Palestinians, who upon gaining control of Bethlehem “reduced” its Christian population from 80% to about 10%, or the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Christian population was about 54% before the Civil War and is now about 37%.
The people pretending that it’s the Jews who are killing Christians are willfully blind, and intentionally blinding you.
No matter what you think of Israel, Hamas is evil. They went too far in 2023, as they were always going to do, and Israel has defeated them. They can no longer field an effective military force. They cannot resupply. They’re done.
Can individual or small groups of militants still kill people? Sure. But there’s no longer any sanctuary, and the days of your tax money being funneled through the PA to pay for suicide bombers are long over (although if you live in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, that is not true of Somalia).
The black pill types told us nine months ago that the peace would not last a week and that Trump could never pull off the deal agreed to yesterday. Yet here we are, nine months later, and he has. “Oh, it won’t last,” you say, but you said that last October, and the peace has held. Why? Israel cut off Hamas’s ability to fight, while Trump cut off its ability to resupply. It’s that simple.
Second, the reason that’s simple is that Hamas’s three chief patrons were Iran, which now can’t get ships in or out of its own ports, along with Turkey and Qatar. Trump has reduced Qatar to a U.S. protectorate. He’s dealmaking with the Turks on F-35s and the disposition of Syria, including new oil pipelines (to be built and owned by U.S. oil companies). Turkey suddenly needs peace to achieve its own ends; Qatar simply has nowhere to go. And Hamas has no one to ship them weapons or pay their bills.
They could have made Gaza into the Riviera. Instead, they dug up the water and sewer pipes to make missiles they fired for two decades at schools. So now the Board of Peace will build what they did not.
Third, they’ll do that because no one hates Hamas as much as the Arabs. Every country the Palestinians have entered in any numbers, they’ve immediately plunged into civil war. No one wants them anywhere near anything important. Egypt’s wall along its border with Gaza makes a maximum security prison look like a sand castle. It has no such wall along its Israeli border. There’s a reason.
Trump has carefully cultivated enormous business and investment deals with every regional power. He’s gone out of his way to give them things they need and want, from the Saudi nuclear power deal to the Turks’ favorite installed in Damascus. Their interests are interlocked with ours, and tightening by the day. Everyone now profits from peace. The Palestinians are in their way.
Fourth, a massive generational shift is underway. The old timers wanted a Palestinian state, so long as it was safely contained somewhere else, and they used it to show they were “tough” against Israel when in war after war they’d been shown to be impotent. It was low cost and (moderately) higher reward for them.
Their children, exemplified by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), are sick of it. They want peace with Israel. They want to make money in Israel, and they want the Israelis to bring tech and investment to them. Even more so, they want military and intelligence cooperation, which all of them badly need. They have none of their parents’ sentimental attachment to long-dead Palestinian leaders or decades-old lost wars. And Trump is daily incentivizing them to double down.
Fifth, why? Because Trump knows three things the black pill guys do not:
Trump knows that prosperous countries rarely attack one another.
Trump knows Americans can make fortunes in the Middle East if peace is the rule rather than the exception, and that will never be achieved through a Bush-style occupation. He also knows that we can save fortunes if we don’t have to worry about the Middle East anymore.
Trump knows that without money, you’re done. And he knows how to cut off the cash.
Trump calls this “commerce not chaos”. It’s catching on.
No one funds Hamas now. No one funds Hezbollah now. A Lebanese peace requires a stable, functioning Lebanese government and the dismantling of Iran’s proxy army on Israel’s northern border — the one that has also occupied and terrorized Lebanon for half a century.
So Trump let Israel annihilate Hamas, which has now unconditionally surrendered. He also let it beat Hezbollah into submission. On the ground, these were the two biggest obstacles to regional peace, now each shattered.
And now we have a way to give everyone what they want in both countries: a Palestinian state under new management, military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, Israeli energy exports to Egypt and Jordan (and Syria and Lebanon soon enough), and the restoration of Lebanon as “the Paris of the Middle East,” as it was before the civil war.
Sixth, most people watching see these as disconnected issues. They aren’t. They never were. But neither is Syria, under new management and (despite its sordid past) desperate to balance Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. power so it can have the breathing room to avoid becoming Ankara’s colony. Suddenly it has an intense interest in peace as well; just as suddenly, it is no longer an essential Russian outpost or a colony of Tehran.
And also neither is Iraq, where pro-Iranian militias have wreaked havoc for 20 years. Those days are over. Iraq’s new President is disarming the militias and arresting their leaders. The militias spent the early part of this year reinforcing the IRGC in its massacre and crackdown on the Iranian people. They’re also the final obstacle to a durable peace — and economic development, and pipeline construction, and prosperity — in Iraq itself.
