What the faltering ceasefires in Gaza and Ukraine reveal about Trump’s diplomacy

Put the Nobel Peace Prize on hold for just a bit.

President Donald Trump came into office promising a swift end to two wars in Gaza and Ukraine. He has taken a radically different approach to both conflicts than Joe Biden, and in some cases produced results.

What he has not done is end either war. In fact, this week, resolution to both conflicts seemed farther off than ever.

The fragile ceasefire in Gaza, which came into effect shortly before Trump took office, shattered after Israel launched airstrikes that killed more than 400 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and resumed large-scale ground operations. Hamas has also resumed firing rockets into central Israel, and the situation is rapidly sliding back into full-scale war.

Also this week, during a phone call with Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively rejected a proposed 30-day ceasefire — which Ukraine had earlier, under US pressure, agreed to. Russia and Ukraine did agree to a mutual halt in attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure, but this has not stopped mass drone attacks from both sides, including a Russian attack on a hospital that took place just hours after the pause was announced.

The two sides will hold talks — via US intermediaries — in Saudi Arabia next week, and the Trump team is reportedly hoping to rapidly move toward a full ceasefire, but stark differences remain between the two sides’ negotiating positions. So, barring a miracle at the negotiating table, the war in Ukraine doesn’t seem any closer to a resolution now than it did in January. The war in Gaza seems farther from one.

What does this tell us? First, an obvious but important point: Ending wars is harder than starting them. Hamas and Israel still have essentially incompatible demands for a final ceasefire. Putin has given no indication, either in his public statements or in US intelligence assessments, that he is interested in ending the war with anything other than complete Ukrainian capitulation.

It would be unrealistic to expect any American administration to end two intractable foreign wars in its first two months. If Trump is being held to that standard, it’s only because he himself suggested during his campaign that he could end the war in Ukraine in “24 hours,” a promise he said this week may have been “a little bit sarcastic.” It also shows the limits to Trump’s unpredictable style of diplomacy.

The state of affairs in Gaza and Ukraine, briefly explained

On Gaza, Trump started strong in January, when the incoming president’s team worked with the outgoing Biden administration to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Both Biden administration officials and regional governments credited Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, with applying the kind of pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to compromise that had been missing from the Biden team’s approach for months.

But that deal was just “phase one” of a ceasefire, intended to last six weeks, during which Israel and Hamas were supposed to negotiate a permanent end to hostilities. Phase one saw the release of 33 Israeli hostages and nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners, but it expired at the beginning of March with no deal in sight.

Fundamentally, Israel is still unwilling to agree to any permanent settlement that leaves Hamas in place, and is also unwilling to countenance the Palestinian Authority taking over governance of the strip, as the Biden administration wanted. Hamas is unwilling to disarm, unlikely to give up the remaining hostages that are its main remaining source of leverage, and probably won’t be swayed by the prospect of more Palestinian civilians being killed.

Trump, of course, had other ideas of how to resolve the conflict, suggesting that the US should take ownership of Gaza, “clean out” its civilian population, and redevelop it as a beachfront resort.

And so the ceasefire has now been effectively taken off life support. Restarting the war has allowed Netanyahu to reconstitute his right-wing government, avoiding early elections. For the moment at least, he has the full support of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, a brief respite in the suffering of the people of Gaza has ended and hope is dimming for the remaining hostages.

In Ukraine, it’s now been about five weeks since Trump upended US policy by opening direct negotiations with Russia — without Ukraine present — which was followed closely by the televised public dressing down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, and the US halting weapons deliveries and intelligence cooperation with Ukraine. It appeared to many as if the US was not just changing its approach to the conflict, but changing sides.

In the end, however, it’s unclear how much actually changed after a month of drama. The war is raging as fiercely as ever, and after a brief pause, the US has resumed weapons deliveries. Recent events may ultimately have had a bigger effect on US relations with Europe than they did on the course of the war: NATO allies are questioning the alliance’s long-sacrosanct security guarantees, and heads of state everywhere are forced to question whether they really want to visit the White House if it entails a risk of getting the kind of treatment Trump and Vice President JD Vance dished out to Zelenskyy.

