All through his 2024 marketing campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump made diplomatic decision of the Ukraine-Russia warfare a significant precedence, suggesting that he may carry peace inside “24 hours.” Even earlier than Trump resumed workplace in January 2025, as president-elect he named envoys and held preliminary discussions with a wide range of leaders.
Since Trump returned to the White Home, he has talked with Russian chief Vladimir Putin, met twice with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and made frequent public feedback on the warfare.
How does Trump’s mediation effort stack up traditionally? I’m a scholar of the presidency, and whereas we don’t but know the end result of the Trump-led negotiations, we do know one factor: He’s not conducting them within the methods presidents – together with Trump himself – have performed them up to now.
President Donald Trump erupted at Volodymyr Zelenskyy throughout a gathering on Feb. 28, 2025, angrily sending the Ukrainian chief out of the White Home as a result of he was ‘not ready’ for peace with Russia.
Saul Loeb/AFP through Getty Photographs
Some labored, others didn’t
There are a number of examples of presidents who tried to play a mediating function in overseas conflicts.
Theodore Roosevelt: Roosevelt received a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to ending the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese Struggle, fought over management of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island. Roosevelt had been requested to mediate by Japan, and Russia agreed. In some ways, this episode marked the start of the function of the U.S. president as a world chief.
Jimmy Carter: Carter’s best presidential success arguably got here within the Camp David Accords, the framework for peace negotiated in 1978 between Israel and Egypt after many years of battle. Carter didn’t win a Nobel Prize for his accomplishment, however Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Start did.
Invoice Clinton: Clinton made two bold makes an attempt to dealer peace between outdated adversaries. One led to success, the opposite in failure.
Clinton’s envoy, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, mediated an accord between the British authorities, the Republic of Eire and the warring factions in Northern Eire that was signed on Good Friday 1998.
However, one in every of Clinton’s best frustrations was a failed try to rearrange peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Clinton blamed the failure on Palestinian chief Yasser Arafat strolling away from a deal in 2000. As a substitute, peace efforts had been supplanted by a Palestinian rebellion that killed an estimated 1,053 Israeli civilians by early 2005.
Coping with a 3rd scenario – the wars set off by the disintegration of Yugoslavia– the Clinton administration additionally obtained an settlement over Bosnia within the 1995 Dayton Accords when the events had been sufficiently exhausted.
Donald Trump: In his first presidency, Trump himself brokered the September 2000 Abraham Accords that established formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The accords, led to largely by way of negotiations led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, had strategic goals of placing higher stress for peace on the Palestinians and strengthening a standard entrance in opposition to Iran. (The Oct. 7, 2023, assaults on Israel by Hamas might have been an try and cease subsequent efforts to increase the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia.)
Though all of those examples concerned presidential management and involvement, they didn’t comply with a single mannequin.
How they did it
Former President Invoice Clinton bows as he meets former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who spearheaded peace negotiations on behalf of Clinton that led to the tip of 30 years of battle in Northern Eire.
Liam McBurney/PA Photographs through Getty Photographs
Roosevelt by no means attended the peace negotiations over the Russo-Japanese Struggle in Portsmouth, however he actively provided proposals by way of intermediaries earlier than and through the convention. The ultimate phases of negotiation had been held on his yacht, the Mayflower.
Carter’s breakthrough got here when he engaged in intense private diplomacy at Camp David, the place he, Sadat and Start had been sequestered for 13 days. To finish the deal, Carter needed to shuffle forwards and backwards between the principals and at one level needed to make a frantic enchantment to Sadat to not depart.
Clinton’s unsuccessful efforts to dealer an settlement between Arafat and a succession of Israeli prime ministers prolonged over the length of his two-term presidency and continuously concerned private conferences and exchanges.
However, Clinton’s involvement within the Northern Eire decision didn’t primarily come within the type of private diplomacy on the finish of the method. Moderately, he set the circumstances for a settlement earlier when he authorized a visa for Irish Republican chief Gerry Adams to enter the U.S., in opposition to the needs of Britain and Clinton’s personal advisers.
When Clinton went to Belfast for a Christmas tree lighting in 1995, he introduced collectively Catholic leaders dedicated to the unification of Eire and Protestant leaders loyal to Britain. First woman Hillary Clinton additionally contributed by assembly with Irish ladies’s organizations on either side.
In distinction, within the Dayton course of Clinton was later portrayed by chief negotiator Richard Holbrooke as primarily disengaged.
Not just like the others
Though every mediation effort was distinctive, there have been some commonalities.
First, the place delicate problems with land possession had been concerned, lots of the negotiations benefited from privateness within the course of.
Second, profitable mediations got here most frequently when the U.S. was impartial, resembling within the Portsmouth negotiations, or pleasant towards each events to some extent, resembling with the Camp David, Good Friday and Abraham negotiations. Dayton was the exception in that the U.S. had develop into fairly hostile towards the Serbs.
In Ukraine, Trump is trying to mediate a battle through which, till now, the U.S. has been firmly and materially supportive of 1 aspect in opposition to the opposite. And he’s trying to do it by publicly making, to date, proposals that had been destined to be poisonous to the Ukrainian public.
Trump seems to be violating the primary rule above – no public negotiations over land – as a way to chase compliance with the second, which is not any mediation with out neutrality. By, amongst different issues, publicly providing proposals that the Ukrainians see as one-sided in opposition to them, Trump has largely erased the picture of the U.S. as pro-Ukraine.
It is a extremely controversial and dangerous technique that has broken relations with U.S. allies and value the U.S. ethical capital in pursuit of an unsure peace.
No matter success Trump finally achieves, it’s little shock that the trouble, which has been pursued over a interval of six months to date, has been harder than he anticipated.
