Last Tuesday at the United Nations, two men stood at the same podium, hours apart, and told two very different stories about the same war. President Donald Trump said his administration had ended the fighting in Gaza and brought the hostages home. French President Emmanuel Macron, delivering his farewell address before stepping down next spring, called the whole thing a spectacle that should shame us all.
He banged his fist on the rostrum for emphasis. It made for good television. It also happened to be out of date.
The corridor that already opened
Macron’s specific complaint was that not a single humanitarian corridor into Gaza had reopened despite the talk of peace. That claim did not survive contact with the news of the same week. Weeks earlier, Israel’s Cabinet had approved the ceasefire and hostage-release plan Trump brokered in October 2025, and by this September, the Israeli military confirmed it had recovered the remains of the last hostage still held in Gaza. Every one of the 251 people Hamas dragged across the border on Oct. 7, 2023, has now either come home alive or been returned for burial. That is not nothing. In a war that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis in a single day and, by Palestinian count, more than 66,000 Gazans over two years, getting every hostage out and the guns silent is a result, not a spectacle.
What 30 years of sympathy actually bought
Macron speaks for a European tradition that has spent three decades treating sympathy as a substitute for strategy. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the European Union alone has sent more than 6 billion euros to the Palestinians, and by one widely cited accounting, international donors combined had pushed past $25 billion within 20 years of Oslo. Brussels has not slowed down. It signed a 1.36-billion-euro package for 2021 through 2024 and, this year, a fresh 1.6-billion-euro package running through 2027. None of that money ever came tied to a demand that Gaza’s rulers give up their tunnels or their rockets. It bought good headlines in Brussels. It did not buy peace.
The unglamorous alternative
Trump’s approach is not elegant, and nobody, including Trump, is pretending it fixes everything. But look at what it has produced. The 2020 Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco without waiting for a final settlement on Palestinian statehood. In November 2025, Kazakhstan became the first country to join the accords in Trump’s second term. A month later, Somaliland pledged to join after Israel recognized it as an independent state. Talks with Saudi Arabia continue, and even Syria’s new government, while not ready to sign, is now negotiating with Washington instead of shooting at Israeli positions. None of this required a single U.N. resolution recognizing anybody’s statehood. It required leverage, patience, and a willingness to take an ugly incremental deal over a beautiful hypothetical one.
Two theories of how the world changes
Macron’s theory is that if enough governments declare their sympathy loudly enough, reality eventually catches up. He said as much in his own speech, noting that a year earlier, about a dozen countries had already recognized a Palestinian state, then admitting in the same breath that people who call that recognition just a piece of paper have a point. Trump’s theory is cruder: that peace is a transaction, secured by verified security guarantees and economic incentives, not a feeling expressed at a podium. After two years of war, one of those theories delivered hostages, a ceasefire, and new diplomatic openings. The other delivered a speech.
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Nobody should mistake Trump’s Gaza framework for a finished peace. Gaza still needs to be rebuilt, Hamas still needs to be disarmed, and the new Board of Peace overseeing that reconstruction still has to prove it can govern rather than just referee. But modest, verified progress beats eloquent futility every time. Macron gave the world a memorable line. Trump gave 251 families their people back. History will remember which one mattered more.
Meda Parameswara Reddy is the director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former research and development executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he specializes in interdisciplinary research and public policy analysis. His writing has appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, RealClear platforms, the Fulcrum, the Humanist, Afro American, the Friday Times, and South Asia Monitor, where he serves on the editorial board. He also hosts the interview show SAM Dialogues with Dr. M. P. Reddy.