Arguably, the Ukrainians gained a rhetorical victory by agreeing to a ceasefire that the Russians then rejected. It could also conceivably bolster the case of the more Ukraine-sympathetic members of the administration. Before presenting the deal to Moscow, Secretary of State Macro Rubio had said that the “ball is now in Russia’s court” and that, “If they say no, we’ll unfortunately know what the impediment to peace is here.”

But for now, there are few signs the White House is preparing to exert any pressure on Russia to accept a broader ceasefire, and in fact may be preparing more concessions on Ukraine’s behalf. In stark contrast to his treatment of Zelenskyy, Trump has said nothing but positive things about his interactions with Putin. Witkoff, the New York real estate developer turned all-purpose diplomat who is now Trump’s point man on both the Middle East and Ukraine, is defending Russia’s drone strikes by saying they came before the pause went into effect and promising potential US-Russia energy cooperation.

Trump’s “break stuff” diplomacy

Trump’s willingness to break norms and radically shift policy can sometimes produce diplomatic results.

His threats to pull US troops out of Syria reportedly gave the US military leverage to negotiate a deal between Kurdish forces in Syria and the country’s new government, forestalling, at least for the time being, a new deadly conflict that many feared after the fall of the Assad regime.

Trump has been criticized for speaking directly to Putin over Ukraine and more recently, having his envoy negotiate directly with Hamas over a US citizen held hostage. (There was a time when Republicans attacked presidential candidate Barack Obama for saying he’d be willing to talk directly to US adversaries “without preconditions.”)

Still, when it comes to Ukraine, there’s a case to be made that Trump and his officials are merely publicly acknowledging what the Biden team privately acknowledged: that Ukraine is unlikely to be able to retake all its territory by military means, even with US support.

When Trump began talks with Russia in February, Samuel Charap, a RAND Corporation analyst and former State Department official who has advocated negotiations to end the war, told me that he credited the Trump team with having “demonstrated the political will to restore bilateral channels” with Russia, but added, “my concern is just that they’re diving into this quite hastily without a coordinated plan about what to do about the war.”

Likewise on Gaza, the Trump administration took office with a ceasefire in place that they could claim some credit for — but now appears to have given up on it.

“There is a certain advantage to being totally untethered from normal conventions like the Trump administration is. You can just go in and try new things and break stuff and maybe some of it is a good idea,” Ilan Goldenberg, a Mideast specialist who served in the Biden administration and on the Kamala Harris campaign, wrote recently, discussing the blow-up over direct talks between the US and Hamas. “On the other hand, rigor, knowledge, and preparation also matter a great deal if you want to negotiate complex deals.”

The two attitudes combined in January, he said, to reach the initial Gaza ceasefire.

Ultimately, the limit of Trump’s approach may be how disconnected from reality it often is. Trump’s AI-constructed fever dreams of a Gaza beach resort have distracted from work on developing an actual workable plan for Gaza’s future and legitimized the most extreme aims of Israel’s annexationist right.

Some Trump officials, including National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, suggested Trump’s nonsensical vision was a pressure tactic to induce regional governments to come up with their own solutions.

But when Arab governments did exactly that, presenting their own (admittedly flawed) Gaza reconstruction plan in early March, the White House immediately rejected it, sticking with Trump’s vision of a Levantine “riviera” cleansed of Palestinians. As with Greenland and Canada, it does appear Trump is serious about this.

On Ukraine, Trump’s views of the conflict appear heavily influenced by Russia itself, or at least its sympathizers in the US, including his inaccurate comments suggesting that it was Ukraine that started the war and that Zelenskyy is a highly unpopular “dictator.”

More recently, he claimed that Ukrainian troops are “completely surrounded” in Russia’s Kursk province and at risk of being massacred. This jibes with Putin’s own claims about the situation in Kursk, but not US intelligence assessments. (Ukrainian forces in Kursk are steadily losing ground but are not encircled.)

More fundamentally, he consistently claims that Putin is interested in ending the war and that it’s only a matter of Ukraine ceding territory, despite little evidence that this is the case.

Trump’s unpredictable approach and willingness to break the unwritten rules of international diplomacy can sometimes help get adversaries talking. But it’s hard to get actual results without engaging with the reality of the situation.