Washington: Ahead of his second go-around in the White House, President Donald Trump spoke with certainty about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine in the first 24 hours of his new administration and finding lasting peace from the devastating 18-month conflict in Gaza.
But as the Republican president nears the 100th day of his second term, he’s struggling to make good on two of his biggest foreign policy campaign promises and is not taking well to suggestions that he’s falling short.
And after criticising President Joe Biden during last year’s campaign for preventing Israel from carrying out strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Trump now finds himself giving diplomacy a chance as he tries to curb Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear programme.
“The war has been raging for three years. I just got here, and you say, ‘What’s taken so long?’” Trump bristled, when asked about the Ukraine war in a Time magazine interview about his first 100 days. As for the Gaza conflict, he insisted the October 7 attack by Hamas in 2023 that triggered the war “would have never happened. Ever. You then say, What’s taking so long?’”
Measuring a US president by his first 100 days in office is an arbitrary, albeit time-honoured, tradition in Washington. And brokering peace deals between intractable warring parties is typically the work of years, not weeks.
But no other president has promised to do as much out of the gate as Trump, who is pursuing a seismic makeover of America’s approach to friends and foes during his second turn in the White House.
Trump has moved at dizzying speed to shift the rules-based world order that has formed the basis for global stability and security in the aftermath of World War II.
All sides have scrambled to acclimate as Trump launched a global tariff war and slashed US foreign aid all while talking up the ideas of taking Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and making Canada the 51st state.
But Trump’s inability to broker deals in Ukraine and Gaza — at least to date — might be the most demonstrable evidence that his effort to quickly shake up US foreign policy through sheer will could have its limits. And Trump hasn’t obscured his frustration, particularly over the Ukraine war, which he’s long dismissed as a waste of US taxpayer money and of lives lost in the conflict.
The president and his team have gone hot and cold about prospects for peace in Ukraine since Trump’s Oval Office blowup with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February.
In that encounter, both Trump and Vice President JD Vance lectured the Ukrainian leader for being insufficiently grateful for US assistance in the fight to repel Russia’s invading forces before asking him to leave the White House grounds.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned that the White House is ready
to walk away.