Is U.S. President-elect Donald Trump the accomplished dealmaker he boasts to be, with the Russia-Ukraine war about to come to a peaceful end? We should take him on his word when he says he’s not keen on starting any new wars—but that’s not at all the same as crafting a settlement in an ongoing conflict.
During his first term, Trump faced three situations that might offer some clues to his practical peacemaking skills.
Is U.S. President-elect Donald Trump the accomplished dealmaker he boasts to be, with the Russia-Ukraine war about to come to a peaceful end? We should take him on his word when he says he’s not keen on starting any new wars—but that’s not at all the same as crafting a settlement in an ongoing conflict.
During his first term, Trump faced three situations that might offer some clues to his practical peacemaking skills.
The first was his aim to strike a deal with “rocket man,” his moniker for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump first threatened to obliterate Kim and his country, then expressed love and respect for him in two highly publicized meetings, and finally just walked away from the entire issue after achieving nothing. Today, the North Korean nuclear program is far more advanced than when Trump made his effort to stop it.
The second case was the Middle East—notably, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for which Trump also promised a quick and easy resolution. It led, near the end of his term, to the historic Abraham Accords, but we should not forget that these did not come out of Trump’s diplomatic design studio. On the contrary, they were the result of an offer by the United Arab Emirates to recognize Israel in order to stop the latter’s announced plans to annex the occupied West Bank; indeed, it was those annexation plans, not the accords that much later followed, that stood at the core of the Trump team’s Middle East strategy. The purposeful neglect of the Palestinian issue, another core aspect of his........