It can be easy to forget, amidst the ballyhoo of mainstream media opinion, just how remarkable a ten-month stretch the last year has been for the Trump administration’s global diplomacy goals.
In general, it is highly unusual for any presidential candidate to make good on most of his campaign goals.
It is even more unusual for said candidate to achieve noteworthy achievements overseas – most Americans can probably single out just a handful of presidents whose legacy was defined by their success overseas.
Reagan, Roosevelt; beyond that, the list is quite slim. In modern times, more presidents have had legacies defined by their foreign policies – though in nearly every case it has been for negative reasons.
Think Joe Biden and his disastrous withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan, an ignominious conclusion to an even more ignominious conflict, the latter the twin gift of Bush, Jr. and Barack Obama, both of whom dramatically escalated America’s overseas incursions – reaping only costs that set our country back maybe decades, tragically costing tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of American lives along the way.
The need to build up America’s reputation on the global arena following at least three decades of endless peril (interrupted only by the brief interlude of President Trump’s first term, where no new wars begun) was thus of chief urgency entering this new year, a monumental endeavor underlined by the wars that reached their boiling points under Biden, with Gaza and Ukraine leading the charge.
President Trump yet rose to the occasion and delivered extraordinary results in spades.
One of the remarkable advantages to the American presidency is the president’s virtual limitless discretion to negotiate on the global arena.
Part of this is because the Constitution expressly delegates authority to the President to make treaties and broker peacekeeping deals.
Another part of this is that whereas the Constitution, through its increasingly byzantine rule-making authorities, in many respects restrains what he can do on the domestic front, those restraints are absent in the global arena.
For many presidents, the challenge of dealmaking in an ever-complexifying world is enough of a deterrent to submerge anyone in such matters – better leave it to faceless bureaucratic organizations like NATO or the European Union to handle foreign business, past presidents have said!
In that instance, it is much easier to avoid responsibility for international bungles by chalking it up to faceless trade organizations than to take personal blame.
And so, we get the disastrous results of recent history: not only Afghanistan, though that is a blotch on our national character that will take a long time to mend, but also Ukraine-Russia, the tragedy of October 6th, Syria, Libya, the Arab Spring which has left so much of Europe in demographic tatters… the list goes on and on.
These catastrophes are the thematic backdrop in which Donald Trump, and his team – Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Pete Hegseth, and others – stepped into with a mandate from the voting public to fix quickly.
Remarkably, not even a full year into the second presidency (which is hard to believe), the Trump administration now appears on the verge of yet another peace deal (at least the eighth one this term) with Ukraine and Russia, hopefully, also ending very soon.
Although the fake news is hemming and hawing about some of the allegedly leaked terms – and audio of Witkoff coaching the Russians on how to bring the deal to the President – the bottom-line truth is that this is noise intended to detract from another monumental victory for the administration’s foreign policy scorecard.
The President has proven himself a first-class negotiator, and with a surrounding team mirroring his talent, he will likely oversee the end of the first land war to ravage Europe in eighty years.
The toll of the devastation, claiming over a million European lives, still is not sufficiently grasped by many Western onlookers.
For years, Europe teetered dangerously close to all-out warfare – what had begun as a regional territorial conflict might have metastasized into a much larger global crisis, and might have gotten there had Biden, and not Trump, been still president.
As easy as Trump can make dealmaking look, it is a talent that very few, particularly among Washington’s political class, have mastered.
That might well explain why so many presidents over the last century have presided over ever-escalating conflicts, rather than kept warring nations at bay.
It is also perhaps a reason, ironically, why the current occupant of the Oval Office does not get adequate recognition for his peacekeeping feats.
Obama received a Nobel prize, though he undoubtedly made the global scene much worse over his eight dismal years of presidential service – endangering millions of Arab lives, and Europeans (to say nothing of the Americans on the homefront whose lives were imperiled by his mishandling of the southern border) along the way.
But those who do not know better accept war as the default rule of world affairs and peace as almost an anomaly. Weirder still for those who hand out these prizes is the man who can bring about a swift peace and save lives in the process.
Wars that never start, alas, or never reach the scale they could have under a less competent leader, are less renowned by committees who hand out stupid prizes because those evaluators sadly lack the ability to assess any crisis that was avoided because of superior leadership from the outset, rather than an incompetent leader awarded for putting out a fire that he largely fueled.
Another gripe had by our media warlords is seemingly in the instruments the President has deployed, either directly or via his surrogates, to achieve the goal of a swift and lasting peace Certain reports have referenced a potential opening of both Russia’s and Ukraine’s economies (through the removal of sanctions, for example) that is poised to have a net-positive effect on economic growth in the region.
In other words, a commercial substitute for the fighting and bloodshed, where economic trade displaces warfighting, resulting in the development of the formerly conflict-ridden region, is somehow frowned upon.
But this ridiculous critique says far more about the critic than their targets: demonstrating patent ignorance, not just of the rules of war, but of the rules of life.
It figures that Washington, a city renowned for being in the industry of pushing papers, would find itself more comfortable in a status quo that more often than not enables such conflicts, instead of entering a new phase of diplomacy where talent reigns supreme.
Fortunately, for this administration, the past is not going to return – the old neocon ways have been rendered obsolete.
The Ukraine-Russia conflict will soon belong, like the other wars and conflicts ended in this second Trump administration, to the dustbin of history.
Peace, and at with it the start of economic and cultural renewal will soon become the spirit which overtakes Ukraine.
Both Zelenskyy and Putin would benefit by getting closer to Europe and America, integrating with their backward nations without forward-leaning economies and lifestyles, and offering the fruits of their civilization to us in an exchange of goods, services, and most importantly, a great intercourse of ideas that sparks innovation, deepens mutual respect, and cements a foundation for enduring prosperity.
This grand confluence of minds and markets, unburdened by the shackles of conflict, would allow Russian ingenuity in engineering and Ukrainian resilience in agriculture to mingle freely with Western entrepreneurial spirit.
Such an intercourse would not merely heal the scars of war but elevate the human condition, proving once again that President Trump’s vision of peace through strength and commerce is not just pragmatic, but profoundly transformative, a rebuke to the warmongers who peddle division as destiny.
In this new era, the dividends of diplomacy will flow not in blood, but in the boundless currency of shared aspirations, ensuring that the horrors of the past yield to a future where nations thrive in harmony rather than perish in isolation. That is worthy of celebration.
The post The Trump Administration’s Peacemaking Achievements Are To Be Celebrated appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.