Donald Trump took a victory lap on Monday after the United Nations Security Council voted to approve key elements of the Gaza ceasefire plan that he helped negotiate. The president deserves it.

The vote, in which both Russia and China abstained but to which no UNSC member state objected, paves the way for implementing parts of the ceasefire deal aimed at establishing a more durable peace in the region. The resolution authorizes the creation of an “international stabilization force” that will provide security in the Strip, and it grants the U.N.’s imprimatur to the establishment of a transitional governing authority led by Trump himself.

For all the complications this plan will no doubt soon encounter, it’s worth taking stock of the successes Trump’s creative approach to geostrategy in the region has already produced.

With this U.N. vote, arguably the world’s most monomaniacally anti-Israel body has ratified the legitimacy of an indefinite Israeli military presence inside the Gaza Strip. It has sanctioned the Trump peace plan’s contention that the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank must undergo some unspecified “reform program” before it can assume sovereignty over Gaza. It has endorsed the notion that Gaza is not a Palestinian problem but a global problem – one that its neighboring Arab states have some responsibility for and must invest in.

If nothing else, Trump’s peace deal compels the Arab world to become stakeholders in Gaza’s future. That’s surely preferable to the status quo ante, when Arab governments could insist that the conditions in the Palestinian territories are Israel’s problem only to criticize Israel’s management of them.

These are wondrous developments. They will have a profound influence over the shape the region takes, even if Trump’s ceasefire plan collapses. Ensuring that it does not collapse is the hard part, and that work is just getting started.

A New York Times report published Tuesday takes readers inside the nondescript Israeli warehouse in which the future of Gaza is being planned and where it will soon be administered, in part, by the United States military. Its reporters seem overcome with trepidation by what they witnessed there.

“Some of those involved in the effort say that scenes of American soldiers tossing around ideas for how to rebuild the devastated Gaza Strip evoke uncomfortable memories of other U.S.-led attempts at reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the Times fretted. The dispatch sneers at the cutesy themes a working group on “civil governance” has adopted, “including ‘wellness Wednesdays’ for health care and education, and ‘thirsty Thursdays’ for water infrastructure,” and it speculates that the project is destined to fail given the lack of “formal Palestinian representation in the building.”

Perhaps the Times should give the president’s 20-point plan a closer read; specifically, step 9, which recommends a “temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” made up of “qualified Palestinians and international experts” subject to the supervision of the president – or, rather, the “Board of Peace” he is to chair and which the U.N. authorized just hours ago. If there is a lack of “formal Palestinian representation” in that process, it’s because the representatives of “formal Palestinian representation” just fought and lost a war against the state of Israel. The victors will magnanimously integrate reliable elements of the population that this international institution is to administer as this process progresses.

It is reasonable to ask if the international community is so eager to endorse the president’s proposal only to offload the seemingly intractable problem of governance in the Gaza Strip onto America’s shoulders. We should not discount the possibility that neither Trump nor his advisors have taken proper stock of all the obstacles in the way of Gaza’s transformation into an internationally financed beach resort. De-Hamasification will be a prospect fraught with uncertainty that will progress in fits and starts, if it progresses at all.

But the president and his team deserve accolades for engineering what are already world-historic outcomes. They will be resented by the peace processors, the multilateralists, and the self-described “restrainers,” who fear the unintended consequences that flow from the application of American military and diplomatic might and would prefer that the unacceptable pre-10/7 status quo persist in perpetuity. But as Trump himself said in his speech before the Knesset, the skillful use of American hard power has opened new avenues for American soft power to succeed. New circumstances in the region could give way to new, previously anticipated opportunities for, if not a Palestinian spring, at least peaceful coexistence with the Jewish State.

And perhaps that is what the president’s critics fear most. Not that he is wrong and his misjudgment will consign America and the world to a foreseeable quagmire, but that he’s right and that his approach will vindicate both the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and Trump’s faith in our Israeli allies to engineer a better world for themselves and us. If America’s retreat from the world were my political project, I’d be terrified, too.