Trump may be a bully, but he has mastered the art of the peacemaking deal

On the eve of a ceasefire in Gaza and with a wider peace in the Middle East on the table, it’s time to admit that the president’s unorthodox doctrine is proving more effective than that of any US president since Bill Clinton – so how does he do it, asks Mary Dejevsky

Donald Trump has made no secret of his ambition to go down in history as a peacemaker. The dramatic agreement on Gaza, underwritten by Trump and finalised in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, is envisaged as just the first stage of a wider Middle East settlement.

The region has defied most peace efforts to date, but just because Trump is so brazen in his aspiration – he wants a Nobel Peace Prize – it does not mean that his chances should be written off. For there is another ambition that practically every recent US president has shared: to emulate Bill Clinton’s Rose Garden moment, when in September 1993, less than a year into his first term, Clinton presided over the famous handshake between Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the leader of the Palestine Liberal Organisation, Yasser Arafat, which sealed the Oslo accords.

The accords set the framework for what is now known as the two-state solution – Israel and Palestine, two states existing side by side in peace. It is perhaps the closest that the region has come to any prospect of stable peace before or since.

Perhaps the Oslo accords failed because the plan was simply untenable. Chiefly, though, they failed because Rabin was felled by an Israeli assassin two years later. Although Clinton tried until the very last months of his second term to broker a new Middle East peace, he failed, as did all his successors – until, maybe, Donald Trump now. Which is why it is worth looking more closely at Trump’s methods.

Although Bill Clinton tried until the very last months of his second term to broker a new Middle East peace, he failed, as did all his successors – until, maybe, Donald Trump now (Getty)

It is too easy to cast Trump’s approach as unconventional and risky without considering whether such attributes are necessarily negative. The standoff between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, for one, could easily have escalated into a fearsome regional war, and possibly a nuclear one. Whether it was common sense or Trump that prevailed, the conflict was halted.

Nor is Trump’s diplomacy as unpredictable or chaotic as many detractors and critics contend. Consistent principles can be traced to his first term. He begins by homing in on particular global trouble spots that are causing a disproportionate amount of instability. Hence his focus on reopening talks with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in his first term.

Second, he favours personal, rather than institutional, connections – an approach that other national leaders, including Keir Starmer and Canada’s Mark Carney, have tried to take advantage of, and where Finland’s golf-playing president, Alexander Stubb, has been particularly successful. That he appoints personal envoys, rather than professional diplomatic ones, may also have merit. Steve Witkoff, for instance, seems to me to make up for any lack of familiarity with the finer points of eastern Ukraine, with a commendable sense of realism and humanity.

Third, he will talk to the enemy, however hostile or outlandish. Would the US have ever left Afghanistan, had Trump not talked to the Taliban? Whatever has befallen Afghanistan since, the US and its allies are surely better off for having left. Kim Jong Un is another case in point. While nothing of substance may have come of Trump’s strange meetings with Kim, they were not fruitless. Kim has diverted at least some of his attention from war to economics, and he has been attending regional gatherings, all of which make North Korea less of a threat to its neighbours and to the world.

Trump also reopened direct dialogue with Putin at the start of his second term. Granted, it may not have stopped the Ukraine war, but for the leaders of the two countries with the planet’s largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons to be talking to each other gives the free world at least one more credible lever to pull – or telephone to pick up – if it finds itself on the brink.

And now Hamas. Some argued that Trump had misunderstood Hamas’s response to his peace plan as a full rather than conditional acceptance of its terms. No, Trump, it seems to me, saw Hamas’s response as “good enough” (perhaps better than expected), and took a punt on taking a partial yes for an answer. A professional diplomat would have erred on the side of caution, leaving the path even to a ceasefire firmly closed.

There are two other aspects to Trump’s diplomacy. One is his transactionalism; his understanding that there has to be something in any deal for the other party. The other – exhibited in the 2020 Abraham accords, which normalised relations between some Gulf States and Israel, and again in the Gaza agreement – is his sense that the more people with a stake in the desired outcome, the better. Hence, those represented at Sharm el-Sheikh included not just Israel and Hamas, but Turkey, Qatar, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority as well as other Palestinian groupings. This made Israel less of a dominant voice, although it had a very special advocate present in the shape of Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Trump’s potential success, however, leaves an obvious question hanging. If Trump has made progress on such an intractable problem as the Middle East, why has the conflict he pledged to solve within days – the war between Russia and Ukraine – so far defied his best efforts?

Elements of the characteristic Trump methodology can be seen: his renewal of the personal connection with Putin; the transactional minerals deal with Ukraine. And a recent US approach to Belarus may reflect an attempt to increase the number of countries with a stake in peace. But with Russia and Ukraine and its European allies apparently intent on fighting on, there is no quorum of countries with a stake in ending the conflict, such as Trump was able to assemble for Gaza. For the time being, Trump’s unconventional diplomacy may have reached its limits.