In his inaugural address in January this year, Donald Trump declared that his greatest achievement would be his role as a “peacemaker and unifier”, promising that the US would “end all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been full of anger, violence and utter unpredictability”.
Five months later, at the beginning of the second term of his presidency, we see a striking collapse of those lofty aspirations.
A president who promised an end to global conflicts, including one that he said he intended to resolve within the first 24 hours of his presidency, has instead seen them escalate, notably the recent escalation of the conflict between Israel and Iran.
The chronology of the latest conflict once again shows a striking mismatch between Trump’s ambitions and reality: the wave of Israeli airstrikes came just hours after Trump urged Israel not to attack Iran.
Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, sought to describe the Israeli attack as “one-sided”, emphasising that the US was “not involved in strikes on Iran”, but Trump insisted he was well informed of Israel’s plans and warned that further attacks would be “even more brutal”.
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Whitkoff, who has become Trump’s chief diplomatic negotiator in the Middle East and Ukraine, is reportedly still planning to travel to Oman this weekend for talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme, but the Iranians are unlikely to attend.
Trump’s convoluted peace programme was in chaos long before Thursday’s attacks.
The Gaza truce his administration helped broker had collapsed within weeks, Israel resumed mass bombing and imposed a three-month full blockade on humanitarian aid to the territory, where the death toll has already topped 55,000.
In Ukraine, where Trump once boasted that he would end the conflict on his first day back in office, Russian forces continue their summer offensive, entering the Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in three years and amassing additional forces, indicating that Russian Federation is in a position to expand the theatre of war.
Meanwhile, Trump’s sudden announcement of a ceasefire between India and Pakistan sparked a strong reaction in New Delhi, where officials denied his claims of brokering a deal.
And while Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has acknowledged before Congress that the Pentagon has contingency plans in place to take Greenland and Panama militarily, it is unclear how territorial gains fit into Trump’s definition of peacemaking.
In his first term as president, no wars were ended, conflict with Iran nearly broke out, and his major “peace” achievement was the Abrahamic Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and countries that were already not at war with it.
Part of Trump’s appeal to voters lay precisely in his promise to avoid foreign conflicts. In the stands while watching the inauguration, supporters told the Guardian how much they appreciated his restraint on military action and supported his “America First” approach, which put domestic issues ahead of international aid and intervention. There is a perception that for Trump, peace is not the absence of conflict, but Washington’s distance from it.
There is one potentially optimistic interpretation of the recent strikes on Iran. Alex Vatanka, director of Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, has suggested that the Israeli attack may be a deliberate risk to force Iran into serious negotiations. The theory is that Israel convinced Trump to authorise limited strikes that would put pressure on Tehran without triggering regime change, essentially using military action to revive stalled diplomacy. On Friday, Trump suggested that a strike on Iran could even improve the chances of a nuclear deal.
“This is unlikely to bring Iran back to the negotiating table,” said Andrew Boren, executive director of global security at Flashpoint and a former official in the office of the U.S. director of National Intelligence. “It marks the beginning of another rapidly expanding flashpoint in the global context of a new hybrid cold war that will be fought both on the ground and in the darkest corners of the internet.”
The success of this strategy depends entirely on Iran’s response. The regime can either return to negotiations, repenting, or abandon diplomacy altogether and pursue nuclear weapons even more aggressively. Early indications suggest that Tehran may not be in a conciliatory mood after bombing its facilities and assassinating leaders.
But even if the more optimistic predictions turn out to be correct, it will not change the overall situation: all the major conflicts that Trump inherited or promised to resolve have escalated under his presidency.
Trump promised to be a peacemaker. Instead, he is waging several wars, and his diplomatic initiatives are crumbling before his eyes