Is Trump a Serious Peacemaker or Just Naive?

Revised English version of an essay forthcoming in the column 'Understanding America' in the German daily newspaper 'Koelner Stadtanzeiger' on Aug.15, 2025.

US President Donald Trump has been insisting for many months now that his main foreign policy concern is world peace. This is hardly surprising as almost any major politician wants to go down in world history as a peacemaker and win the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump's endeavors to resolve a considerable number of the armed conflicts of our times must be welcomed. It is not so much his objectives which are controversial but Trump's unorthodox methods and strategies as well as the deeper motivation behind his grandiose promises that are dubious.

It is doubtful that the upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska will lead to a ceasefire in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Instead, it is to be feared that Trump will place far too much faith in the promises the Russian president will put on the table in the course of the meeting. In any case, it has been apparent for months that Trump blames Ukrainian President Zelenskyy for the outbreak of war rather than Putin who embarked on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

During the virtual summit organized by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz shortly before the Alaska meeting and attended by a number of European leaders as well as Zelenskyy, US Vice President Vance and Trump himself, the US president made it clear that he would not be taken in by Putin’s impressive powers of distortion and persuasion. Yet, this remains to be seen. Trump also said that there might be a second summit with Putin, if the Alaska meeting went well, and perhaps also one attended by both Putin and Zelenskyy. The latter would be highly desirable.

Trump and Teddy Roosevelt

Trump's initiative to convene a peace conference to overcome armed conflicts follows the presidential tradition as it was established by President Theodore Roosevelt over 100 years ago. Roosevelt was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for convening a peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to settle the Russo-Japanese War.

Trump's advisors have certainly informed him about Roosevelt's successful initiative, because like Trump, Teddy Roosevelt was also famous for a foreign policy that combined stark threats and outrageous rhetoric with occasional conciliatory diplomacy. However – and this is the big difference – representatives of both warring parties took part in the Portsmouth Conference and, for example much later, in the Camp David negotiations of the 1980s and 1990s which almost led to the conclusion of Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. Unlike Trump, Presidents Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were smart enough not to invite just one of the warring parties, and then the aggressor at that, to a peace conference. They invited both parties to the peace summits.

The meeting in Alaska should definitely be followed by a US convened peace conference attended by the presidents of both Russia and Ukraine. Even Trump seems to have recognized that convening a ‘peace conference’ with just Putin is rather unusual and smacks of the policy of appeasement conducted by European leaders in 1938 when they did not reject Hitler’s territorial demands on Czechoslovakia.

Trump has thus begun to downplay the significance of the meeting with the Russian president, saying that it was merely a first personal contact to find out whether or not Moscow was interested in settling the war with Ukraine. Still, as often, Trump seems to be highly interested in attracting maximum international attention to his endeavors. He also wants to demonstrate to his loyal MAGA supporters that he is indeed a peace president, as he promised during the election campaign.

Normalizing economic relations with Russia: rare earths minerals

Above all, it seems, Trump is primarily concerned with normalizing relations with Moscow, including perhaps the lifting of sanctions on Russia. In particular, Trump hopes to significantly improve economic and trade relations with Moscow. Russia not only has rich deposits of nickel and copper, but also possesses numerous rare earth minerals. Both Moscow and Washington have indicated that they are very interested in cooperating closely with each other in the extraction and refinement of the rare earths minerals in Siberia.

Moscow and Washington share an interest in significantly reducing their dependence on China for rare earths minerals. These minerals are of crucial importance for the manufacturing of many modern industrial and military products. Convening a bilateral summit conference with Putin is therefore considerably more important to Trump than having Zelenskyy join such a meeting. Washington, after all, already signed a minerals agreement with Ukraine several months ago.

Trump the Peacemaker?

While Trump likes to depict himself as a peacemaker, the US president is no pacifist. He is quite willing to use force when he feels like it. In January 2020, during his first term in office, he had Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force, assassinated by a U.S. drone strike. And more recently, from March to May 2025, Trump ordered the bombing of Houthi positions in Yemen because their attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea were endangering the security of international shipping lanes. Together with Israel Trump also approved of extensive bombing raids to destroy three nuclear sites in Iran in late June 2025.

Nevertheless, Trump has also made several successful efforts to resolve military tensions. During his first term in office, Washington played a decisive role in promoting the conclusion of the Abraham Accords, which led to the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and later Sudan.

In recent months, Trump has defused the escalating military conflicts between India and Pakistan through talks and economic pressure and has also been able to settle the serious border conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia. The Trump administration also managed to arrange a ceasefire in Congo by reconciling the central government and the Rwandan-backed militant troops in eastern Congo.

And just last week, Trump brought the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia - countries that have been sworn enemies for years - together in the Oval Office and signed an economic cooperation agreement with them. In particular, he was able to secure the future of a small strip of Armenian territory located in Azerbaijan near the border with Iran. This Zangezur corridor, which previously was part of Moscow's sphere of influence, will be renamed the “Trump route for international peace and prosperity” and administered by the US. An American company will be responsible for improving the infrastructure in the region.

Trump's peace efforts are therefore always aimed at achieving geoeconomic stabilization deals while at the same time securing economic advantages for his own country. This, it seems, is also Trump’s main objective for the meeting with Putin in Alaska. Here a deal on rare earth minerals with Russia looms large. Yet, Putin will prove to be a highly skilled negotiator who may well run rings around Trump whose attention span and attention to details are famously limited.

Just as Trump has so far failed to convince Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu of his various ideas and plans for ending the terrible war in the Gaza strip, it is quite unlikely that during the meeting in Alaska Trump can persuade Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Yet, Trump is also always prone to surprise us.