In the realm of international diplomacy, President Donald Trump is an optimist. Peace, or at least stability, is always just around the corner. The political and security disagreements that have sustained some of today’s most destructive wars, he insists, can always be resolved. And it’s only a matter of time before the very same conflicts that have vexed negotiators in the past are nipped in the bud.
Like all politicians, Trump is prone to gross exaggeration of his accomplishments and minimization of his failures. He’s certainly not the only politician to do this. When Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was killed by his rebel opponents in October 2011, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state and future Democratic presidential nominee, cheered and used it as an example of why the Obama administration’s decision to intervene in Libya was the right thing to do. (Fifteen years after Gaddafi’s death, the North African state resembles a Mad Max movie, with multiple governments and militias competing for territory). Trump’s declarations of victory in the foreign policy space, however, have become so numerous that they tend to go in one ear and out of the other.
When Trump announced a three-day ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia earlier this month, he presented it as the beginning of a new period in which the warring parties would, perhaps, negotiate seriously. “Hopefully, it is the beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard fought War,” he posted on Truth Social. On April 16, when Israel and Lebanon agreed to a 10-day ceasefire as a confidence-building measure on the road to formal peace negotiations, Trump patted himself on the back and claimed this was the ninth war he solved since returning to the White House in January 2025. Ditto Gaza. After Israel and Hamas accepted his 20-point peace plan, Trump did his own grandiose iteration of Henry Kissinger’s “peace is at hand” line: “At long last, we have peace in the Middle East.”
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