Trump has brought together nations willing to work with Washington to stabilize the Middle East but not tackled the real cause, analysts say
Published: 11:30am, 16 Oct 2025
Far from being a historic deal to end war in the Middle East as claimed by US President Donald Trump, the Gaza peace declaration has only established a bloc of regional countries that will work with Washington for now to stabilise the region, observers say.
Composed of Egypt, Arab monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, and Nato member Turkey, this “Axis of Stabilisation” in the making will continue to diplomatically engage Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” allies, including Hamas, to reduce the risk of further conflict in the region.
Over time, analysts say these countries may establish spheres of influence across the Middle East, like Turkey has by backing the winning horse in Syria’s recently concluded civil war, and act in concert with each other and Washington to marginalise the influence of a degraded, cornered Iran in the Arab world.
But none of this qualifies “The Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity” as a transformative diplomatic initiative, analysts say.
Asked by This Week in Asia if Trump and his Middle Eastern allies had found a way of ending conflicts in the region, three eminent analysts said “no”.
“Not a chance,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar of the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute. “What they have succeeded in creating is a temporary and very fragile ceasefire in Gaza, nothing more. Even that could fall apart at any moment.”
Nir T. Boms, a research fellow of Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Centre, said Trump had assembled a Middle East camp “that understands that stability is an actual objective and that we should not let the radical fringe lead the regional agenda”.
But “this is far from creating an end game” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or guarantee the stabilisation of Syria or Lebanon.
Fatal flaw
The fatal flaw in the Trump initiative was failure to address Palestinian statehood, the underlying cause of the Gaza war, the analysts said.
Pathways to resolving the deeply entrenched conflicts that have plagued the Middle East for many years do exist, according to Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Washington-based risk consultancy Gulf State Analytics.
However, “any meaningful and lasting solution must begin with an honest reckoning with the root causes of these crises, not merely
At the heart of the conflict “lies a structural imbalance rooted in Israel’s harsh occupation and the denial of basic rights and freedoms to the Palestinian people”.
According to Cafiero, any proposed peace framework is bound to fall short of its stated goals without “directly confronting and addressing these fundamental injustices”.
Instead, the involvement of a stabilising bloc of regional states represents “simple real-politics”, Boms said. “Diplomacy always comes at the end of a war and the US objective was always about increasing the sphere of cooperation.”
The US objective was always about increasing the sphere of cooperation
Nir T. Boms, research fellow at Tel Aviv University
The most notable feature of the current initiative was the US seeking to further integrate Qatar and Turkey into this “pragmatic circle”.
“Granted, the US seeks to lead the ‘stability axis’ and make sure that economic interests will not be sabotaged by war,” Boms said.
The idea of stabilising the region, and pushing the stakeholders to support formulas, will “allow the restoration of the original Westphalian idea: helping states guarantee the world order rather than disturb it”.
“It’s a worthwhile objective and it’s important to bring more stakeholders to such a table – but this is not getting the peace movement out of work still,” Boms said.
Ibish described the prospect of these regional players managing spheres of influence within the Middle East as “definitely not impossible”.
“You can see how everybody’s interests, except possibly for Iran, indicate that the entire governmental structure of the Middle East, including Turkey and all the Arab states, can come to a consensus on an issue as major as ending the war in Gaza and act to ensure that this happens,” Ibish said.
Without that consensus, Hamas “might well not have come to the table and released all the remaining living Israeli hostages, which is a major step forward”.
Difficult next step
The next phases of the Trump plan for Gaza “are very nebulous and will be extremely difficult to achieve, but it is certainly not impossible to imagine this happening” if all regional states continue to push in that direction and “everyone regards it as strongly within their interests”.
However, Ibish said Trump “does not appear to realise it, and certainly does not acknowledge it in his rhetoric”, that getting to the next phase of the Gaza peace deal, involving the installation of an international transitional stabilising force and disarmament of Hamas, “is going to be incredibly difficult”.
Israel may also have “every incentive to disrupt the process”, especially after the general election, which is scheduled to be held by October next year.
“Meanwhile, there are endless other features, fractures and conflicts that remain in the Middle East, and the question of the West Bank, which Israel is palpably preparing to annex, is unaddressed,” Ibish said.
He pointed out that the text of the Gaza declaration called Palestinian statehood “aspirational” – which was “diplomatic speak for a mirage or a pipe dream”.
“No, and not only no, but no way.”
In this context, Trump’s 20-point peace initiative “suffers from a critical lack of clarity and moral seriousness”, Cafiero said.
“Its vague language and conspicuous silence on the realities of Israeli occupation render it deeply insufficient as a foundation for a just resolution.”
By failing to acknowledge the asymmetry of power between the two sides, and by glossing over decades of Palestinian dispossession, Trump’s plan “essentially recycles the flawed logic of past initiatives that prioritized process over substance”, Cafiero said.