Daniel DePetris: Donald Trump is getting a reality check on his peace plans for Gaza and Ukraine
If there is one lesson President Donald Trump is learning during the first four months of his second term, it's that talking about peace isn't the same as fostering it. In Ukraine and Gaza, host to two of the most intractable wars in the world, the president is striking out.
The self-professed master dealmaker devoted considerable time on the campaign trail trumpeting his ambitions for a more peaceful world and bragging about how he was the only person on the planet with the talent and stamina to end the wars his predecessor Joe Biden couldn't.
On the war in Ukraine, Trump boasted how he would quickly get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same room to hash out the issues like adults, perhaps not appreciating just how difficult it would be to corral the men together.
'I will get the problem solved and I will get it solved in rapid order and it will take me no longer than one day,' Trump said during a March 2023 rally to his supporters. 'I know exactly what to say to each of them.'
While the Israel-Hamas war wasn't as high on his list of priorities, Trump was adamant that he would rather have the fighting over before he took office. This was as much about his wider ambitions in the Middle East as it was about any humanitarian inkling to stop the killing; Trump's desire to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords and strike an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement was only going to happen if a comprehensive ceasefire in Gaza was set in stone.
Unfortunately, all of the braggadocio we heard during the campaign has proved to be empty. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue to fester like gaping wounds.
To Trump's credit, he is at least actively trying on the Ukraine file. His special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has met with Putin at least four times. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sketched out various peace proposals with the Ukrainians in Europe. Trump has met with Zelenskyy twice, the first gathering degenerating into a very public browbeating of the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office. Rubio and Vice President JD Vance spoke with Zelenskyy last weekend at the Vatican. And this week, Trump spoke with Putin on the phone, days after Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met for their first direct talks in more than three years.
Yet the meetings aren't producing much of anything — at least not yet. Every attempt to hammer out a short-term ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine has come to naught. The unconditional 30-day truce Kyiv agreed to in March was rejected by the Russians, who viewed it contrary to Moscow's position of talking about the deep issues powering the conflict in the first place. The Black Sea truce negotiated weeks later died before the ink was even dry as Putin linked Russian participation to Western sanctions relief.
Trump's frustration with Putin is greater today than it once was but still not so significant that he is throwing in the towel on the entire effort. That may change if substantive progress isn't seen in a few weeks; Vance and Rubio have stated numerous times that at some point, Washington will have no choice but to walk away if Zelenskyy and Putin are unable to compromise.
If Ukraine is a case study of America pursuing an out-of-reach solution, then Gaza is an example of America incessantly bashing its head against the wall. Zelenskyy is at least willing to give Trump an opportunity to pull a rabbit out his hat. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, isn't even pretending to be cooperative. Instead, he's expanding Israeli military operations in Gaza, catering to his far-right constituency to keep himself in power and demonstrating the same maximalism that Hamas has waved away in the past.
Whereas the Americans are talking about a long-term ceasefire and hostage exchange, Netanyahu is talking about keeping up the pressure on Hamas until the organization agrees to disarm, demobilize and leave Gaza in self-imposed exile. Those are essentially the same terms Netanyahu presented when Biden was in the White House, and the results are as bloody today as they were back then.
In Netanyahu's mind, there is no graceful exit ramp for a group that slaughtered 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7. The only choice Hamas has is death or surrender, even if this comes at the cost of the remaining hostages and an even bigger humanitarian catastrophe to more than 2 million Palestinians in the enclave. For Hamas, surrender is unacceptable; for Israel, that's the minimum it's willing to consider.
There's a moral to the story here: Third-party mediators can do only so much if the combatants are incapable of compromise, have a domestic political incentive to continue fighting or still believe they can win the entire game. This isn't the first time a U.S. commander in chief has run into this reality. Indeed, every U.S. president coming into office thinks he can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good, only to leave the White House with nothing to show for the effort. Ultimately the core issues — how much land the Palestinians should have for a state of their own, where the borders should be drawn, whether Palestinians displaced from their original homes should be given the right to return, the status of Jerusalem — were too much for the Israelis and Palestinians to handle, even with very capable American negotiators prodding them.
At this point, short-term truces in Ukraine and Gaza might be the best Trump can hope for — and even these outcomes are hardly certain. Nobody said international diplomacy was going to be easy.
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