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?
