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For weeks, Donald Trump has been exerting influence on events in the Middle East. After winning the 2024 election, he dispatched his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to help the Biden administration get the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage-release deal over the finish line. Now, a little more than 24 hours into his presidency, Trump has already begun to undo much of President Joe Biden’s decision making from the past four years, including on foreign affairs. I spoke with my colleague Yair Rosenberg, who covers both Trump and the Middle East, about the new president’s goals and approach to the region.

Isabel Fattal: What moves has Trump made on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office yesterday?

Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after inauguration, Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s February executive order that erected an entire sanctions regime against extremist Israeli settlers. This order allowed the administration to impose stiff penalties on violent settlers in the West Bank and anybody who supported them, and—as I reported in March—could have eventually applied not just to individual actors and organizations on the ground but also to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli army.

Biden’s executive order was seen as a sword of Damocles hanging over the settler movement. It effectively cut off some important people on the Israeli hard right from the international financial system, because if you’re under U.S. sanctions, a lot of institutions cannot touch you. The settler movement was so concerned about this that they pressed Netanyahu to lobby against the sanctions in Washington, and some members even took the Biden administration to court in the United States. All of that now goes away: not just the sanctions, but the executive order that created the entire regime. Trump is also reportedly expected to end the U.S. freeze on 2,000-pound bombs that Biden put in place during the war in Gaza, and impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its attempted prosecution of Israeli officials—something Biden resisted.

Isabel: Trump told reporters last night that he is “not confident” that the Gaza cease-fire will last, adding that “it’s not our war; it’s their war.” How durable is the cease-fire deal right now?

Yair: Trump is right to be skeptical. It’s not at all clear whether this is actually going to hold. The first of the agreement’s three phases, which we are in right now, is 42 days long. Israel is releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for 33 women, children, and elderly hostages in Gaza held by Hamas, some of them living, some of them dead. That part of the deal seems likely to continue according to plan.

But partway through this period, the two parties are supposed to negotiate for the release of the remaining male hostages, for whom Hamas is demanding a much steeper ransom than this already steep price. And if those negotiations don’t bear fruit, it’s entirely possible the war will resume, especially because hard-right politicians in Netanyahu’s government have already vowed to press on until Hamas is eliminated.

The question becomes: How committed are Israel and Hamas to actually getting this done? And how committed is Trump to keeping the cease-fire on the rails? From his comments, it doesn’t seem like he knows. He’s speaking like a spectator instead of an actor. So we have no idea what he intends to do.

Isabel: What would it look like for Trump to truly commit to keeping the cease-fire on track?

Yair: It would require his administration to make it more worthwhile for both sides to compromise and stick to the deal rather than capsize it. Most Israelis support the current deal, but the accord’s most bitter opponents are the hard-right politicians in the current Netanyahu government, making the cease-fire harder to sustain as time goes on. But the Israeli far right is also hoping to get many items on their wish list over the next four years, much like they did during Trump’s previous term. Among other things, they seek U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the removal of the sanctions we discussed, and backing for Israel in its ongoing war with Iran and its proxies. If Trump is committed to the continuation of the cease-fire—an open question—he could make clear that some of these benefits come with a price, which is calm in Gaza. And Trump, both in his previous term and in recent weeks, has shown that he is willing to offer incentives that Biden would not.

Hamas is even harder to influence, because they’re a messianic terrorist group. Fundamentally, they don’t seem to care about not just how many of their own fighters they’ve lost but also how many Gazan civilians have been killed in this war. For them, every casualty is either immaterial or an asset in a gruesome PR war against Israel. But they do have sponsors abroad—like Qatar, which hosts some of the group’s political leaders. The Qataris want to be on the right side of the next Trump administration, like any other state in the Middle East. And so Trump has the ability to put pressure on the Qataris, who can then push Hamas to compromise on what they’re willing to accept in the next hostage exchange.

These methods aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s true that the U.S. has some sway over events, but these countries and actors have their own national interests and make decisions based on their own internal politics. Americans on both the right and the left tend to overestimate the U.S.’s role in world developments. Frankly, if there were a magic button here, Biden would have pushed it already.

Isabel: What can we learn about Trump’s second term from how he has handled this cease-fire situation thus far? What does it tell us about how he might relate to the region?

Yair: The thing to understand about Trump’s approach to politics, as I’ve written, is that he has few if any core beliefs, which means that he is both incredibly flexible and easily influenced. Both domestic and international actors know that if they can give Trump something he wants, he might give them something they want. It doesn’t matter if they are a traditional U.S. ally or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re a democracy or not. It’s entirely about whether you are in his good books. So everybody is now scrambling to get on Trump’s good side, to make down payments on the things they hope the most powerful person in the world will then pay them back for. In a real sense, that’s what this cease-fire is—for Israel, for Qatar, for Egypt, it’s all jockeying for advantage by trying to give Trump a win now so he’ll give them a win later.

