Trump: Ending Wars is Hard
Who could have known?
WSJ (“Trump Promised to End Two Wars Quickly. In Private, He Admits He’s Frustrated.“):
When President Trump spoke to a room of top donors at his Florida club last week, he described ending Russia’s war in Ukraine as a growing frustration that keeps him up at night, people in the room said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was particularly tough to negotiate with, and wanted “the whole thing,” Trump said, referring to Ukraine, according to an attendee. His comments came in response to a donor’s question about his biggest foreign-policy concerns.
The war in Gaza was also notably challenging, Trump told the crowd. Finding any solution was hard because “they’d been fighting for a thousand years,” he said.
When Trump campaigned to return to power, he vowed to end both of those wars diplomatically and argued that neither conflict would have begun if he was in the White House at the time. He would even end the war in Ukraine on “on day one,” he said.
Instead, as he passes the 100-day mark of his second term with neither conflict closer to a resolution, negotiations to end Iran’s nuclear program stalled, and a trade war straining relationships with allies, Trump is finding solving the world’s problems more difficult than he had thought.
“Bluster and theatrics have their role in diplomatic high wire acts, but so do details and hard work,” said Dan Baer, a former ambassador in the Obama administration who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Trump has since said he was joking about ending the Russia-Ukraine war in record time, and that supporters know he was being hyperbolic.
Kyle Haynes, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at Purdue University, said: “If he hadn’t promised such things repeatedly throughout the campaign it’d be wildly unfair to criticize him for failing to achieve them. But he did.”
[…]
In recent weeks, Trump has privately griped to advisers that Putin doesn’t want to end the war, and that both sides refuse to compromise. Trump has also asked advisers if they believe Putin has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children, according to people familiar with the remarks.
Earlier this year, Trump said he believed Kyiv would be harder to convince than Russia unless the deal terms were Ukraine’s terms, resulting in a combative Oval Office encounter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky live on television.
More recently, senior Trump administration officials have acknowledged that Russia remains the biggest holdout, refusing to agree to an unconditional 30-day cease-fire that Kyiv has already supported and instead seeking more concessions from Ukraine.
“I wouldn’t say that the Russians are uninterested” in ending the conflict, Vice President JD Vance told a Munich Security Forum event in Washington on Wednesday. “We think they’re asking for too much.”
[…]
On Gaza, too, the Trump administration is pushing for a negotiated end to the war between Israel and Hamas.
Witkoff helped the departing Biden administration execute its cease-fire plan in January, just moments before Trump took office. But that agreement crumbled in March, and now the war has resumed. Israel has stopped all aid from reaching vulnerable Palestinians in Gaza, sparking a deepening humanitarian crisis.
Israel’s cabinet this week approved a measure to capture all of Gaza should Hamas keep on fighting and hold the remaining hostages. The Israeli government said Hamas has until the end of Trump’s Middle East visit next week to release the hostages.
Some administration officials have been frustrated by Israel’s renewed attacks. But Trump has continued to talk about rebuilding the area, and effectively given Israel the green light to continue its military operations until Hamas changes course.
Meanwhile, Witkoff has widened his net of advisers to prepare for a postwar Gaza, including meeting with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and lawyer Alan Dershowitz, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Whether they’ll succeed remains to be seen, but they’re trying their best,” Dershowitz, a former Harvard professor said, adding: “I sense it’s more challenging than they hoped.”
In fairness, how could a man with a mere four years of experience as President of the United States be expected to know that foreign policy is hard?
“In fairness, how could a man with a mere four years of experience as President of the United States be expected to know that foreign policy is hard?”
And firing most of the people who actually have experience handling foreign policy makes it even harder.
“No one knew international relations were so complicated!!11!!” The Stupidest Felon Rapist in the Oval Office.
The patterns of memory loss in every dementia case are unique, but I admit to wondering how much of his first term Trump remembers clearly and in detail.
So much respect…
@Daryl:
That Trump would state such egotistical, naive blather out loud in a debate on national television was not surprising. That he wasn’t ruthlessly, endlessly mocked by everyone (besides Harris/Walz and the late night comedians that is) for the stating such inanity while one of our two major parties didn’t cringe in shame for backing this clown is why the US is the international embarrassment it is now.
@Michael Cain: Occam’s Razor suggests that he is just a simpleton who thinks that it is easy to deport millions, force trade deals via tariffs, and negotiating the ends of wars is like making a real estate deal.
I continue to think that blaming dementia gives him an out he doesn’t deserve to have.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Why then did Trump not take the first two actions when he was in office from 2017 to 2021?
@Bill Jempty:
@Steven L. Taylor:
He didn’t do a lot of things in his first term because there were a few responsible people around to stop him.
Now he is surrounded by sycophantic yes-men.
And the other two branches of Govt aren’t willing to play their roles in providing checks and balances.
Tony Blair is one of the biggest “how it started” to “how it’s going now” dropoffs in modern politics
Well, Trump appears to be taking credit for the India-Pakistan ceasefire, so there’s that. I suppose.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I agree. I’m not really seeing mental deterioration. He was always an ignoramus with a wildly inflated opinion of his own brilliance. He was always rambling and incoherent. He was always an utter pig. I think if there’s a change it’s in the depths of his hubris, greatly facilitated by the fact that he fires anyone who casts doubt on whatever Tweet the twit posts.
