Analysis: Gaza and Ukraine will show whether Trump is a true leader or just a bully

CNN

6 days ago

Donald Trump
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Donald Trump looked like the last king of Scotland.
To the skirl of bagpipes, the president welcomed Keir Starmer to one of his Scottish golfing palaces in his mother's ancestral homeland. The prime minister flew in Monday as a guest and a supplicant in a corner of his own United Kingdom.
Starmer was a mere extra as Trump held court in a mind-bending news conference that rollicked through topics like his hatred of wind power, the window frames in his ballroom and Windsor Castle.
Trump capped his protocol-reversing day by flying the PM across Scotland on Air Force One to another of his exclusive clubs, in another ostentatious show of US power optics.
A day earlier, the top EU official, Ursula von der Leyen, matched Starmer's effusiveness after arriving at Trump's windswept Turnberry links for an audience bearing a trade deal that some Europeans blasted as a surrender.
Events in America's new temporary capital in southwest Scotland were an object lesson in how Trump flexes his indomitable personality and relentless sense of others' weaknesses to impose personal power and rack up big wins for himself.
Six months into his second presidency, Trump is getting exactly what he wants on many fronts. He's destroying the global free trading system by lining up framework trade deals that enshrine one of his longtime obsessions — tariffs. He sent US stealth bombers around the world to bombard Iran's nuclear program. And he's wrung promises of a vast increase in military spending from NATO members.
It's the same at home. Trump has bullied Congress into submission. He's imposing his ideology on great universities. He's forced private law firms to do pro bono work for him and he's weaponizing the justice system against his foes. And he's effectively shut down the southern border and halted undocumented migration.
This is the kind of 'winning' that eluded him in his first term and that he promised his MAGA supporters would reach such a volume they'd grow tired of winning.
Yet Trump is such a polarizing president — one whose 'wins' are sometimes more theater than substance — that his current streak bears close examination.
Internationally, it is fair to ask: Is Trump racking up victories for the American people or for himself? Is his coercive power over allies and smaller states a sign of strength or the behavior of a schoolyard tough guy? And what will be the consequence of his wins in the long term — years after his zest for a headline proclaiming a great 'deal' has passed? The alliances that made the US a superpower seem especially vulnerable in this regard.
If Trump is really a dominant global force, the proof will come in his handling of three critical issues highlighted on his trip to Scotland: a wrenching famine in Gaza, the war in Ukraine and trade.
Trump made surprising tonal shifts Monday on Gaza and Ukraine.
Responding to hideous video of malnourished children in Gaza, Trump contradicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that there's no starvation in the enclave after months of Israeli bombardments.
'We have to get the kids fed,' Trump said, promising to set up food distribution centers to alleviate the growing famine. But he offered few details about how this would work in a war zone where civilians have been killed lining up for food. He also ignored US complicity in the aid crisis following difficulties faced by a Washington-backed Israeli program that bypassed UN experts.
Perhaps Trump's commitment is a genuine shift and could lead to him undercutting Netanyahu, a leader who has repeatedly rebuffed US pressure and damaged the president's wish to be seen as a peacemaker.
It could be, that as happened after chemical weapons attacks in Syria in 2017, Trump was truly moved by heartbreaking footage of suffering children.
But a president with a sharp political sense may have also calculated that growing outrage toward Israel meant he might end up sharing the blame for the horror. The cynic's case is supported by his previous suggestion that Gazans should leave to allow the creation of a 'Middle East Riviera' beach resort. And Trump's evisceration of USAID means the dying Gazan kids will be far from alone.
The second test of Trump's global power will come over Ukraine.
The president on Monday vented growing frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin's refusal to accept his generous suggestions for a peace deal in Ukraine, capping his previous 50-day deadline for action to 10 or 12 days.
'We have such nice conversations, such respectful and nice conversations. And then people die the following night,' Trump said.