Expect the next four years to look a lot like this, with international actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and domestic actors such as American evangelicals and Republican neo-isolationists all playing this game of thrones, hoping to curry favor with the ruler now holding court.

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Please Don’t Make Me Say My Boyfriend’s Name

By Shayla Love

Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable … “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”

By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia.

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Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable. According to Carnegie, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency partly because his campaign manager addressed voters by their names. The Steel King, Andrew Carnegie (no relation), reportedly secured business deals by naming companies after at least one competitor and a would-be buyer, and maintained employee morale by calling his factory workers by their first name. “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”

By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia. People who feel it most severely might avoid addressing anyone by their name under any circumstance. For others, alexinomia is strongest around those they are closest to. For example, I don’t have trouble with most names, but when my sister and I are alone together, saying her name can feel odd and embarrassing, as if I’m spilling a secret, even though I’ve been saying her name for nearly 25 years. Some people can’t bring themselves to say the name of their wife or boyfriend or best friend—it can feel too vulnerable, too formal, or too plain awkward. Dale Carnegie was onto something: Names have a kind of power. How we use or avoid them can be a surprising window into the nature of our relationships and how we try to shape them.

The social function of names in Western society is, in many ways, an outlier. In many cultures, saying someone else’s given name is disrespectful, especially if they have higher status than you. Even your siblings, parents, and spouse might never utter your name to you. Opting for relationship terms (auntie) or unrelated nicknames (little cabbage) is the default. Meanwhile, American salespeople are trained to say customers’ names over and over again. It’s also a common tactic for building rapport in business pitches, during telemarketing calls, and on first dates.

Western norms can make sidestepping names a source of distress. For years, Thomas Ditye, a psychologist at Sigmund Freud Private University, in Vienna, and his colleague Lisa Welleschik listened as their clients described their struggles to say others’ names. In the 2023 study that coined the term alexinomia, Ditye and his colleagues interviewed 13 German-speaking women who found the phenomenon relatable. One woman told him that she couldn’t say her classmates’ names when she was younger, and after she met her husband, the issue became more pronounced. “Even to this day, it’s still difficult for me to address him by name; I always say ‘you’ or ‘hey,’ things like that,” she said. In a study published last year, Ditye and his colleagues searched online English-language discussion forums and found hundreds of posts in which men and women from around the world described how saying names made them feel weird. The team has also created an alexinomia questionnaire, with prompts that include “Saying the name of someone I like makes me feel exposed” and “I prefer using nicknames with my friends and family in order to avoid using names.”

[From the April 2023 issue: An ode to nicknames]

Names are a special feature of conversation in part because they’re almost always optional. When an element of a conversation isn’t grammatically necessary, its use is likely socially meaningful, Steven Clayman, a sociology professor at UCLA, told me. Clayman has studied broadcast-news journalists’ use of names in interviews, and found that saying someone’s name could signal—without saying so directly—that you’re speaking from the heart. But the implications of name-saying can shift depending on what’s happening at the moment someone says a name and who’s saying it; we all know that if your mom uses your name, it usually means you’re in trouble. Even changing where in the sentence the name falls can emphasize disagreement or make a statement more adversarial. “Shayla, you need to take a look at this” can sound much friendlier than “You need to take a look at this, Shayla.” And, of course, when someone says your name excessively, they sound like an alien pretending to be a human. “It may be that folks with alexinomia have this gut intuition, which is correct, that to use a name is to take a stand, to do something—and maybe something you didn’t intend,” Clayman said. Another person could misinterpret you saying their name as a sign of closeness or hostility. Why not just avoid the issue?

In his case studies and review of internet forums, Ditye noticed that many people mentioned tripping up on the names of those they were most intimate with—like me, with my sister. This might sound counterintuitive, but saying the names of people already close to us can feel “too personal, too emotional, to a degree that it’s unpleasant,” Ditye told me, even more so than saying the name of a stranger. Perhaps the stakes are higher with those we love, or the intimacy is exaggerated. People on the forums agreed that avoiding loved ones’ names was a way to manage closeness, but sometimes in the opposite way. “I think this is pretty common among close couples,” one person wrote. “It’s a good thing.” Using a name with your nearest and dearest can feel impersonal, like you’re a used car salesman trying to close a deal. If I say my boyfriend’s name, it does seem both too formal and too revealing. But if I use his nickname—Squint—I feel less awkward.

[Read: Why we speak more weirdly at home]

Alexinomia is a mostly harmless quirk of the human experience. (It can cause problems in rare cases, Ditye told me, if, say, you can’t call out a loved one’s name when they’re walking into traffic.) Still, if you avoid saying the names of those closest to you, it can skew their perception of how you feel about them. One of Ditye’s study participants shared that her husband was upset by her inability to say his name. It made him feel unloved.

As Dale Carnegie wrote, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Pushing through the discomfort and simply saying their name every now and then can remind your loved ones that you care. By saying someone else’s name, even when it’s awkward, you’ll be offering a bit of yourself at the same time.