Donald Trump loyalists point to the fact that he has never initiated a war in either of his two terms as US president. That suggestion is true insofar as he has scrupulously avoided new deployments of US ground forces in potential conflict zones across the world.
This does not mean that Binyamin Netanyahu is not being armed and encouraged by the Trump administration in his war against Palestinian people located in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank and in southern Lebanon.
Nor does it mean that Hamas allies such as the Houthi regime in Yemen cannot be the subject of aerial bombardment in response to its threat to international shipping in the Red Sea, or the launching of ballistic missiles from Yemen to targets in Israel.
Trump’s recent statements about Vladimir Putin going “crazy” in his missile and drone bombardment of Ukrainian civilian targets betokens a slowly emerging realisation. He is beginning to see that he does not share the constructive and productive relationship with Moscow that he used to pretend.
Trump’s vainglorious boast that he would end the Russian–Ukrainian armed conflict in 24 hours once he assumed the presidency now looks clownish and ridiculous. He has been exposed badly as misunderstanding Putin’s war aims, strategy and tactics. All of this underlines the absurdity of his Oval Office ambush of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which was clearly a premeditated strategy to humiliate, isolate and subjugate Ukraine with the intention of “doing a deal” with Putin – largely on Putin’s terms.
Trump’s willingness to betray Ukraine in pursuit of a deal with Putin, while never explicitly admitted, was all too obvious to Nato allies in Europe and indeed in Canada and to American allies across the world.
If Trump’s bottom line on Ukraine is that Kyiv simply cannot hope by conventional military means to recover all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia since 2014, there may be a good deal of realpolitik in such an approach. Sometimes we forget that the Crimean Peninsula was only incorporated in Ukraine as late as 1954, having been depopulated ruthlessly in the postwar era by Stalin and Beria. Before that, it was generally accepted that Crimea was part of greater Russia.
That said, it is unreasonable to expect Zelenskiy to concede territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea as a precondition for negotiation of a comprehensive settlement to end the war between Kyiv and Moscow. For one thing, any such concession would not merely violate international law, but would also violate the Ukrainian constitution and Zelenskiy’s constitutional duties as president.
As I have written here before, conventional military theory suggests that successful territorial campaigns depend on a three to one advantage in military personnel and equipment combined with air superiority. Ukraine is simply not in a position to assemble or deploy such forces. And so it must, for the foreseeable future, concentrate on defending unoccupied territory in its struggle with Russia.
Part of the diplomatic prequel to the infamous and cowardly Oval Office ambush on Zelenskiy was a demand that America should share in the postwar development of Ukrainian mineral and energy resources. While some hoped that such a deal would confer on the US a selfish motive for supporting the Kyiv regime in its struggle with Moscow, this was not the case. The ambush perpetrated in the Oval Office demonstrated that Ukrainian acceptance of such terms would not be enough to buy Trump’s unconditional support for the maintenance of Ukraine as a sovereign independent member state of the United Nations, or as the beneficiary of a US security guarantee conferred on it after the implosion of the Soviet Union in exchange for surrendering its nuclear arsenal.
Trump, for all his social media posturing and accusations of Putin’s “craziness”, does not believe that he has usable leverage – military, economic or diplomatic – with which to confront and control Putin’s war methods and aims.
The same applies, apparently, to his complete lack of leverage over the Israeli government. Trump appears to believe that he can supply Israeli forces with weaponry with which to pursue their barbaric campaign in Gaza, but cannot set out red lines of any kind within which Netanyahu is to pursue his naked ambition to subjugate the Palestinians, to deport them and to annex their lands.
Just as Trump folded his tent in the Doha discussions on the future of Afghanistan, and just as he gave up on his threats to use force to end North Korea’s ICBM programme, his capacity to do a deal in the Middle East has been exposed as the vapourings of a paper tiger.