Does this mean we are in an era of endless war, broken up by temporary ceasefires? I posed this question to Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based think tank Chatham House. “That’s what we’ve witnessed in the Middle East now for about a decade because the international order has fragmented. Multilateralism has failed, if you will, in delivering peace settlements, and alignments between states have no longer been binary but have been working at cross purposes,” she told me. “It makes conflicts much more intractable and harder to unravel.” Exacerbating this is President Donald Trump’s businesslike approach to diplomacy, namely his unbounded confidence in his dealmaking skills and his desire for speedy victories. “It’s the issue of transaction, a short and easy win, which doesn’t address the underlying roots of conflicts that are almost certain to boil up again and endure,” Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former negotiator on Arab-Israel issues for both Republican and Democratic Administrations, told me. “That is the Trump approach to everything.”
Since Trump returned to office, he has declared himself the “President of Peace” who has ended eight wars around the world. (Recently, he pushed the tally to ten.) The list includes fighting between India and Pakistan, a border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. The Trump Administration played a role in brokering ceasefire agreements in these conflicts. None has led to an enduring political or military resolution, and in all cases the threat of violent escalation remains high. In his State of the Union address, Trump claimed that U.S. efforts prevented “a nuclear war” between India and Pakistan. Today, the two South Asian neighbors remain on high alert amid tit-for-tat threats and reports that both sides are preparing for more war. Clashes between Thailand and Cambodia restarted in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-brokered agreement to withdraw their troops from the disputed five-hundred-mile border. Those troops are still there, and significant mistrust remains a threat to peace. Decades of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan has stopped, but unresolved disputes remain, and neither side has signed a formal, comprehensive peace treaty. In the D.R.C., Rwandan-backed rebels and the government “are continuing to strengthen and expand their military capabilities with foreign personnel and weaponry despite ongoing peace efforts,” Critical Threats Project, a U.S.-based research organization, wrote last week. “I do wonder to what extent some of these failures are structural, and to what extent they are simply a function of Trump because Trump really has a hard time resolving conflicts,” Trita Parsi, an Iran expert and executive vice-president of the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He’s so impatient and just wants to get a quick photo op, and as a result he papers over the real disagreements. He just creates a pause so that he can claim that he’s resolved eight or nine conflicts, whatever the count is these days. But he’s not really done anything. Everyone else is kind of, like, going along with it because you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of Trump.”
The greatest foreign-policy success of Trump’s second term is the twenty-point plan that secured the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage deal in October. Trump personally applied pressure on a reluctant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to the deal and declared, “The war is over.” The ceasefire secured the release of the remaining hostages, but the multistage plan deferred the most arduous issues, which remain unsolved. Since October, Israeli strikes have killed hundreds of Palestinians, according to the U.N., and Hamas has yet to disarm; its fighters have reasserted control over parts of Gaza, setting the stage for a future conflict with Israel. “Gaza is divided, dysfunctional, and sporadically violent,” Miller, of the Carnegie Endowment, said. “The Israelis have increased their percentage of control. They’ve killed upwards of seven or eight hundred Palestinians since the deal. That is not a ceasefire.”
The ceasefire in Lebanon also has amounted to little. Trump took credit for an April 16th agreement between Israel and Lebanon, which Iran demanded as a condition for broader talks with the United States. “It has been my Honor to solve 9 Wars across the World, and this will be my 10th, so let’s, GET IT DONE!” Trump posted on Truth Social. The ceasefire, though currently active, has failed to stop the conflict. Israeli attacks have killed nearly four hundred people since April 16th and Israel’s forces have continued to destroy villages and consolidate territorial gains in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary force, has attacked Israeli troops and targeted northern Israel with rockets and drones. Israel’s practice of routinely violating an active ceasefire has weighed on Iran’s understanding of its own ceasefire with the U.S. and Israel. “The Israelis want to have a state of endless war in which they will do what they have done in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank to Iran, which is a mowing-the-lawn strategy,” Parsi said. “The end state is to be in a constant state of war in which you constantly have the ability of attacking these neighbors to make sure that they never amass enough power to challenge you.” The Iranians, he added, “absolutely are not going to accept being part of Israel’s mowing-the-lawn strategy. They’re not looking for a pause or a half deal that just shifts the nature of the conflict from one theatre to another.”
