CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE

Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan reflects one of Keynes’ most important insights, embodied by the warning that the ‘perils of the future lay not in frontiers and sovereignties, but in food, coal, and transport’

- Shlomo Ben-Ami

US President Donald Trump is probably not even aware of John Maynard Keynes’s 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which cautioned that the harsh demands imposed on Germany after World War Iwith their “unjust and unworkable economic basis” ~ would destabilise all of Europe. But Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan reflects one of Keynes’ most important insights, embodied by the warning that the “perils of the future lay not in frontiers and sovereignties, but in food, coal, and transport.”

Gaza has never been central to discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Trump views the enclave as the Archimedean point from which he can not only expand his family’s business empire—a key motivation behind much of his foreign policy — but also consolidate US alliances in the Middle East and advance a grand international infrastructure programme capable of countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRD.

These ambitions long preceded the Gaza war. In 2017, during his first presidency, Trump reached an agreement with Japan to offer “high-quality infrastructure investment alternatives in the Indo Pacific region,” and established a partnership aimed at promoting universal access to affordable and reliable energy in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. “In a globalized world,” then Secretary of Defense James Mattis stated, “there are many belts and many roads, and no one nation should put itself into a position of dictating ‘One Belt, One Road.”

Former US President Joe Biden took up the infrastructure mantle in 2022, when he established the I2U2 Group with India, Israel, and the UAE to focus on “joint investments and new initiatives in water, energy, transportation, space, health, food security, and technology.” The follow-