Seventh, all these roads lead one place: Iran. The Islamic regime is the primary source of funding, armament, and direction for the bad guys in every armed conflict in the region: literally all of them. Tehran used all these proxies to build a de facto Persian Empire from Baghdad to Beirut and from Abadan to Aden. That’s gone now. It won’t be coming back.
Eighth, the Iran war has shown the Gulf Arab states that the Iranian regime really is a clear and present danger, not a convenient idiocracy that keeps its country from becoming a rich regional power. Months of Iranian bombardment of Arab hotels, water plants, airports, and shipping have been more persuasive than decades of American leaders. Now Saudi Arabia carries out joint attacks on Iran with the U.S.; so do Kuwait and the UAE. And with a host of currency swap lines, nuclear power deals, and direct military support, Trump is drawing all of them closer to the U.S. by the day.
Ninth, all that works because of what doesn’t. China is a nonfactor. Supposedly Iran’s ally (much like it was supposedly Russia’s “ally without limits” while it pushed Putin into his Ukrainian quagmire), China hasn’t lifted a finger. Rumors of shoulder-fired missile shipments are just that: rumors. But even if true, they’re the exception that proves the rule. China is not sending advanced fighter jets, not at any price. China is not sending troops. China is not sending its Navy. If anything, it’s sparring with the U.S. over the pending Taiwan arms sale...but only very, very gently.
No one in the Middle East is stupid enough not to understand what China calls “the Malacca Dilemma”. 80% of its oil has to flow through the Strait of Malacca. The U.S. already had de facto control of the chokepoint; it has turned that into control into a chokehold with its new defense pact with the heretofore “Non-Aligned” Indonesia. It’s also flipped India, which not only signed an “impossible” February trade deal with Trump (or so said the black pillers) but immediately began capturing illegal Russian Shadow Fleet oil tankers.
Iran has to use that Shadow Fleet too: 90% of its oil exports are to China. But China hasn’t lifted a finger, and India doesn’t care. That was even before Trump sealed Iran’s ports tight.
Tenth, all of this has required complex negotiations with at least a dozen countries that mostly don’t like each other, and all of that takes time. If you see Trump call a cease fire to “negotiate” with Iran, don’t be dumb: he’s actually using that time to negotiate with Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and Oman, and Qatar, and Bahrain, and Kuwait, and Iraq, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Turkey, and Israel. Iran is a threat to every one of them, and in many cases has been their murderous oppressor. They’re skittish, they’re gunshy, they know their militaries are strong on paper but weak in fact, and like all people, inertia has kept them in the long status quo.
But Trump has destroyed that status quo: it is never coming back. And slowly, every country in the region is getting the point and getting on board.
How Iran finishes is almost irrelevant. Oh, you’re not going to believe our expanded target package over the next few weeks. The prospect of a successful Iranian revolution and a free Iran is very, very real. A free Iran would be the greatest investment opportunity of the 2030s, and everyone would benefit, no matter how tough change may be.
But at this point it wouldn’t matter. Iran spent trillions of its people’s money on underground complexes in which to build nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to load them on. It has literally nothing left to show for it. And every day it threatens Hormuz or the Bab al-Mandab is another day that its well-armed, wealthy neighbors become more determined that it can never be allowed to rise again. If the U.S. doesn’t finish Iran, the Arabs will.
Trump plays the part of a chaos agent. He does this to keep all his enemies off balance. He’s been telling you this on video and in print since at least 1987. If you can’t see the play, that’s on you.
But no one ever does the homework. So it keeps on working for him. He’s remaking the Middle East no matter what happens in Iran, and our grandchildren will thank him, not just for peace but for the prosperity that comes from it. What they won’t remember is your black pill foolishness, your temporary gas price inconvenience, or your inability to see the world being transformed before your eyes.
Which is good. You want your grandchildren to respect you, after all.
Great, great analysis and spot on. As a 27 year, retired Naval Aviator (who helped end the Cold War dismantle the USSR), your insight and cogent comments show an understanding I can only wish my leaders had while I was on active duty. Your column is always a breath of fresh air.
Ken Clements
Captain, US Navy (ret)
Rod, thanks again for your summary and black pill refutations. In the back of my mind I see all that you’re saying, but the black pillers like Steve Bannon and Eric Bowling(sp?) cloud my view.
I hope enough people see this plan along with the related economic plan to enable a win or at least a hold in the midterms.