Now that he’s facilitated a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas, President Trump is already moving on to the next item. He’s a man in a hurry, and while his bid for the Nobel Peace Prize may have failed this year, he has no intention of letting his foot off the pedal. The next conflict to be solved, by Trump’s own admission, is the even deadlier war in Ukraine. “We gotta get that one done,” Trump said during his speech to the Knesset this week. “If you don’t mind, Steve [Witkoff], let’s focus on Russia first. All right?”
The Trump administration is optimistic about the president’s ability to get the war in Ukraine settled. If Trump could pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas into a deal, the reasoning goes, then what’s stopping him from working similar magic on Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky?
The president held a phone call with Putin on Thursday, ahead of a meeting with Zelensky in the White House on Friday. In a social media message after the call, announcing that the Russian and US presidents will meet in Budapest, Trump even made the point explicitly: “I actually believe that the success in the Middle East will help in our negotiation in attaining an end to the war with Russia/Ukraine.”
Unfortunately, international diplomacy doesn’t work like that. While there may be some similarities between the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza (they both started off as a despicable act of aggression) the differences are so numerous that one wonders why US officials would even bother trying to extrapolate lessons from one war to the other.
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