The Trump administration’s handling of the cease-fire talks will reflect its broader approach to the Middle East. The Vandenberg Coalition outlines, country by country, how the U.S. can best craft that approach over the next four years. Noteworthy, among other things, is that the report’s authors are not impressed—so far—by recent changes in Lebanon:

U.S. policy should treat Lebanon as a state captured by Iran unless and until Hizballah’s grip weakens. The election of a new president, which Hizballah prevented for two years, suggests that there is hope the Lebanese state will assert itself and regain its sovereignty from Hizballah and Iran. But that hope will become a reality only if the United States maintains a tough and insistent policy against the influence of Hizballah and Iran.

Therefore, they write, the U.S. should end “funding for the Lebanese Armed Forces until it demonstrates a willingness to oppose Hizballah,” while accepting “that Israel can only rely on itself to secure the Israel-Lebanon border.”

For, Gaza, the report recommends allowing “an Arab trusteeship” to take over the territory when the war ends, as the “weakness and incompetence of the Palestinian Authority mean it cannot govern Gaza.” Not part of the trusteeship should be “any entities with longstanding support for Hamas,” which would presumably exclude Qatar:

Qatar has worked to undermine U.S. interests by cooperating with Iran and sheltering terrorist groups like Hamas. With much better friends like the Saudis, Washington no longer needs to tolerate destabilizing Qatari behavior. . . . The Qataris’ sheltering of Hamas leadership is reprehensible. They have failed to use their leverage over Hamas to secure the release of all remaining hostages in Gaza, including American citizens, some of whom Hamas has murdered in captivity.

In fact, the report calls for the radical step of removing the U.S. airbase from the country, which is the foundation of the American relationship with Qatar.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.