As President Donald Trump seeks to end wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, his approach to both seems to boil down to giving the stronger party what it wants and pushing the weaker to accept it.
His defenders view it as hardnosed realpolitik — a recognition that the strong eventually prevail, so better to cut one’s losses in the interest of a certain kind of peace. “You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in their White House blowup.
“ He’s transactional,” said Aaron David Miller, a former veteran U.S. diplomat now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump is “looking for quick wins — deals, I would argue — not anything remotely related to the incredibly difficult work” of conflict resolution.
But the eventual outcome of conflicts is not always determined by military power alone – see America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, where the world’s strongest military failed to defeat a tenacious insurgency.
And the mercurial Trump has a way of complicating any unified theory of his actions: In recent days, he has threatened new sanctions against Russia and his administration unnerved some Israelis by negotiating directly with Hamas., which the U.S. and Israel view as a terrorist group.
Trump has offered Russian President Vladimir Putin nearly everything he wants before peace negotiations even begin, by ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine, and suspending military aid and intelligence sharing that Ukraine relies on as it fends off Russian attacks.
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