President Donald Trump likes to say that he has ended a number of wars during his term in office, and FIFA just gave him a peace prize for his work. But several of the conflicts he claims to have resolved appear ready to reignite, raising questions about his approach to life-and-death dealmaking.
Some of the peace deals that Trump claims to have struck have “simply unraveled,” said NPR. The president hailed a so-called peace accord between Thailand and Cambodia in October, but the border dispute between the two countries “flared up again” a month later, and then again this month. And there is still “low-level fighting” between Israel and Hamas, despite the ceasefire brokered by Trump. His unorthodox approach can sometimes produce “unexpected results,” said The Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig. In places like Gaza, though, Trump has a habit of “declaring victory before it’s achieved.”
The “crumbling peace deals” show the limits of Trump’s “high-speed” approach, said The Wall Street Journal. The Thailand-Cambodia deal and a faltering June accord between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo both depended on the United States using its “economic and military might” to get the parties to the table. Critics say those deals also “largely failed to resolve key issues” that led to fighting in the first place. That could have “serious consequences for regional stability,” said Kevin Chen at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
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There is a difference between “making a deal” and “making peace,” said Peter Beaumont at The Guardian. Trump’s specialty is dealmaking, which is a “fundamentally transactional affair” and quite different from the difficult work of “mediated peace processes.” The president has a “performative” instinct for the “handshake and the signing” of a deal more than a “durable and fair peace” that can leave both sides satisfied. Trump’s “lack of commitment” to an enduring process is “transparently obvious to all involved.”
Trump works for peace “loudly, dramatically and quickly” but without “sustained attention,” said The Economist. The approach “may pause, but cannot end” the globe’s most enduring conflicts. Despite the FIFA honor, the world can take comfort that Trump still wants a Nobel Peace Prize and might be willing to work for it. The Nobel committee should “keep dangling its own prize just beyond his grasp.”
What next?
Trump’s patience is “running thin” while Ukraine and its European backers consider a Trump-backed deal that would largely bow to Russia’s “hardline demands,” said NBC News. The “stop-start diplomacy” on the war since Trump returned to office has “yet to yield any breakthroughs.” The president is ready to move. “Sometimes you have to let people fight it out, and sometimes you don’t,” he said to reporters last week. Trump seems not to want to “get pulled into another round of negotiations,” said Neil Melvin, the director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute. That raises the risk that he will “do a deal over the heads of the Europeans with Russia.”
