Trump as peacemaker president is going strong

Donald Trump is leaving it to the warmongers in Europe to continue to fight if they so wish. The ploy is working.

On June 14, United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with each other on the telephone for the second time in 10 days. I cannot recollect this frequency in presidential-level Russian-American conversations anytime during the past half century since my first term in the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1970s.

Russian President Leonid Brezhnev’s notional counterpart in the post-Watergate White House was Gerald Ford with Henry Kissinger the de facto tsar of American foreign policy. In 1975, the year of the Helsinki Accords, was a rare period of ‘thaw’ in East-West relations. But it was largely a European initiative, which Kissinger dismissed as “meaningless — it is just a grandstand play to the left. We are going along with it.” Indeed, by 1978, the roof came crashing down with the communist takeover in Kabul and by the winter of 1980, the Soviet forces blithely marched into the CIA's bear trap, kickstarting the second great proxy war between the two superpowers after Vietnam.

Suffice to say, Trump and Putin are aware of the crucial importance of making hay while the sun shines. They are moving with incredible speed to build a partnership. It is a breathtaking feat that the moribund diplomatic ties are just about reviving but the two presidents are simultaneously laying the bricks of constructive engagement. They are already designing an architecture of co-operation despite the pervasive scepticism domestically and among allies and onlookers such as Britain or India, whose elites are visibly struggling to catch up with Trump’s new thinking. Many derisively dismiss him as a historical aberration. Time will tell.  

Trump and Putin are gingerly dancing around a ‘chicken-and-egg’ situation in their sequencing where constructive engagement leading to co-operation could help stabilise the foundations of US-Russia relationship, while without functioning embassies, co-operation cannot take off. The Ukraine war and the Iran nuclear issue are at the epicentre of this paradigm. At the very first occasion Trump dialled Putin on February 12, Trump brought up Ukraine and Iran (and Middle East settlement) as issues of highest priority, hinting at a correlation possible between the two in conflict resolution, and signalling his desire to work together. Putin’s intuitive cognition instinctively seized upon it. 

Trump’s peacemaking efforts to end the Ukraine war are still a work in progress. The glass is half full, half empty. He is taking timeout while the military track creates new facts on the ground to give impetus to diplomacy, as in all major wars. By winter, he will probably return to pick up the threads. Meanwhile, the US has de facto pulled out of the proxy war unnoticed. 

Trump is leaving it to the warmongers in Europe to continue to fight if they so wish. The ploy is working. The Europeans have abandoned their ‘coalition of the willing’ as without US leadership, the proxy war against Russia is doomed. NATO too has begun calibrating its compass. The upcoming summit at the Hague will prioritise Europe’s militarisation over the fate of the proxy war. It is a remarkable turnaround.

Equally, Trump sees the Iran nuclear issue as a low-hanging fruit. Iran is keen on a fair deal and a productive relationship with the US in sync with the emergent regional consensus on reconciliation and development. Trump senses it and hopes that a deal can be wrapped up before the JCPOA’s expiry in October. During their earlier phone conversation on June 4, Trump upfront sought Putin’s help to connect the dots in the negotiations. Putin not only agreed but forthwith acted on it by preparing to visit Tehran shortly.  

Enter Israel. Any US-Iran normalisation will impact Israeli interests. Israel has taken note that Trump has cleared the deck in the White House national security team to launch a New West Asia with an economic blueprint as the underpinning that his old billionaire friend Steve Witkoff, special envoy to Russia and Iran, is assiduously working on. The prospect of a US-Iran-Russia triangle is worrisome for Israel if it is excluded from the great churning in West Asian alignments.

The emerging multipolarity in West Asia’s regional politics poses uncertainties too. Israel feels uneasy that a nuclear deal would result in the lifting of US sanctions and might usher in a productive relationship with Iran, which would radically change the regional chessboard. Israel would have preferred to weaken Iran first and force it to agree to a deal on terms acceptable to Israel. But Trump opted for the ploughshare with so many loose ends still lying around affecting Israel’s security.

Trump, the peacemaking president, is sailing in many boats — he initially disfavoured Israel’s war on Iran but wouldn’t oppose it, either, and lately began complimenting Israeli operations and hinted at cashing in on the conflict situation; he gives Israel whatever it wants to fight and even commends its performance in the brewing war with Iran but he won’t risk American lives; he pivots on the Russia-Iran axis but also touches base with Netanyahu; he keeps an eye on the powerful Israel lobby but would neither annoy nor openly fraternise with it.

After the conversation with Putin on Saturday, Trump has kept voicing  optimism that peace between Israel and Iran, and a nuclear deal with Iran are still possible. Indeed, can he pull it off? If anyone ever can, it can only be Trump who once went broke in the mid-1990s with a $900 million debt in personal liabilities — his hotels and casino businesses declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009 — but only to bounce back spectacularly in 2016 as the superpower’s billionaire-president. Trump reminds us of a beautiful line in the Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby, ‘Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.’ 

(M K Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)