Donald Trump has relentlessly insisted that the United States—or even he personally—should “take over” Gaza, remove its population of more than 2 million Palestinians, and turn the region into a “Riviera” on the Mediterranean for the “world’s people.” Just this week he posted an AI-generated video showing him and Elon Musk partying in “Trump Gaza,” a paradise dominated by a golden statue of the president.

As a practical and political matter, the idea is a nonstarter. But simply by proposing it, Trump may have paved the way for two more attainable goals that could reshape the Middle East—and lead to chaos for Palestinians, particularly those in the West Bank.

The first seems to be a nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump has been fairly open about his desire for a deal. After he announced new sanctions against the country early this month, Trump held a press conference in which he addressed Iran directly: “I would love to be able to make a great deal, a deal where you can get on with your lives and you’ll do wonderfully.” Trump must recognize, though, that the Israeli right—and its conservative allies in America—would be furious about such an agreement and demand some form of compensation.

[Yair Rosenberg: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

Which leads to his second goal. In the same press conference, Trump hinted that he might allay Israel’s concerns by offering to expand its formal control in the West Bank. When asked whether he supported Israel’s “sovereignty” in the region, he said that his administration would “be making an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.” Palestinians are still holding their breath.

Annexing additional portions of the West Bank sounds tame compared with Gaz-a-Lago. And that could be precisely the point. By repeating his plan to clear out Gaza, Trump has shifted the Overton window in the Middle East and reinforced the idea that Palestinians’ claims are somehow void. The move follows a standard Trump tactic: say the same shocking thing over and over until it isn’t shocking anymore. Gaz-a-Lago sounds like madness, but apply a Trumpian lens, and a certain method appears—one that just might get him a nuclear deal with Iran.

There are several reasons to think he can make such an agreement, and probably one with favorable terms for the U.S. First, Iran’s bargaining position is exceptionally weak. Israel has dealt extensive damage to Tehran’s regional proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi and Syrian militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas. Worse still for Iran was the downfall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, the regime’s most powerful ally in the region. As a result, Iran is unable to project power in the Middle East or adequately defend itself from potential attacks from Israel or elsewhere. A deal would grant the regime not only an added measure of protection but also relief from sanctions, which would allow the country to begin to rebuild its economy and rethink its national-security strategy.

Iran’s little remaining leverage mostly comes from the progress it has made toward nuclear weaponization since 2018, when Trump withdrew from the deal that President Barack Obama had negotiated. That’s why another agreement is one of the few options Iran has to reclaim some power. One could imagine the country instead racing for a nuclear weapon. But the regime must know that Washington has a plan to destroy its nuclear capabilities within a matter of days through round-the-clock bombing.

Still, in response to Trump’s announcement this month that he was increasing sanctions, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seemed to dismiss the notion of a deal. But Tehran has otherwise been signaling for at least the past 18 months that it’s open to renewing talks with Washington.

As for Trump, a deal is the simplest way to keep Iran from sprinting toward a bomb and drawing the U.S. into conflict, which is the last thing he wants. It might also represent the best opportunity for him to establish himself as an international dealmaker. He would surely claim that his unique genius produced a deal that Obama couldn’t get (even though almost everything that will have made it possible happened under Joe Biden). He will probably demand a Nobel Peace Prize, and he might even get one.

The outline of such a deal is easy to imagine. Iran will likely have to halt further uranium enrichment, relinquish its current stock to be held in escrow outside the country, and place its nuclear facilities under the control—or at least observation—of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Perhaps it will have to destroy some centrifuges, too.

[Read: How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus]

By most estimates, Iran is about a year away from developing a usable warhead; any agreement would substantially extend that interval. Obama got Iran to agree to pause any nuclear advances for 15 years. Given the regime’s weakened stance today, Trump might well get 20 or more. Trump could also insist that Iran verifiably limit the arms and funding it grants to regional proxies. Israel has effectively proved that these groups can’t defend Iran anyway, so the regime may be more willing to curtail its support.

The main obstacle to a deal might be Iran’s missile arsenal, which the country could refuse to decommission. But unilateral missile disarmament is virtually unheard-of in international relations. This shouldn’t deter the United States. Israel’s air strikes in October significantly degraded Iran’s arsenal as well as its ground-to-air defenses and its ability to produce fuel for sophisticated rockets. Iranian missiles don’t pose nearly the threat they once did.

Billboards outside an Israeli settlement in the West Bank (Lucien Lung / Riva Press / Redux)

If a deal gets done, that leaves the resulting anger of the Israeli right and its allies in America. The administration already has a blueprint for how it might assuage them: the “Peace to Prosperity” framework that Jared Kushner championed during Trump’s first term. Much of the proposal is impractical, even farcical, but it contains a plan for Israel to annex an additional 30 percent or more of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. This would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded by a new and U.S.-approved expanded Israel.

Right-wing Israelis regard the entire West Bank as their exclusive patrimony, so they might not be thrilled to get only 30 percent more of it. But the plan would significantly extend their area of sovereign control. In all likelihood, it would be sufficient to appease them after a nuclear deal is signed.

Palestinians will protest; they want a state, not a shrunken territory circumscribed and dominated by an enlarged Israel that may soon want to pursue total control from the river to the sea, as its governing coalition envisions. But Israel and the U.S. will likely be able to impose the scheme by force. Israel has already effectively controlled the territory since 1967; little stands in the way of the country claiming it outright.

“Peace to Prosperity” was widely ridiculed when it was released in 2020. Now, next to Trump’s Gaza plan, it will look to some on the right like a model of rationality and restraint. That could be enough to make it happen.

Gaz-a-Lago is a fantasy. But by reciting the proposal again and again, Trump might be setting in motion very real—and extremely ominous—consequences for the West Bank and the entire region.

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.  

Douthat came to religion through his parents’ New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn’t follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously.

But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth:

That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?

This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat’s favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat’s purpose is to hasten the process. “Already the time of the new atheism is passing,” he writes; “already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise.

[Read: Evangelicals made a bad trade]

President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so “let’s bring religion back.” Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump’s religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president’s more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.