For months, Donald Trump has presented himself as the very incarnation of a global peacemaker, touting an ever-changing list of international conflicts that he claims to have settled. Sometimes it has been six, sometimes as many as ten. “I ended seven wars,” the President told the U.N. General Assembly last month, “and in all cases they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed,” which was not true but has not stopped Trump from repeating it. Two alleged conflicts on the White House’s list—Egypt versus Ethiopia and Serbia versus Kosovo—were not current wars by any definition. It is true, though, that Trump has leveraged the power of his personal diplomacy to broker a number of ceasefire agreements, but lasting peace deals have proved elusive. In Africa, for example, the three-decade-long conflict between militia groups in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues largely unabated, notwithstanding an agreement brokered by the U.S. in June that Trump hailed as “a Great Day for the World!” Nor have Trump’s accomplishments as a mediator always been accepted as such by the warring parties themselves. When the President boasted repeatedly that he had got India and Pakistan to resolve the latest outbreak of fighting over Kashmir, India’s leader, Narendra Modi, was so angry at what he saw as Trump’s misrepresentations that their falling out now threatens America’s years-long effort to cultivate India as a key strategic partner in the U.S. rivalry with China.
But the main point, as Trump sees it, is that he’s done a lot to make peace, so much so, it seems, that it’s hard for him to keep track of all the countries whose troubles he’s solving. In September, he boasted of his peace efforts in a nonexistent territorial war between Armenia and Cambodia, two countries some four thousand miles apart from each other, and he twice said Albania rather than Armenia when he bragged about ending its long-running conflict with Azerbaijan. (Trump’s gaffes led to much hilarity among fellow-leaders on the sidelines of a recent summit in Copenhagen, where the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, was caught on tape chiding the French President, Emmanuel Macron. “You should make an apology,” he said, “because you didn’t congratulate us on the peace deal that President Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan.” Azerbaijan’s leader, Ilham Aliyev, who was standing nearby, burst out laughing.)
Even with all that, Trump could not claim to have made any breakthroughs in the two major wars that he had made it a priority of his Presidency to end—the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Until now, that is. Late on Wednesday evening, in a social-media post, Trump finally had something to truly trumpet: “I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” he wrote just after 7 P.M. “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”
The ceasefire deal, brokered with the help of America’s Arab allies, such as Qatar and Egypt, calls for Israel to stop fighting within twenty-four hours and to partially withdraw from Gaza, and for Hamas to release by early next week all twenty Israeli hostages presumed to still be alive two years after they were taken during Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack. At a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, as advisers made plans for Trump to fly to the region on Sunday night for a signing ceremony, the President touted his “momentous breakthrough.”
The prospect of peace in Gaza led even Trump’s critics to praise the deal, “the first hopeful moment in a long time,” as Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who has been outspoken in pressuring Trump (and Joe Biden before him) to do more to end the conflict, put it. Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, were as jubilant as if he’d gotten Benjamin Netanyahu and Muhammad Ismail Darwish to embrace on the Temple Mount (something the Israeli Prime Minister and the head of Hamas’s leadership council most certainly will not do).
In many ways, it was Trump’s willingness to pressure Netanyahu that really forced the deal. The Israeli Prime Minister had “no option but to cave,” as Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told me last week after Hamas agreed in principle to peace talks on Trump’s terms. Aaron David Miller, a veteran U.S. Mideast negotiator for Presidents of both parties, also predicted more or less what ended up happening, with the main uncertainty being not the phase-one ceasefire but whether a more lasting postwar arrangement for Gaza and crucial details such as Hamas’s disarmament can be agreed upon. “Trump wants a deal. He’ll settle for all hostages out and an end to the comprehensive Israeli military campaign,” Miller told me after last week’s Hamas news. “Bibi can’t afford to alienate him. On the contrary, he needs Trump to win Israeli elections in 2026.”
As if to reinforce the point, Netanyahu not only signed off on the ceasefire deal but then released an A.I.-generated image on social media of himself with Trump, as the U.S. President received the Nobel Peace Prize—a faked scene that spoke to Trump’s oft-stated aspiration to claim the award. “He deserves it!” Netanyahu wrote. This year’s winner of the prize, in fact, is due to be announced on Friday morning, and while hardly anyone expects Trump to claim it, many Republicans saw the Gaza news as a chance to demand it for him anyway. “Those groups of academics and élites that are sitting in Norway, that board of people that decides it, they need to give President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize,” Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, said on Fox News. (“Thank you Brian!!!,” the President responded on his Truth Social platform.)
Prize or no prize, Trump seized on the moment to declare that, because of him, the war was over. “We settled seven wars or major conflicts—but wars—and this is No. 8,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “This is peace in the Middle East.” There were no caveats or quibbles about what a phase two might look like.
It was hard to square all the encomiums for Trump rolling in from Republicans, hailing him as, basically, the Greatest Peacemaker in the History of the World, with the martial rhetoric that had actually been emanating from the President this week. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Even as Trump was negotiating an end to hostilities in the Middle East, he was at the same time ordering hundreds of National Guard troops to what he insisted were “war-ravaged” American cities, such as Portland and Chicago, and all but provoking open conflict with the Democratic elected officials who run those places.
Trump has not only likened Portland to a war zone but called it “under siege” and in a state of “insurrection” against the federal government. He’s used similar language about Chicago. “It’s like a war zone,” he said of crime in the city. “It’s probably worse than almost any city in the world.” If the courts block him from deploying the troops he’s already called up, he’s said he’s considering using the Insurrection Act to call out more of them. He seemed both infuriated and undeterred after a federal judge, whom Trump himself appointed, warned that America should be governed by “constitutional law, not martial law.”
There are many remarkable aspects to Trump’s decision to escalate his fight against large swaths of America, not least of which is that it is all based on the lie that there is anything approaching war-like levels of civil unrest in the cities he’s targeted. “There is no rebellion in Illinois,” the state’s lawyers argued in court on Thursday. Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, similarly declared, “There is no insurrection in Portland, no threat to national security.” Does it even matter? The federal judge in Oregon found that Trump’s rationale for the deployment was “untethered to facts,” but reports on Thursday from the federal appeals court that will decide whether the lower court’s ruling stands suggested the judges there were inclined to overturn it and let Trump have his war anyway.
And that, in the end, is the most amazing thing of all. The threats that haunt Trump, and against which he rallies our troops, as in that chilling seventy-two-minute speech he made to America’s entire military leadership in Quantico just a week ago, come not from foreign powers but from “dangerous” domestic battlegrounds that ought to be used as “training grounds” for the U.S. military. Trump has labelled himself a “President of PEACE,” as he searches for international accolades. But at home in America it is the battle with what he calls “the enemy from within” that has consumed him and come to define his Presidency. ♦