If Trump really switches from buttering up Putin to punishing him, he could hurt Russia, especially with secondary sanctions that bankroll the war by being Moscow's oil exports. But there's a huge problem: That would require the US to directly take on powers such as India and China, risking global economic blowback.
With Trump in Scotland, his trade negotiators were in Sweden holding high-level talks with China that could yield another 'win' for his tariff strategy and potentially the spectacle of a presidential visit to Beijing this year.
Is he really ready to risk all this for Ukraine — a nation that he thinks has already had too much US aid?
A robust move against Putin in the coming days that could also rebound against Xi — even against Trump's own political interests — would show the president is willing not just to lord it over Europeans but to stand up to the most ruthless leaders.
Failing to take such action would validate critics who see Trump's irritation at Putin as less about Ukraine's plight than about the embarrassment about the president's Nobel Prize campaign being thwarted by his erstwhile hero.
On the surface, Trump pulled off a genuine win against the European Union in the trade deal and for his 'America First' trade policies, which he views as reversing decades of partners taking advantage of the United States in the interest of reviving American manufacturing.
The EU chose not to use its own economic might to inflict pain on the US economy. Instead, it accepted a deal that will see the imposition of a 15% tariff on European exports.
The backlash was swift.
'An alliance of free peoples, gathered to assert their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission,' French Prime Minister François Bayrou wrote on X.
But others saw pragmatism rather than capitulation, because it's becoming clear that tariffs are existential for Trump — as shown by similar levies included in recent trade deals announced with Japan and the Philippines. Europe's already-sluggish economic growth will take a hit. But a trade war would be worse.
'Those who expect a hurricane are grateful for a storm,' said Wolfgang Große Entrup, the head of the German Chemical Industry Association.
Trump's estimation that the EU agreement was 'the biggest deal ever' is hyperbole. The short framework is far from a detailed agreement, which may take years to negotiate and thousands of pages to spell out.
This all looks like Trump's classic habit of spinning a small breakthrough as a gargantuan win.
The framework announcement by the White House is thin and full of conditional language. On closer inspection, it's not clear exactly what the EU has given away. There is no clear indication that the Europeans have ceded to US demands to accept its hormone-treated beef or to ease regulation of Silicon Valley firms.
European leaders are playing a long game.
A trade war with Trump might have destroyed their efforts to prevent him rupturing the transatlantic alliance, which included a pledge for NATO members to raise defense spending to 5% by 2035 during his last transatlantic trip.
It may also not be a coincidence that Trump's change of tack on Ukraine and Gaza — which brought him closer to two critical European foreign policy priorities — came hours after the EU concessions in the trade agreement.
Trump's wins are in the open. Europeans are more subtle.
Starmer is following the same gameplay. His willingness to check his political dignity at the door each time he meets Trump has yielded a friendship with the president — and a tariff rate of 10%, better than that imposed on the EU.
Trump's binary view of a life in pursuit of wins means that he must always come out on top and those on the other side must lose.
Eventually, this is bound to alienate some of America's best friends.
This doesn't matter in the 'America First' creed, which seeks to leverage US might against smaller nations whether they are allies or adversaries.
But US alliances and its leadership of like-minded democracy were the key to Washington's power since the end of World War II. And sometimes the country needs its friends — like after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Trump is burning through American soft power at a frightening rate.
And as some of America's traditional allies consider closer ties to China, there are clear signs that Trump's transactional approach could wreak long-term damage.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, former Bush administration foreign policy official Kori Schake writes that the Trump team is hastening a future in which countries 'opt out of the existing US-led international order or construct a new one that would be antagonistic to American interests.'
And it's not even clear that many of Trump's wins will bring greater security at home. After all, by punishing Europe with a 15% tariff on its goods, Trump has imposed yet another consumption tax on Americans.
'It's a number that will hurt both the US and EU economies,' Fredrik Persson, president of BusinessEurope, told CNN's Richard Quest.