How Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine worked a Mideast miracle

President Donald Trump has performed nothing short of a miracle by halting the war in Gaza and securing the release of 20 precious souls who had been languishing in Hamas captivity since Oct. 7.

Trump’s efforts were greeted with jubilation and relief in Israel — and amazingly, in Gaza as well.

The cease-fire is the first step in a larger peace deal that could reshape the Middle East and end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good.

This alone would have been enough for us — Dayenu! as we Jews say on Passover.

But Trump’s achievement is all the more extraordinary: His diplomatic breakthrough won’t cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars.

While American foreign policy throughout the post-war era has relied on endless extensions of our military might and our national wealth, Trump’s stems from relationships he has built to profit the American people — specifically, our working class.

That was the first thing the president mentioned in a Fox News interview last week, just hours after the peace deal was announced.

Host Sean Hannity asked Trump how he managed to include so many Arab nations in the effort to get Hamas to the table, nations that for decades had refused to get involved.

The president’s answer? Tariffs.

“Having the ability to deal with trade, having the ability to use tariffs to help me make a point,” he said.

“The tariffs have brought peace to the world, I’m telling you. They have brought peace to the world.”

Of the seven — soon to be eight — conflicts Trump has resolved in the first year of his second term, five of them were settled “through trade,” he said.

“We are not going to deal with people that fight,” he declared — and that firm rule “gives you a tremendous road to peace and saving millions of lives.”

It was a revealing moment that showed us just how deeply Trump has tied his domestic program and his foreign policy priorities together.

The president designed his tariff regime to reshore manufacturing and end the fleecing of America by countries that flood our markets with their cheap goods while putting a tax on our exports.

But he’s simultaneously using it to accomplish all manner of policy wins — from stemming the free flow of fentanyl across our southern border to bringing India and Pakistan to the negotiating table to forcing Pfizer to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

His Middle East peace plan is just the latest example.

Its seeds were sown during Trump’s trip to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia earlier this year, when he secured trillions of dollars in investments in US manufacturing — including billions to buy American-made aircraft and engines, as well as in new AI ventures.

Trump hailed these investments at the time as part of his larger agenda to bring back American manufacturing jobs, a promise he’d repeatedly made to his voters.

But the deals also secured the trust of these Muslim Gulf nations, treating them as valued and respected partners.

Previous administrations based their Middle Eastern forays on the fiction of shared values, or the fantasy of exporting American-style representative democracy to people who don’t want it.

They spent trillions of taxpayer dollars and sacrificed thousands of American lives in service to these foolhardy notions.

Trump doesn’t believe in shared values — he believes in sharing value.

He’s not bent on exporting democracy, but on exporting exports.

And by intertwining the US economy with theirs, Trump was signaling the kind of friendship whose currency runs much deeper than the fictional shared values of previous administrations.

For Trump, the currency is, well, currency.

His moves to solidify friendship via joint economic prosperity and shared interests were crucial to getting the Middle East deal done.

Trump, who has been avowedly, proudly pro-Israel for his entire political career, would never have been able to get Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to the table had he not been able to convince these nations he had their best interests at heart, too.

He did that by creating shared economic projects — in a program that benefits the American people first and foremost, but that also unlocks our markets for new friends and allies.

That’s the secret sauce here: Trump’s foreign policy and domestic policy are two sides of the same coin.

He’s used tariffs to force the hands of foreign leaders with policies designed to enrich the American middle class rather than bleed it dry.

And getting them on board with his America First prosperity agenda means that world peace must be their priority, too.

Will wonders never cease.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the author of “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women” and hosts “Batya” on NewsNation.