The limits of U.S. President Donald Trump’s brand of extremely personalized, belligerent diplomacy have never been more apparent than with the negligible outcomes this week involving two of the world’s deadliest ongoing conflicts.
In Gaza, Israel’s military shattered the tenuous ceasefire on Tuesday by inflicting the largest number of deaths in a single day on Palestinians since the war started in October 2023.
And after Trump’s phone call with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, any hope that the Russian president was prepared to roll back or significantly restrain his ongoing three-year assault on the country also proved largely illusory.
Both results were easily predictable, say veteran diplomats, given Trump’s almost single-minded focus on scoring quick wins at the expense of the harder work of dogged diplomacy resulting in lasting gains.
“He’s imposing timelines that are unrealistic and he’s also imposing terms that are not going to be adhered to,” said Louise Blais, a longtime Canadian diplomat and former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.
“He’s sort of an ‘instant gratification president’ — he doesn’t have the patience to do the work that diplomacy requires,” she told CBC News.
In their public statements, Trump’s foreign policy team has insisted it was a week of “wins” for the administration — that the Putin-Trump call will lead to more peace talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia over the weekend, and that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also agreed to a truce on strikes on energy targets.
Over-promising
But Blais says Trump’s actions follow a familiar pattern of over-promising and under-delivering.
“You don’t bring parties like Ukraine and the Russian Federation or Hamas and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to common ground overnight. It just doesn’t happen,” Blais said.
And yet that appeared to be exactly what Trump was trying to do with his aggressive bullying and public dressing-down of Zelenskyy in that now-infamous Oval Office meeting in February.
Trump berated Ukraine’s leader and pushed him to make concessions before beginning negotiations with Putin.
When challenged earlier this week that his efforts are not yielding results, Trump officials resorted to hyperbole.
“Trump is a natural-born leader,” said his special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who has also taken a lead on the war in Ukraine.
“I can’t over state how compelling he was on the call [with Putin],” Witkoff gushed on FOX News. “There is no other human being like him.”
Trump has repeatedly said he believes Putin wants to end the war that he started, even though U.S. intelligence agencies along with the leaders of practically every European country disagree.
Publicly, the Kremlin has continued to insist on maximalist ceasefire terms that would extinguish Ukrainian sovereignty, neuter its military abilities and officially turn over huge swaths of territory to Russia, including areas that Putin’s troops have been unable to occupy.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin say they’ve agreed to an immediate, 30-day ceasefire on energy and infrastructure in Russia’s war with Ukraine, after a lengthy phone call.
Of late, Trump has appeared more interested in dealing with Putin than Israel’s Netanyahu.
As Israeli warplanes rained missiles down on targets in Gaza this week, the White House had little to say, other than that Trump fully supports Israel and its renewed military actions.
Unlike when the original ceasefire was agreed to in January, this time Trump and his emissary Witkoff have reportedly not leaned on the Israeli leader to end the war or insist that Netanyahu should stick to the original three-stage plan that Witkoff pushed Netanyahu to accept.
Blais, the former Canadian ambassador, says Netanyahu likely predicted — correctly — that Trump would back off or lose interest in finding a negotiated settlement to the Gaza issue once the first ceasefire was signed.
“That’s probably one of the reasons why [Trump] has been so ineffective, is that those party to the conflicts know that he doesn’t have the resilience, the staying power, or the focus to keep at something that’s not going well,” Blais said.
Other analysts say Trump’s strongman act may be useful for breaking stalemates or relaunching stagnant talks, but the gains from such displays of bravado can be fleeting.
‘Madman theory’
“You see some merit in the so-called ‘madman theory’ — the fact that you don’t know what he’s going to do and he’s very unpredictable,” said Julie Norman, who teaches International Relations at University College London.
A recent article in Foreign Affairs defined “madman theory” as a leader who, by acting in a highly volatile way, believes they can frighten opponents into making concessions.
On more than one occasion, Trump has suggested his adversaries are scared of him because they can’t predict what he will do next.
The Foreign Affairs article however underscores an inherent contradiction in that approach:
“Leaders with a reputation for unpredictability — or who encourage the perception that they might do almost anything regardless of the consequences — often struggle to make credible guarantees.”
And while such a leadership style may be popular with dictators and strongmen, the article notes, it also rarely works.
“Former Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened to use nuclear weapons against the West and often seemed to lose control of his emotions in front of Western leaders — yelling, gesturing and turning red in the face — but he ultimately was unable to compel the United States to retreat,” the article said.
In his first term as president, Trump memorably attempted the same kind of highly personalized approach with North Korea’s erratic dictator Kim Jong Un in an effort to encourage him to give up his country’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Three meetings later — including one in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea — Trump ended the diplomatic niceties after Kim proved unwilling to sign an agreement to do what Trump wanted.
Norman says Trump’s style seems particularly misplaced for resolving the two current wars he’s confronted with.
“Trying to resolve these very complex, very long-lasting, very intricate conflicts that require precision, require time commitment, and attention to detail and nuance — and all these are things that Trump just so far doesn’t really seem to want to be bothered with,” Norman told CBC News.
Trump’s next steps are, not surprisingly, difficult to predict.
The U.S. president appears intent on re-establishing business, political and economic ties with Russia, regardless of progress toward ending the war in Ukraine.
And in the Middle East, Witkoff and others continue to act as mediators in an effort to end the resumed attacks on Gaza, even though Trump’s long-term vision for ending the conflict has yet to be clearly articulated.
While earlier he suggested Palestinians should be evicted from Gaza and the territory turned into a giant real estate development, Trump has since walked back some of what he said.
What seems assured, says Norman, the international relations analyst, is that when Trump’s boasts turn out to be far in excess of what he delivers, it will be someone else’s fault.
“It’s very hard to be a dealmaker, a peacemaker, a negotiator or a diplomat when [being a bully] is your international reputation as an individual — and also as a state.”
