Trump sides with the tyrant on peace.
According to The National Interest, Trump’s public desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize has led him to stretch and distort the meaning of terms like peace agreement and mediation in an unprecedented way. He has taken any action that could be interpreted as a move from war to peace, and he has played a small role in it, to his name.
In his first term, this action began with the “Abraham Accords,” which were not actually peace agreements, but only the improvement of diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab countries that were not only not at war with Israel, but also had extensive cooperation with it.
The impact of these agreements on peace in the Middle East was negative because Israel saw this improvement of relations as a substitute for peace with the Palestinians and used it as the basis for creating an anti-Iranian military coalition.
In his second term, Trump claimed to have played a peacemaking role in several conflicts, when much of the mediation work had been done by others. In the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute, for example, Malaysia was the main diplomatic figure.
The document that Trump called a “peace agreement” did not even resolve the issues at stake; Cambodia and Thailand confirmed this, calling it a mere transcript of the meeting.
In other conflicts in which Trump claimed to have played a role—such as the Congo-Rwanda conflict—fighting continued because the militant groups involved were not party to the peace agreement. In the case of the long-running India-Pakistan conflict, one of the parties—India—has explicitly opposed any third-party intervention and has rejected U.S. involvement.
Trump or his administration’s role in trying to resolve some of these conflicts has been limited to threatening to halt trade talks, as in Cambodia and Thailand. But in two others, his administration’s involvement has been much more pronounced. These two cases are enough to identify a pattern, one that can be seen as part of Trump’s obsession with identifying with the winners and denigrating the losers.
This pattern involves overtly favoring the militarily stronger side, while the interests of the weaker side are largely ignored. Trump seems to see facilitating and encouraging the show of strength by the strong side and the crushing of the weak side as the quickest way to end the war and present it as “peace.”