By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, July 17, 2026
Campaigning for the White House in 2024, retired game
show host Donald Trump insisted that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war on his
first day in office—maybe before. He repeated that boast more than 50 times—it clearly was not a one-off remark. The
war rages on, of course, and we have a pretty good idea of who is going to put
a stop to that war: the Ukrainians.
How are the great peacemaker’s other projects going?
There’s the much-ballyhooed “ceasefire” (a funny kind of
ceasefire, in which the firing never ceases) in the complicated
U.S.-Iran-Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict. Vice President J.D. Vance put
together a sort of a deal (call it the JCPOS) that lasted about four minutes.
Israel carried out airstrikes targeting Hezbollah agents in Beit Yahoun early
in the week. Iran now says that Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz is a
non-negotiable “redline” that its military will defend “until the end.” Trump, having five minutes ago insisted
that the “new” Iranian leaders were more reasonable and tractable than their
immediate predecessors, now says they are “scum.” Trump, who promised an
Iranian genocide before signing off on a memorandum of
understanding somewhat softer than what the Barack Obama administration had
negotiated, is back to promising war crimes, including terroristic attacks on civilian infrastructure.
Those are the two big ones. Nothing you would call an unqualified
success. We did wreck the Iranian navy, much of which might as well have been
ordered from a 1972 Montgomery Ward catalog.
Last year, Trump said he negotiated a ceasefire between
India and Pakistan. There are two parties who dispute Trump’s characterization
of the U.S. role in that conflict: India, vociferously, and Pakistan, more quietly. India, in
fact, rejected the Trump administration’s offer to act as a mediator
in the Kashmir dispute. “We have a longstanding national position that any
issues related to the federally controlled union territory of Jammu and Kashmir
must be addressed by India and Pakistan bilaterally,” India’s defense ministry
said. “There has been no change to the stated policy.”
Trump also claims to have negotiated a truce in the
Thai-Cambodian dispute. Neither the Thais nor the Cambodians seem to have got
the word, and within a few weeks of the supposed ceasefire having been secured
late last year, a half million residents of the border area were forced to flee
fighting. Thai troops recently marched across the border, began raising
Thai flags, and burned commercial buildings, according to a Cambodian complaint.
Trump claimed to have negotiated a “historic” peace deal
in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fighting has, in fact,
intensified since the supposed peace deal was announced. “Fighting continues unabated,” says U.N. High Commissioner
for Human Rights Volker Türk.
In the months since Trump’s announced intention to
intervene in the Egypt-Ethiopia dispute, there has been no fighting. Also,
there was no fighting before, no war per se to be resolved. Trump did cause
some head-scratching in the Arab world when he talked about his first encounter
with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who “was in a hotel, and I met
him, and we fell deeply in love.” A strange thing to say, but, then, Trump has
for years been losing ground in what evidently is a hopeless war with his frontal
lobe.
Trump has campaigned hard for a Nobel Peace Prize. Why?
It is shiny, for one thing, and Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize that he
did not deserve, so why shouldn’t Trump? Unhappily for the president, the only
peace prize he has secured for himself so far is the one invented for him by a corrupt soccer organization seeking
to curry favor with his administration.
Ronald Reagan was interested in being a peacemaker, too.
Everybody remembers Reagan’s enthusiasm for building a space-based
missile-defense system—“Star Wars” was the sneering nickname the Democrats gave
the idea—but fewer people remember that Reagan also wanted to share the
technology with the Soviets, the idea being to lower the strategic value of
nuclear missiles and consequently make it easier to get rid of the damned
things altogether. It was an idealistic and slightly batty notion, but Reagan
was a serious man surrounded by serious men.
Donald Trump, in contrast, is a social media addict who
watches cable news all day and is surrounded by sycophants, grifters, and
incompetents. It is remarkable to note that even as the U.S. military has
depleted its weapons reserves to dangerous levels, the priority for the
strutting, preening secretary of defense is … testosterone
screening for U.S. troops. It is as though these goofs wish to advertise
their insecurities.
As a peacemaking team, the Trump administration has an
almost unblemished record of failure. That being the case, they might wish to
change the subject.
Should we talk about inflation?
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