កិច្ចព្រមព្រៀងសន្តិភាពក្លែងក្លាយរបស់លោក Trump គឺមានគ្រោះថ្នាក់
Potemkin peace can be a threat all its own.
It’s the holiday season, which is an ideal occasion to remind readers of the importance of peace and the steps that we should take to make it more widespread and enduring. I’ve observed before that recent U.S. leaders have talked less about peace than they should’ve (and less than their predecessors did), which is surprising given the United States’ broad interest in a more peaceful world.
U.S. President Donald Trump is something of an exception in this regard. He does talk a lot about peace, mostly to insist that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (in addition to that bizarre award recently conferred on him by FIFA head Gianni Infantino). He has claimed to have ended at least eight wars; unfortunately, that assertion is about as accurate as the idea that “Trump University” was a good place to get an education. Instead of a genuine end to conflict, Trump’s specialty is a Potemkin peace plan—a symbolic “agreement” proclaimed with great fanfare that soon collapses.
In Gaza, for example, the 20-point peace plan—a package that Trump hailed as “not only the end of a war, this is the end of an age of terror and death”—hasn’t ended the violence between Israel and Hamas. Instead, it has facilitated Israel’s slow-motion conquest of the West Bank and its brutal treatment of Palestinians there. Nearly 400 Palestinians have been killed since the cease-fire was reached (along with a handful of Israeli soldiers) in October; relief aid remains restricted and inadequate; and the peacekeeping forces that were supposed to oversee subsequent phases of the cease-fire have yet to be created. And does anyone seriously believe that the plan’s deliberately vague language of a “pathway toward a future Palestinian state” is genuine or likely to lead anywhere? The plan wasn’t a step toward true peace; it was just a fig leaf for the unceasing effort to create a “greater Israel” and eventually erase the Palestinians as a meaningful political entity.
Similarly, Trump’s claim to have ended the border war between Cambodia and Thailand has been discredited by multiple events: The two states recently resumed fighting, and Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul responded to a subsequent phone call with Trump by rejecting calls for a cease-fire and declaring, “Thailand will continue to perform military actions until we feel no more harm and threats to our land and people.”
The same tragic pattern is unfolding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Rwanda-backed M23 militia has resumed its attacks on Congolese forces and expanded its territorial control. Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted this is “a clear violation” of the cease-fire supposedly brokered by Trump. In Sudan, U.S. efforts to end the brutal civil war there have gone nowhere. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi debunked Trump’s claims to have stopped some brief border skirmishes between India and Pakistan (incurring Trump’s wrath in the process). Egypt and Ethiopia remain at odds over a controversial dam project on the Nile River despite Trump’s episodic interventions.
In all these cases, Trump’s claims to have advanced the cause of peace are mostly hype.
Ditto for Ukraine: During his presidential campaign, Trump boasted that he would end the war there “in 24 hours,”—a claim that was absurd when he made it, and his erratic efforts to convince the two sides to stop fighting have yet to bear fruit.
And let’s not forget that these ineffectual peace efforts are accompanied by actions stoking the flames of war elsewhere. Trump joined forces with Israel when it attacked Iran; he has ordered bombings or missile strikes in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; and his administration is blithely committing extra-judicial killings of suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, which is in clear violation of U.S. and international law. Trump is also threatening to use military force to oust President Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. This is not a resume that merits the label “peacemaker.”
Ending wars and creating lasting peace are rarely easy, and it usually requires an outright victory by one side (followed by a reasonable settlement that discourages the losers from trying to reverse the results) or mutual recognition that nothing is to be gained by continuing the fighting. In the latter case, both sides must accept that they are not going to get everything they want and focus instead on obtaining enough of what they need to be satisfied.
In either case, however, a host of details need to be worked out, including the location of borders, possible reparations, repatriation of prisoners, restoration of diplomatic ties, security guarantees of various sorts, and mechanisms (such as the deployment of neutral peacekeepers) to monitor the terms and alleviate the “commitment problem” (i.e., the possibility that one side or the other reneges in the future). Ideally, a peace agreement will also point the way to long-term reconciliation, a process that typically takes a long time. Evenhanded third-party mediators can facilitate all these steps and help guarantee that an agreement sticks.
Trump is a poor peacemaker because he and his team ignore all these requirements. Trump himself is notoriously impatient and uninterested in details. Unlike former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who spent endless hours persuading Egyptian and Israeli officials to sign the 1978 Camp David Accords, or former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who spent almost a month brokering the agreement that ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Trump is neither willing nor able to roll up his sleeves and develop creative proposals to bridge the gaps between combatants. And because he has such a short attention span, adversaries know they can just wait him out and go back to fighting once he’s moved on to something else.
Direct presidential involvement is not an absolute requirement, of course, provided the president designates competent representatives to carry the baton for him. Unfortunately, Trump prefers to rely on amateur diplomats, such as Steve Witkoff or Jared Kushner, instead of professional diplomats with the necessary expertise, and he doesn’t trust experienced officials to determine if a potential agreement is workable or not. Here, Trump’s hostility toward the deep state is a self-inflicted wound, because expert advice is extremely valuable and professional diplomats tend to out-perform political appointees. As Jonathan Monten of University College London put it recently, “[Trump] wants to be perceived as at the centre … So the quality of the preparation, the quality of expertise, the quality of diplomatic negotiation are all extremely low.”
Even would-be defenders of Trump’s “cowboy diplomacy” have acknowledged that “if peace is built on hollow agreements, though—on single-spaced sheets of paper with bullet points waved on the White House lawn—peace may not last very long.”
Moreover, Trump and some of his chosen envoys have not been evenhanded. The result is that some of the warring parties don’t trust them, and the mediators are likely to push for one-sided solutions that go nowhere or that break down shortly after they are signed. This problem has been most obvious in the Middle East, given the pro-Israel sympathies of Witkoff, Kushner, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, but it is also apparent in Trump’s disdain for Ukraine and admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
To Trump’s credit, he seems genuinely wary of major military conflicts—especially those that require using ground troops or other serious risks—and he appears to recognize that war is expensive and gets in the way of profitable business deals. Those are good instincts, but it takes more than that to resolve major conflicts and avoid sowing the seeds of future trouble.
If you asked me what gift I’d like this holiday season, I’d say an approach to peacemaking that viewed it not as an exercise in public relations or presidential preening but as a difficult challenge that is nonetheless worth a serious effort. As I’ve written before, world peace is in the United States’ interest because major conflicts are one of the few things that could do lasting harm to the nation’s remarkably secure and privileged position. Peace is also morally preferable, because war entails considerable human suffering. Taking peacemaking seriously wouldn’t end all existing conflicts or prevent new ones from occurring, perhaps, but it would increase the odds that at least a few of them might end. This holiday season, that would be a most welcome gift.
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