WASHINGTON — When President Trump returned to the White House in January, he promised to deliver big foreign policy wins in record time.
He said he would halt Russia’s war against Ukraine in 24 hours or less, end Israel’s war in Gaza nearly as quickly and force Iran to end to its nuclear program. He said he’d persuade Canada to become the 51st state, take Greenland from Denmark and negotiate 90 trade deals in 90 days.
“The president believes that his force of personality … can bend people to do things,” his special envoy-for-everything, Steve Witkoff, explained in May in a Breitbart interview.
Six months later, none of those ambitious goals have been reached.
Ukraine and Gaza are still at war. Israel and the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, but it’s not clear whether they ended the country’s atomic program once and for all. Canada and Denmark haven’t surrendered any territory. And instead of trade deals, Trump is mostly slapping tariffs on other countries, to the distress of U.S. stock markets.
It turned out that force of personality couldn’t solve every problem.
“He overestimated his power and underestimated the ability of others to push back,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “He often acts as if we’re the only people with leverage, strength or the ability to take action. We’re not.”
The president has notched important achievements. He won a commitment from other members of NATO to increase their defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product. The attack on Iran appears to have set Tehran’s nuclear project back for years, even if it didn’t end it. And Trump — or more precisely, his aides — helped broker ceasefires between India and Pakistan and between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But none of those measured up to the goals Trump initially set for himself — much less qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize he has publicly yearned for. “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this,” he grumbled when the Rwanda-Congo agreement was signed.
The most striking example of unfulfilled expectations has come in Ukraine, the grinding conflict Trump claimed he could end even before his inauguration.
For months, Trump sounded certain that his warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin would produce a deal that would stop the fighting, award Russia most of the territory its troops have seized and end U.S. economic sanctions on Moscow.
“I believe he wants peace,” Trump said of Putin in February. “I trust him on this subject.”
But to Trump’s surprise, Putin wasn’t satisfied with his proposal. The Russian leader continued bombing Ukrainian cities even after Trump publicly implored him to halt via social media (“Vladimir, STOP!”).
Critics charged that Putin was playing Trump for a fool. The president bristled: “Nobody’s playing me.”
But as early as April, he admitted to doubts about Putin’s good faith. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” he said.
“I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done, and I always hang up and say, ‘Well, that was a nice phone call,’ and then missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city,” Trump complained last week. “After that happens three or four times, you say the talk doesn’t mean anything.”
The president also came under pressure from Republican hawks in Congress who warned privately that if Ukraine collapsed, Trump would be blamed the way his predecessor, President Biden, was blamed for the fall of Afghanistan in 2022.
So last week, Trump changed course and announced that he will resume supplying U.S.-made missiles to Ukraine — but by selling them to European countries instead of giving them to Kyiv as Biden had.
Trump also gave Putin 50 days to accept a ceasefire and threatened to impose “secondary tariffs” on countries that buy oil from Russia if he does not comply.
He said he still hopes Putin will come around. “I’m not done with him, but I’m disappointed in him,” he said in a BBC interview.
It still isn’t clear how many missiles Ukraine will get and whether they will include long-range weapons that can strike targets deep inside Russia. A White House official said those details are still being worked out.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sounded unimpressed by the U.S. actions. “I have no doubt that we will cope,” he said.
Foreign policy experts warned that the secondary tariffs Trump proposed could prove impractical. Russia’s two biggest oil customers are China and India; Trump is trying to negotiate major trade agreements with both.
Meanwhile, Trump has dispatched Witkoff back to the Middle East to try to arrange a ceasefire in Gaza and reopen nuclear talks with Iran — the goals he began with six months ago.
Despite his mercurial style, Trump’s approach to all these foreign crises reflects basic premises that have remained constant for a decade, foreign policy experts said.
“There is a Trump Doctrine, and it has three basic principles,” Schake said. “Alliances are a burden. Trade exports American jobs. Immigrants steal American jobs.”
Robert Kagan, a former Republican aide now at the Brookings Institution, added one more guiding principle: “He favors autocrats over democrats.” Trump has a soft spot for foreign strongmen like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and has abandoned the long-standing U.S. policy of fostering democracy abroad, Kagan noted.
The problem, Schake said, is that those principles “impede Trump’s ability to get things done around the world, and he doesn’t seem to realize it.
“The international order we built after World War II made American power stronger and more effective,” she said. “Trump and his administration seem bent on presiding over the destruction of that international order.”
Moreover, Kagan argued, Trump’s frenetic imposition of punitive tariffs on other countries comes with serious costs.
“Tariffs are a form of economic warfare,” he said. “Trump is creating enemies for the United States all over the world. … I don’t think you can have a successful foreign policy if everyone in the world mistrusts you.”
Not surprisingly, Trump and his aides don’t agree.
“It cannot be overstated how successful the first six months of this administration have been,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week. “With President Trump as commander in chief, the world is a much safer place.”
That claim will take years to test.
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