Trump and American irrelevance
The thing Trump wants the least - being irrelevant - is increasingly what is happening
We all know that President Trump promised to end the Ukraine war in “24 hours”. We also all know that, in spite of a huge amount of attention from the new Administration, focus from Trump, his Vice-President, the Secretary of State, the offering of almost all that Russia wants in negotiations that have excluded and humiliated Ukraine, he has made little or no progress.
When European leaders met in Kyiv and President Zelenskyy challenged Putin to meet him in Istanbul for direct negotiations (something that Zelenskyy had resisted so far), it was a recognition that the American plan for peace had failed and a new European-led initiative was needed. Indeed, this was something that was already being said in terms by Trump: both he and Marco Rubio threatened to drop the peace attempts in April if progress was not made. JD Vance made a similar threat this week: observing that “Trump was prepared to walk away from the talks but stopped short of threatening sanctions.”
Another of Trump’s peace missions has been going off-course. It’s easy to forget that the main negotiator in the Russia - Ukraine process has been Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The Trump administration succeeded in getting the last US hostage in Gaza, Edan Alexander, released - certainly a worthy achievement - but the wider prospect of peace between Hamas and Israel looks nowhere close. Trump has realised what many previous US presidents have come to learn: he has little or no leverage over Benjamin Netanyahu and feels obliged to support him, even as he escalates his violent confrontations with the Palestinians, both in Gaza and in the West Bank. The Trump Middle East Peace Plan is going nowhere.
But perhaps Trump’s biggest foreign policy initiative was his tariff blitz. His liberation day tariffs led to market chaos and he swiftly backed down, maintaining only the China elements of them. Trump was clearly desperate for a deal with China, faced with photos going viral of US ports empty of freighters, and he lied publicly that Beijing was coming to the table (it wasn’t). Finally on 12 May it was announced that the China punitive tariffs were also being shelved for 90 days after talks in Geneva. There’s no evidence of any concession on China’s part. Trump’s tariff plan is in tatters.
The lessons he won’t learn
With Trump’s major foreign policy initiatives having failed, a few lessons seem to emerge:
Foreign policy is hard and often requires expertise. Getting a dodgy real estate developer or a failed Fox News host to lead your team doesn’t give you the strongest hand;
When you telegraph to the world the clear message that you are unpredictable, unreliable and unreasonable, people will make alternative arrangements. The past 100 days of Trump 2.0 have seen an amazing amount of diplomatic activity, specifically not involving the United States, as countries seek to create new arrangements and alliances;
As a result of this, the United States is actually becoming the thing Trump fears most: irrelevant. Countries do not seek to confront the United States, nor even isolate it. But they do seek to insulate themselves from it, forming trade, defence and cultural alliances that are not dependent on the erratic leadership in Washington DC.
The only thing Trump really cares about is ratings. Increasingly, people no longer need to watch him very closely.