Is Trump poised to become a historic global peacemaker?

While Donald Trump prepares to spend a second week at his criminal trial in New York, the pace of global events outside courthouse walls remains dizzying. With each passing day, the former president faces fresh questions about his plans for government, should he be returned to the White House in November.

In a hunt to understand Trump’s views on the Middle East crisis, two journalists from the Tel Avivheadquartered Israel Hayom scored an exclusive last month thanks to their newspaper’s owner.

They travelled there expecting to hear fulsome words of support for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the assault on Gaza. Instead, they surfaced fresh evidence of

Trump’s growing animus to the Israeli leader.

“You have to finish up your war,” he said. “Israel has to be very careful because you’re losing a lot of the world, a lot of support.”

The reporters were stunned to hear Trump (inset) embrace a position at odds with most Republicans. But the seeds of Trump’s tensions with Netanyahu were revealed last year when Trump claimed that the Israeli leader “let us down” on the eve of the military operation to kill General Qassem Soleimani, the former head of Iran’s Quds force, who was assassinated on Trump’s orders on 3 January 2020.

“We had everything all set to go,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Florida. “The night before it happened, I got a call that Israel would not be participating in this attack.

“We did the job ourselves with absolute precision… and then Bibi tried to take credit for it. I’ll never forget that.”

The former president’s angry memory also extends to Netanyahu’s early decision to congratulate Joe Biden on winning the keys to the White House, rejecting Trump’s false claims that the 2016 election was rigged. “Transactional” is the description observers usually apply to Trump’s anticipated foreign policy plans.

The former president judges world leaders on the loyalty they have shown him and whether he considers them friendly (China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un are “friends”, but Netanyahu is not). Trump’s surrogates predict that despite his recent rhetoric, he will stand by Israel through thick and thin.

But veteran analysts of America’s relationships in the Middle East say that – by definition – predicting Trump’s moves is an imprecise art.

“One of the premises of a Trump administration is that the president will be the only person who