CNN
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Donald Trump’s team is throwing itself into the most expansive and simultaneous set of high-level diplomatic negotiations in years, involving China, Ukraine, Russia, Iran, the Middle East and multiple global trading rivals.
The big question this week, as the president leaves on the first major foreign trip of his second term, is whether this whirl of attempted dealmaking will improve America’s strategic position or whether it will end up alienating allies and empowering enemies.
There’s some irony to the administration’s engagement on so many fronts. Trump is, after all, the “America first” president, who was elected to get US prices down and to fix the southern border rather than to adjudicate the frontier disputes of other nations.
But talks spanning many global issues also reflect Trump’s determination to impose his ideas and authority across the world and his attempts to tear down political, diplomatic and economic systems that have endured for decades.
His policies come at considerable risk as Trump’s often unilateral and unorthodox plans to revolutionize global trade; exert US power over smaller nations; address Iran’s nuclear program; contain China; and halt the killing in Ukraine could backfire.
It’s hard to keep up with an administration with a finger in so many geopolitical pies.
This weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met Chinese trade negotiators in Switzerland and reported good progress. In Oman, another set of US officials held tough and inconclusive direct talks with Iranian negotiators on addressing Tehran’s nuclear program. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance helped forge a ceasefire after an alarming escalation between India and Pakistan. Trump’s pressure forced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Turkey but at the cost of improving Moscow’s position.
On Sunday, Trump said Hamas had agreed to release Edan Alexander, the last remaining living US hostage in Gaza. The move appears to be an attempt to build pressure on Israel over ceasefire talks and humanitarian aid before Trump heads to the region.
This all came days after Trump concluded a trade deal with Britain and ahead of leaving Monday for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates on a trip that will highlight his personal affinity for the world’s richest nations and the Gulf region’s rising political and economic clout.
This intense activity is not what many foreign policy experts necessarily expected when Trump returned to power in January, but it does hold the promise that the most disruptive president in modern history could rack up foreign policy wins that ease global tensions.
Still, diplomatic bustle doesn’t itself mean progress. Many of the talks, including those over Trump’s tariff war with China and those with Iran — after he destroyed a previous nuclear deal with Tehran in his first term — are aimed at mitigating crises the president caused. Others, like the administration’s pro-Russia stance over the Ukraine war, raise doubts about fairness. And Trump’s ruthless culling of foreign assistance from the US Agency for International Development, especially on fighting HIV/AIDS, could mean many people face death or starvation.
There are some common trends in all the foreign policy gambits.
— In most cases, negotiations are being led by officials who are inexperienced in global diplomacy. Trump’s friend and envoy Steve Witkoff, who is deeply involved in Middle East, Ukraine and Iran diplomacy is, like Trump, a real estate investor. His prominence fits the president’s mistrust of establishment foreign policy officials and promotion of outsiders. But sometimes, his naiveté looks like a liability. Witkoff often emerges from meetings with Putin pushing Russia’s disinformation and expansionist propaganda. Similarly, Bessent has no experience of the exhaustive, drawn-out and formal talks that Chinese officials prefer in negotiations, especially on intricate trade issues.
— Any negotiation, at any time, can be blown up by Trump’s unorthodox and volatile approach. The trade showdown with China plunged into a genuine crisis when the president arbitrarily raised tariffs to 145% on a hunch that had the effect of shutting down one of the world’s most critical trading relationships. Ahead of the weekend’s talks, Trump said he was willing to go down to 80%. The president’s admirers see this unpredictability as a dealmaker’s genius. But he’s also playing roulette with global markets — and therefore the retirement savings of millions of Americans. The uncertainty is making a recession more likely.
— Trump’s capriciousness hangs over all the negotiations. His perpetual role as a bad cop who flings extreme rhetoric over social media can be a useful negotiating tool for officials, who can argue he might go off the rails if talks fail. And Trump’s mold-breaking can forge openings other presidents spurned; for instance, his remarkable first-term summits with North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un.
But while the diplomacy did cool tensions, the reality is nations follow their own foreign policy interests. Diplomacy solely rooted in the personality of a president often fails, and that was borne out when Trump’s strategy didn’t end Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.
— The hyper-politicization of the Trump administration makes assessing his national security strategies difficult. Every time there’s a small breakthrough, the president hails it as one of the great deals of history. And sycophantic subordinates feed his desire for adulation with exaggerated praise.
