Trump touts his peace deals – but many are already unraveling

President Trump has made it well known that he is coveting the Nobel Peace prize, and rarely passes up the opportunity to say he has solved eight conflicts around the world in eight months. 

But despite the efforts, the results have been mixed: some outcomes are precarious, and the president’s role in brokering a deal is disputed. Others have simply unraveled

There are the ones you don’t hear about so much such as Armenia and Azerbaijan. Serbia and Kosovo signed a peace agreement in 2020 during Trump’s first term in office with the help of NATO and the European Union. That deal has stuck. 

Trump claimed credit for securing peace between Egypt and Ethiopia. The two countries were not at war, just locked in a tense dispute over a hydroelectric dam on the Nile River.

Nonetheless, the deals always receive a great deal of fanfare, says Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Reagan: His Life and Legend. 

“President Trump trumpets every one of these deals as being essentially peace in our time,” he says. “But they were all overhyped and oversold.”

Boot says what Trump and his team are really negotiating are ceasefires, not peace agreements. “And that’s the crucial difference,” he says. “With the ceasefire, it can flare up into fighting at any moment.”

Take for example, the peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, which was hailed as the Kuala Lumpur Peace Accord in late October. Fighting over a long-running border dispute flared up again between the two sides about a month later, and once again over the past week. 

Then there’s Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A deal was reached during the summer but not formally signed until earlier this month. There was great fanfare during the ceremony in Washington for what Trump had called a “glorious triumph”. Yet, the fighting raged between the DRC and Rwanda even as both sides sat down to sign a deal with Trump. 

Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO and currently a senior fellow at the Belfer Center and Harvard’s Kennedy School, says long, festering problems between countries don’t get solved by signing a piece of paper in Washington.

“That takes painstaking diplomacy, hard work and a lot of a lot of time, he says. “And unless you can find a way to resolve the underlying conflict, countries are willing to use force to get their way.”

But Trump often pushes back against tradition and does things his own way. Matthew Kroenig, senior director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, says that’s given Trump some success.

“His unique style sometimes produces unexpected results, essentially declaring victory before it’s achieved,” Kroening says, adding that forces others to scramble and fill in the details. “As in the case with Gaza.”

Trump took credit for ending what he said was an Arab-Israeli conflict that had been going on for 3,000 years. Daalder says Trump was able to help secure the release of all the Israeli hostages held in Gaza over the past two years. But there is still low-level fighting, and no long-term resolution in sight. 

“We haven’t been able to move beyond the ceasefire and the exchange of hostages to building a lasting, peaceful situation in Gaza,” Daalder says, let alone a lasting, peaceful situation between Israelis and Palestinians. “Which is, of course, the fundamental reason we have this conflict in the first place.”

Trump also helped broker a peace deal between Israel and Iran. That came after Trump inserted the U.S. into the conflict by bombing several of Iran’s nuclear sites.

Trump’s efforts to solve decades long tensions between India and Pakistan dealt a blow to U.S.-India relations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi disputed Trump’s claims that he was instrumental in brokering a deal. Shortly after, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on most U.S. imports from India. Boot calls it a major bump in relations between the two countries.

“I think although the ostensible reason for these massive tariffs is that India has been buying Russian oil, I think the real impetus was that Trump was mad at Modi for not going along with his claims of India into the India-Pakistan conflict,” Boot says.

Still, the Atlantic Council’s Kroenig says Trump can take credit for normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab nations during his first term in office, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. 

“(It’s) pretty remarkable, getting these countries to recognize Israel and open up trade and travel,” says Kroenig.
There are still some conflicts seemingly beyond Trump’s grasp — most notably Ukraine and Russia. 

There are also confusing signals from a president trying to capture a Nobel Peace Prize, says Daalder. “The direct confrontation he’s seeking with Venezuela, the possibility of an actual war with Venezuela would go directly contrary to this idea that he’s a peacemaker,” he says.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader. Trump can take comfort in knowing he has received at least one award for his peace efforts: he was handed the inaugural FIFA peace prize from soccer’s governing body earlier this month. The honor included a big gold medal.