I don’t think history has seen too many international leaders for whom payback has come so unequivocally, so precisely and so quickly as in the case of Donald Trump.
The American president won the November 2024 elections by a narrow margin, and it is not unfair to suspect that the flimsy lead he enjoyed was down to various eccentric and risky campaign promises and his unscrupulous rhetoric.
By using fake promises, Trump managed to collect the votes he needed, but reality has caught up with him.
Undoubtedly, among the elements that decisively contributed to Donald Trump’s re-election was the great promise that he would ensure world peace.
- That he would ensure it, on the one hand, by bringing peace to war zones – Ukraine and Gaza.
- And on the other hand, by preventing the outbreak of other wars.
The Trumpist rhetoric regarding the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was quite particular as Donald Trump obsessively insisted on two ideas for which he did not nor never have proof:
Firstly, had he rather than Biden been president, the war would never had started.
Secondly, if re-elected president, he would make peace in 24 hours.
More gullible voters took him at his word and voted for him. He was elected, but did not deliver. In other words, everything happened as expected.
Donald Trump has been the president of America for five months almost to the day.
After only five months, his balance sheet looks like this:
- Donald Trump has failed to stop the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In fact, the two conflicts have recently escalated with a sharp growth in civilian casualties.
- Donald Trump has singularly failed to prevent the outbreak of two other wars: the India- Pakistan conflict and the war between Israel and Iran.
For a president who ‘sold’ peace during his election campaign, the fact that he has four wars in the first five months of his mandate is a ‘performance’ that future presidents will have trouble in matching.
Some will probably argue that one of these conflicts, the one between India and Pakistan, has since ended anyway, and it was under Donald Trump’s mandate.
But when you hear this, pay close attention to the following two essential details.
One, his Vice President J.D. Vance stated from the outset that: “We will not get involved in the middle of a war that does not concern us fundamentally and that has nothing to do with America’s ability to control it.” In other words: the Trump-Vance administration did everything not to be associated with this new war. But after hostilities ceased, Trump poked his nose in the Indo-Pakistani story, because the ending appeared to be successful by claiming that he played a decisive role in stopping the battle. Fake, of course, but what good PR!
- And the second aspect would be the fact that India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers. And this implies two other crucial things. A. One would be that the Indo-Pakistani war is a paradigm that is totally distinct from the Russian-Ukrainian war or the Israeli-Iranian war. It goes without saying that the dynamics are very different when both belligerents have nuclear strike capabilities, compared to situations in which only one of the belligerents has this advantage. B. When two nuclear powers conventionally confront each other, the end of the conflict depends on the “partnership” of damage between the belligerents rather than on the magic of someone like Donald Trump. India and Pakistan were quick to restrain for fear of mutually assured destruction rather than some on the hoof bargaining at Mar-a-Lago. So, peace was by a result of India and Pakistan not using their atomic arsenals rather than the merit of the strident rhetoric of the Trump.
Let’s now return to the latest Trump-era war: the Israeli-Iranian conflict.
A few things are already clear:
- The war has come sooner than perhaps expected not only because of the developments opened by Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 (developments that include the weakening of Iranian proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis; Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political reasons, coupled with his old obsession with the need to strike Iran militarily preemptively in order to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon; the weakening of Iran’s own capabilities.) It has also come to this point because the same Donald Trump decided, in his first term, to withdraw the US from the JCPOA agreement to limit the Iranian program, a difficult and long-negotiated agreement by the West during the Obama administration. An agreement that, according to numerous experts, worked as long as it was in force and especially as long as the US remained involved. But Trump, as always, considered that he knew better, and the result was, as always, trivial and to be expected: once the agreement was disbanded, Iran accelerated its program of uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons. And here we are, with Iran more atomic today than it could have been if Trump hadn’t withdrawn the U.S. from the JCPOA. And what did Trump do once he returned to the White House? He started negotiating with the Iranians again, so exactly what Obama had done, except that, unlike Obama, Trump started from a worse position, because the position has been “stupid” in the years since Trump pulled America out of the agreement concluded by Obama!
- Another thing that can be noticed today is that Trump and members of his administration had been signaling in recent weeks and days that Washington does not want escalation with Iran. The US was engaged in negotiations with Iran, with a round even scheduled for the Sunday after the Israeli strike. The head of the American intelligence community, Tulsi Gabbard, had told Congress that the American services believed that Tehran was not building the nuclear bomb. And a little earlier, the Washington Post had revealed that Trump was quite angry with the former head of the National Security Council, Mike Waltz, because Waltz was too hawkish anti-Iran and coordinated too closely with Netanyahu on the issue of a military solution to the Iranian problem. In any case, it made sense that Trump and the pro-Russian part of his entourage (including Tulsi Gabbard) were at least skeptical of the idea of Israel attacking Iran, and this because of the potentially unintended implications on Trump’s relationship with Putin, Iran being a key ally of Russia in the war in Ukraine. And yet… In the case of Iran, Netanyahu, like Putin in the case of Ukraine, however, led Trump by the nose and forced him to plunge into a completely different reality. Now, Trump seems to be giving mixed signals as he seems to want to be associated with success. And if Bibi cunningly forced his hand, then Bibi will have to win in order for Trump to be associated in people’s minds with the actor who mediated the success.
- There’s one more element worth mentioning: Trump is probably worried a lot about Saudi Arabia’s particular situation. More precisely, for the solvency of Saudi Arabia. This is the country where Donald Trump made his first official visit, as president, both in his first and second terms. Each time, Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman agreed on economic and investment deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars ($350 and $600 respectively). As Trump has weakened the potential of America’s trade relations with countries on all continents during his second term, Saudi Arabia’s weight in the U.S. economy has increased accordingly. Hence Trump’s great concern (perhaps, even, Trump’s main concern) about the outcome of the Israeli attacks on Iran: it is important to him that Iran does not focus on retaliation against the Saudis, as America’s allies. For in such a situation, the Saudis could suffer major damage and would have to spend disproportionately on defense – all of which means redirecting huge sums from being spent in Trump’s America to making it great again… So Donald, like it or not, has to support Bibi.
In other words, Trump, the pacifist Trump, not only did not end the existing wars (as promised), not only did he not prevent the outbreak of new ones (as he boasted he would do), but he has been pushed by circumstances to get involved in a massive war (a war that his decisions a few years ago only accelerated and turned in his face as a boomerang).
Trump lied, deceived and has demonstrated his powerlessness. He has done this since the first term, he continued in the campaign for this second term and he cannot stop this now, as president.
Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Iran, Pakistan and India – seven countries have highlighted the soft, political and geopolitical boundaries of the current resident of the White House.
And it’s only five months since Trump took over the White House. What will happen next, because we still have three and a half years ahead of us?