“What I witnessed was like watching a grand master in chess perform,” top White House adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News last week after a rambling Trump news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during which the president bizarrely insisted Canada should become the 51st state — despite Carney’s reiterating that would never happen. In more hyperbole, Trump declared that the “US and the UK have been working for years to try and make a deal, and it never quite got there.”
That’s true, but the agreement he signed fell far short of earlier aspirations. Most UK goods will also still have a 10% tariff, meaning higher prices for US consumers. Often for Trump, it’s all about the deal, whether it’s a good one or not.
— More than three months into Trump’s second term, there’s growing evidence that his transactional foreign policy is motivated more by an aggressive pursuit of US financial interests and even his own personal gain than by traditional US values. Trump required Ukraine to join a pact in which the US will share revenues for its mineral wealth as an effective condition for continued American support that recalled the plunder of colonialism.
And CNN reported Sunday that Trump hopes to accept a gift from Qatar of a luxury 747-8 aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars to serve as the new Air Force One. The plane would revert to Trump’s library and his personal use when he leaves office, in what appears to be a massive ethical violation and could infringe the Constitution. Following reports on the jet, Trump said Sunday night that the Defense Department plans to accept a Boeing 747-8 jet to replace Air Force One as a “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.”
— Rubio argues that the test of every US policy abroad is now whether it makes Americans safer and more prosperous. But Trump’s attacks on allies and genuflecting to dictators are shattering trust in the United States and causing its friends to look for security arrangements that would end up weakening US power abroad.
Progress in China talks; questions loom over Iran and Ukraine initiatives
The administration claimed success on multiple fronts over the weekend.
Zelensky agreed to join Putin for talks in Turkey amid hopes that they could represent a turning point in the war. His move followed a visit by European leaders to Kyiv in which they demanded a 30-day ceasefire before talks take place. But Russia refused and Zelensky blinked after Trump wrote on his Truth Social network, “I’m starting to doubt that Ukraine will make a deal with Putin.” The Ukrainian leader may feel he had no choice to go to the talks to avoid alienating Trump. But the president’s rebuke was just the latest occasion on which he’s promoted Russia’s position and spurned US allies in Europe that back Ukraine. His constant concessions to Putin mean the US is not seen as an honest broker and may mean Russia ends up being rewarded for its illegal invasion.
In Switzerland on Sunday, both the US and China reported breakthroughs in trade talks. Bessent said there’d been “substantial progress,” and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said he was confident the “deal” would help resolve the national emergency on trade declared by Trump. Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng was also positive. The upbeat atmosphere will boost stock markets traumatized by Trump’s chaotic second term.
Still, the substance will be crucial. If the two sides simply agreed to start a long process, the damage from Trump’s trade war against Beijing, which promises shortages and higher prices for consumers, could linger. And Trump’s fixation on tariffs and his belief that other nations perpetually rip off the US mean consumers will likely end up with higher prices, despite Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s comment to CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday that this fact amounted to “silly arguments.”
Trump also claimed that his administration was instrumental in ending an India-Pakistan clash over Kashmir that seemed about to erupt into a full-scale war. The government in Islamabad hailed the US intervention as decisive, although India was more guarded. Still, US involvement may be a sign that Trump is more willing to throw himself into international diplomacy without an obvious US payoff than at first appeared. Just hours before Washington got more involved, Vance, part of MAGA’s isolationist wing, described the dispute as “none of our business.”
The longest-running Trump foreign policy initiative is in the Middle East, and it started before he took office. It’s a poor advertisement for his strategy. Witkoff’s involvement has so far failed to stop the war in Gaza as the deadly humanitarian crisis worsens. In fact, Trump may have made things worse. His plan to move Palestinians and to build the “Riviera of the Middle East” is not only tantamount to ethnic cleansing, but has boosted calls by far-right politicians in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for discussions about sovereignty of Gaza.
And Trump’s hostility to US allies has been destructive. A growing transatlantic rift has governments that always supported Washington turning away and mulling their own security arrangements. This might fulfill one Trump goal of allies doing more in their own defense. But it could break an alliance system that has multiplied US power for generations. And Canada’s Carney has warned one of the closest geopolitical friendships in history — that between Ottawa and Washington — will never be the same following Trump’s threats to absorb his nation.
