Donald Trump has framed himself as the leader who can solve the world’s toughest conflicts, from Gaza to Ukraine. But how effective is his diplomacy? Gregory B. Poling of Center for Strategic and International Studies weighs in.
00:00U.S. President Donald Trump has positioned himself as the leader who can solve the world's toughest conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine.
00:09But how effective is his brand of diplomacy?
00:12Gregory Peopholing from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington says that Trump's America-first approach may likely chase easy wins, leaving the hardest crisis unresolved.
00:23There's a clear inconsistency here in the America-first approach in which the president doesn't want to be involved in actually mitigating conflict.
00:36He wants to pull the U.S. back from what his supporters might call the world police role, but he also wants to be seen as a great peacemaker.
00:45And so I think what he looks for is relatively easy wins, places where he can use some tariff leverage or where foreign governments are eager to make him happy and therefore will let him claim some credit for something.
00:58But again, the White House is not that interested in the dirty work of actually negotiating ceasefires and peace deals.
01:11The sole exception being, so far, Gaza, and that's because the U.S. was already so deeply involved.
01:18There was no way to just pretend that the U.S. didn't have to have a role there.
01:22Half of them, you know, again, like the Thailand-Cambodia deal, they played a marginal role, maybe important in helping speed things up, but they're not actually there to oversee the implementation, which is why we don't see the U.S. really doing anything about the breakdown of the Thailand-Cambodia ceasefire.
01:41So those are the ones that are most transactional and where the administration is not having, I think, that big a role beyond the pump and pageantry of it.
01:53But Russia-Ukraine, you know, and Gaza-Israel, where the U.S. is actually using its influence, again, we're seeing a mixed bag.
02:06It doesn't seem that they are actually able so far to deal with the hardest conflict in the world, which is clearly Russia-Ukraine right now.
02:15Gregory also draws a clear distinction between Trump's diplomacy in Gaza and in Ukraine, stressing that while the former allowed for significant leverage, the latter offers much less.
02:27So in Gaza, the U.S. had more leverage over Netanyahu and the Israeli government than any other outside party, and so could use that leverage.
02:37And the fact that Trump was both, in a sense, closer to Netanyahu than Biden had been, but also more willing to use that leverage, I think, gave him the ability to move Israel into a ceasefire, which, again, is still fragile.
02:52And we should be clear that the ceasefire has not moved forward in the way that people had hoped, but it is still holding.
03:00Russia-Ukraine, you don't have that leverage.
03:02Trump does not have that kind of leverage over Putin.
03:05Putin is the one who does not want peace.
03:08The U.S. clearly does have leverage over Ukraine, but only to a point, not so much leverage that Washington can actually force Ukraine to give up its sovereignty.
03:19That, combined with the fact that the administration seems, again, more focused on getting a deal than what's actually in that deal, has been part of the problem.
03:30So this latest proposal, the 28-point proposal that's now been walked back and rejected by all parties, that appears to have basically been written by Russia in a way that was clearly going to be unacceptable to Ukraine and to the Europeans.
03:44And they took it to them anyway, because I think they were just so eager to say the word deal, and they didn't want to think too much about what was in it.
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