From Daylight to Daybreak

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, October 10, 2025

 

In a post on X, Barack Obama announced his hopes for the peace agreement between Israel and Hamas and then, characteristically, took to instructing. “It now falls on Israelis and Palestinians, with the support of the U.S. and the entire world community, to begin the hard task of rebuilding Gaza,” he wrote, “and to commit to a process that, by recognizing the common humanity and basic rights of both peoples, can achieve a lasting peace.” As president, Obama’s dominant foreign policy idea was to bring Iran closer to the U.S. and put “daylight” between America and Israel. “When there is no daylight,” he said in 2009, “Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.”

 

Today, Obama is on the sidelines, the U.S. and Israel have never been closer, President Trump has shepherded Israel and Hamas into signing a peace agreement, and the Arab states approve—a complete refutation of Obaman logic and a triumph of its opposite: When the U.S. stands by Israel, Israeli leaders are comfortable taking risks. And Sunni Arab countries no longer sanction all manner of deadly mischief carried out in the name of a free Palestine. 

 

The world has long passed Obama by. But a decade and a half ago, he wasn’t alone in his thinking. It was part of a conciliatory approach to the Middle East that had become conventional wisdom in certain liberal circles.

 

Which raises a larger point. Obama, who virtually branded the term “change,” was never a forward-looking visionary with new ideas. He was youthful and talented, and his being the country’s first black president made his election rightly historic. But he was merely a fresh vessel for theories that had been kicking around academia and liberal think tanks for ages. Those theories failed when he translated them into action, and everything began to change in earnest once Obama left office. So now, he’s left tweeting about the obligations of the “world community.”

 

Then there’s Trump. Before Donald Trump entered politics, nobody would have pegged him for a global change agent. He was nearly the opposite: a glitzy cultural fixture who seemed exceedingly comfortable with the status quo. And when he began to turn the world upside down, he wasn’t young. Trump was 70 years old when he was first sworn into office. In less than a year he’ll be 80. John Podhoretz often points out that reckonings and changes come from unexpected places and in unlikely forms. Trump was the change the world was waiting for, whether they knew it or not. If you’re an Obama liberal, nothing hurts more than that truth.

 

Because Trump, unlike Obama, has never been attached to a political school of thought, he pulls ideas out of his head and turns them into policy (for good and ill). Obama, like the rest of us, had no clue what change really looked like. But we do now. And this week, with a victorious Israel and defeated Hamas entering into the first phase of a peace plan, it looks terrific.

 

Of course, the failed, stale ideas still live on in irrelevant institutions and the minds of their believers. Even revolutionary change can’t rid the world of bad thinking. Which is why Obama probably has a better chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize (again) for his inane tweet than Trump has for creating unprecedented peace.

 

But what does a man who’s changed the world and initiated Middle East peace on his own terms need with a medal tarnished by the likes of Yasser Arafat? That’s just a shabby symbol from a bygone age, and this is a new day.