Trump’s Team Discovers That Diplomacy Is Hard
You can have your cake and eat it, too. That was the promise of President Donald Trump’s “peace through strength” pitch on the campaign trail, promoted most loudly by his former national security adviser Mike Waltz. By looking powerful and fearsome, the United States could get what it wants from its opponents without either costly wars or uncomfortable diplomatic concessions.
After all, the Biden administration’s combination of moralizing words and military intervention had been the worst of both worlds. And Trump’s outside-the-box approach allowed him to snatch some low-hanging fruit that his predecessors failed to. Over the past month, he has freed the last living American hostage from Gaza, cut a deal to get U.S. forces out of Yemen, helped broker an Indian-Pakistani ceasefire, opened negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, and brokered a Russian-Ukrainian prisoner exchange.
Trump’s tour of the Persian Gulf two weeks ago was supposed to be a victory lap for his diplomatic efforts. The president declared the end of “neocon” meddling and announced the lifting of economic sanctions on Syria, while Arab leaders announced huge new investment deals in the United States. But since then, the Trump administration’s efforts to end conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine seem to have stalled—and Trump himself is getting frustrated.
“I don’t know what the hell happened to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Trump told reporters on Sunday after Russia launched major air raids on Ukraine, killing 12 people. “I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.”
Afterward, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Putin “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!” Although Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov shrugged off the comments as “emotional overload,” the Trump administration followed up on the comments with a serious escalation. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced on Monday that the United States and European allies were lifting all restrictions on the range of weapons provided to Ukraine, an option Waltz had been a fan of.
Last week, Trump had convinced Russia and Ukraine to enter the first direct talks since the beginning of the war. During the meeting in Turkey, the two sides agreed to trade 1,000 prisoners of war for 1,000 prisoners of war—and not much else. Peskov told reporters that further negotiations would be possible only after the two sides “achieve certain results in the form of agreements.”
The fundamental issue is still the same as it was before Trump came to office: Russia wants to keep the land it seized and neutralize Ukraine as a military threat, while Ukraine wants to get its land back and gain protection against further Russian attacks. Trump reportedly told European leaders that Putin doesn’t want to end the war because he believes Russia is winning, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly accused Trump’s ceasefire proposal of being a way to buy time in order to “rearm Ukraine in a calm atmosphere.”
U.S.-Iran talks are dragging on with a similarly unclear outcome. At the same press conference where he attacked Putin’s air raids, Trump claimed that the two countries conc
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