I really dislike this social-media fueled need to turn everything into clickbait. Another example: no, he is not ‘plunging in the polls.’ Nor is he, destroyed, humiliated, spiraling or melting down any more than he always has been.
@CSK:
If it is the result of US facilitated talks then I am more than happy to give him credit for having that off-ramp happen under this watch.
@CSK:
Credit goes to the fact that short of nukes these two countries can’t do anything but lob shells back and forth. Neither has the power to force terms on the other. It’s either all-out nuclear war, or slap fights. It was always going to end in yet another tense stand-off. See: every year since 1947.
@Matt Bernius:
It seems to have been mostly the result of efforts by Rubio and Vance, but I take your point. Dammit.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m reminded of two students I once had in the same class. One was Indian and the other Pakistani. They were both lovely, super-smart, very pleasant, and hardworking young women, but sweet Jesus, I spent the entire semester waiting for them to start shooting ICBMs across the room at each other.
@Bill Jempty: Your question is kind of hard to answer because I have to guess at your precise meaning.
I would note that even now, he has not actually deported millions, and even now, his attempts at tariffing the deal are failing. He has long claimed both should happen (even before he was president).
As such, the fact that he has been more aggressive in his second term doesn’t mean he has dementia.
And perhaps you have forgotten things like family separation and having to subsidize farmers because of tariffs in the first administration?
None of this is new, it is just a new intensity.
And, as @Daryl correctly notes, he has more enablers and fewer obstacles this go ’round.
@Scott F.:
I’ve been re-reading Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. They stress that the barrier to wannabe autocrats has to be the parties. The mechanisms are gatekeeping nominees and forming coalitions of middle and left parties.
– Our one, count it, one, opposition party may have some difficulty in finding coalition partners.
– Dr. T teaches us our weak parties aren’t able to gatekeep worth a damn.
– I see little evidence our Republican Party has the slightest interest in gatekeeping.
Le sigh.
Our establishment needs to factor in this and find a way to sidestep Trump’s blinders and minders:
Despite Russia ongoing depletion of military capacity, consider the medium term implications if Putin prevails in Ukraine. And as amply evidenced, Trump is deficient in long term analysis.
The NYT are reporting that India denied any direct US involvement in the ceasefire:
Like most of you, I am shocked that this administration would take responsibility for something it didn’t do.
@Bill Jempty:
@Steven L. Taylor:
Another difference this term is his approach to the “obstacles” that remain. Last time, at some level Trump acknowledged that there were two other co-equal branches of the government that he had to co-opt or cow in order to meet his objectives. Now, he’s ignoring the other branches almost entirely and signing executive orders like they are grade school valentines in order to “easily” do the things he wants done. Whether want he wants is legal or sustainable wouldn’t matter once he got the results he imagined, so he’s just doing it.
I think Trump’s reported frustration is very real. Because he is a simpleton, he truly believed his easy answers would lead to easy results. He thought that if he wasn’t thwarted like he imagines he was last term, then his will would manifest in this newly great America. So, he just declared his will through executive orders expecting everything to fall in line.
Then, lo and behold, tariffs don’t lead to the results he imagined. He couldn’t get Putin and Zelensky together with him to hash it all out over Big Macs. Turns out that most federal workers aren’t just sitting around, but they actually provide government services that people care about. Mass deportation has massive costs in blood and treasure. The simpleton is getting slapped up the face with reality.
This has been conventional wisdom among many people for so long, that I’d almost not fault Trump for it, except he’s the president. One thing the Gaza conflict has done is made people with expertise in Middle Eastern history share it more frequently online. From what I understand now, Jews and Palestinians have not been fighting for a thousand years. Instead, the region for centuries was characterized by uneasy tolerance with occasional outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence (but a lot less than in Europe).
@Matt Bernius:
Per NBC, they’re apparently shooting at one another again.
@Monala:
The “fighting for a thousand years” is a rather long-standing trope of US isolationists.
Applied to almost every area of curent conflict since the founding of the Republic: Europe, Middle East, Indian subcontinent, Far East.
It’s just an excuse for a lazy and complacent unwillingness to actually analyse what’s happening right now and why.
Such analysis does not mean “US must imtervene”, or can do so effectively, or that there are any easy answers.
But unless you make some effort to understand the context, you’re not likely to understand what can, and cannot, be done about such issues.
“Wishes ain’t fishes.”
How surprising.
@JohnSF: “It’s just an excuse for a lazy and complacent unwillingness to actually analyse what’s happening right now and why.”
It’s pretty much the 21st century version of “life is cheap to those people.”
You mean Ukraine and Russia (and Israel and Palestine and China and Canada etc) and their various non-US allies and antagonists all have their own agency, own power, and own priorities independent of the US?
You mean that — contrary to what we’ve been told by leftists and rightwingers — the US president cannot end other countries’ generations-long conflicts, or control other nations’ leaders, with the magic phone call of characteristically-American narcissistic delusions?
Quelle surprise.