Trump's Peace is an American Hustle

Is Donald Trump a peace maker?

There are many conflicting assessments of this question all over the internet, and I discussed some of them this week with Michael Rossi. He is an American political scientist currently based in Tashkent. You can watch the interview on Substack and on YouTube.

The conflicting assessments of Trump’s foreign policy contain much confusion and wishful thinking. It is understandable. There is more noise than signal about American aims for war or peace. Few actions have been implemented, rather than announced. But too many people are willing political hopes and fears into being. They do not sense the realities of the history of American war and peace.

The best antidote to wishful thinking about Trump’s peaceful intentions is some quality history about the USA’s long history of losing the peace.

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This post and my deep dive interview with Michael Rossi (Diplomacy in USA, Europe, and the world after the Trump-Zelensky Showdown) are bonus episodes in my world history tour of world powers. The updated schedule of the year-long tour is here:

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Wishful Thinking about Trump’s Peace

Wishful thinking is not politics. It is the end of politics. It is religion.

John Helmer, “Trump’s Ukraine War Numbers: The Truths vs. Lies” (Dialogue Works, 2025)

Veteran journalist John Helmer (originally an Australian) is partly right. Wishful thinking is not helpful to politics, if politics is defined as government. But today’s politics is divorced from governing. It has become a virtual reality theatre, in which bad actors perform with worse scripts and the audience cheers or boos in fickle confusion. In these conditions, an epidemic of wishful political thinking has overwhelmed governing.

No psycho-demographic segment and no political belief is safe from this virus. A slice of every group is stricken with confused wishful thinking about the question of whether Trump is a peacemaker.

There are many believers in Trump, the peacemaker, among his MAGA supporters, and among alternative media commentators who, until 20 January 2025, were fierce critics of American foreign policy and political elites. For example, The Duran and Scott Ritter have placed false hope in Trump. They now scream the rebel yells of nineteenth century American political rhetoric. They fail to see that Trump’s slogans restate American supremacy.

The supporters of American foreign policy, who believed that “America was back” with Joe Biden, also engage in wishful thinking in their trite comparisons of Trump to Hitler. Timothy Snyder and Timothy Garton Ash shout their nightmares from their Atlantic retreats most days here on Substack. They equate tentative peace talks to establish normal diplomatic relations between Russia and the USA (crippled by Obama in 2016) with the ‘appeasement’ of Munich 1938. These spectres might seem fearful, not wishful. But their fears express the wish that the illusions championed—Ukraine was a democracy fighting a war of national independence—were ever true. Only an evil dictator, like Trump, could betray these hopes. His peace dishonours the idea of America. His peace is war, by other means, on democracy. The ghosts of wars past are necessary to explain how the world turned against the liberal rules-based order that has treated the two Timothies so well.

Critics of the American empire, such as Brian Berletic, say Trump’s peace is a psychological operation. The split with Europe is a masquerade. It is a ‘division of labour,’ in which Europe fights Russia and the USA wars with China. Trump’s peace is merely a distraction from never-ending imperial war. These critics are battle-hardened by many false flags and cries of wolf by the ‘deep state’ that rules the USA. They do not want to be fooled again. They wish Trump to continue the regime, same as it ever was, so they do not need to adapt theory to history.

These conflicting assessments are driven by differing assumptions, stances on Trump, and the difficulty of separating signal from noise in his statements. Since the results of talk are yet so uncertain, Trump’s intentions are still obscured by the fog of peace. For example, the talks in Riyadh weeks ago agree to appoint the leading representatives of the USA and Russian governments in peace talks on Ukraine. We are still waiting for those decisions. The process has barely begun. It may simply be too early to tell if Trump is a peacemaker.

In addition, John Helmer has pointed to some dark domestic clouds further obscuring Trump’s intentions. Trump’s disapproval rating has surged in the first month of his Presidency. He is sinking in the polls. He wants a peace for domestic political victory, even if it is a three-card trick. Helmer argues that the USA is seeking a “cash back” deal in Ukraine, so Trump can claim a win. It is an American hustle.

I broadly share Helmer’s assessment of the Trump administration. Its governing style is incoherent, divided and erratic. Its approach to diplomacy is shambolic. Trump may end the war, as quickly as it takes. But it will leave Europe to bear all the costs of the ruin and the coming social crisis in Ukraine. It is a New York snatch and grab, dressed up as peace.

But the deeper question is not Trump. He is just another gerontocratic American oligarch, shaped by the nihilistic, machismo leadership culture of the USA. He is not the first and will not be the last American President who presents false promises of peace. Trump personifies the USA state. The deeper question is: how does the USA state negotiate peace?

The best guide to future performance is past performance. The USA has been at war for all but 17 years of its independent history. It entered late the global conflicts of World War One and Two. It came out from both the financial victor. Even after its defeat in the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the USA looted the impoverished nation’s treasury as it scampered out of Kabul. Why would any serious diplomat trust an American peace proposal?

The best guide to political judgment, as Isaiah Berlin argued, is the sense of reality formed by studying history. Let us look briefly at four events from the American diplomatic past to judge the reality of the American state’s proposals for peace.

These four events are:

• Wilsonian peace of 1919

• Post-1945 Pax Americana

• The “Kissinger Moment” of 1972

• The Lost Peace of 1989

I will sketch each event very briefly and offer a history book recommendation if you would like to dive deeper. There are also links to my past articles on these themes.

Woodrow Wilson’s Botched Peace of 1919

The 1919 Peace of Versailles is famous as a bad peace. The exclusion of Germany and the Soviet Union from the talks poisoned the peace. The reparations had economic consequences. The Versailles Treaty contributed to the next war. The unequal implementation of national sovereignty with liberal empires still haunts the world today.

It was America’s first botched peace. President Woodrow Wilson presided over the peace talks of Versailles and the USA acted as a super-state. Ever since Wilson has been treated as a saint of liberal internationalism. But, as Adam Tooze argues in The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (2014), Woodrow Wilson’s botched peace of 1919 was the USA’s first dismal failure as world hegemon.

Wilson’s Progressive Internationalism failed. The US Congress even refused to join the League of Nations. The failure gave way to the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Ever since references to Munich 1938 absolve American hucksterism and hyperpower for its mistakes in 1919. American foreign policy became encrusted in myths: saving Europe, domestic betrayal, authoritarianism, collapse into ‘isolationism’, and the undying liberal dream of an American-led world order. These myths concealed the utter failure of America’s first attempt to shape the ‘world order’.

You can read more on the botched peace and the American hegemony project since 1900 in my article from a few weeks ago, The American Hegemony Project, According to Adam Tooze.

Peace by Frozen Conflict: The Post-1945 World

In 1945 the USA had another go at establishing a liberal order. This time there were more enduring achievements. The United Nations succeeded in ways the League of Nations did not. But no peace agreement settled the situation in Europe or Asia. America found a new excuse for its failures to negotiate peace. Losing the peace was called a “frozen conflict.” The Cold War saw many of these, starting with Berlin and the still unresolved division of Korea into North and South. Astonishingly, American geopolitical strategists still refer to this tragedy as a model for responding to American defeat in Ukraine.

I have written extensively on American diplomacy during this Age of American Expansion, based on John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000. You might want to start with the article in my series on the brief history of the multipolar world, Myths of the post-1945 world: the Cold War and Nehru’s empathy. You can read more about America’s failure to build a positive peace after 1945 in my Post-1945 World | The Real History Guide, available for paid subscribers.

Kissinger Myth: why Nixon went to China in 1972

Many geopolitics commentators today are speculating that Trump’s peace plan is a “Reverse Kissinger” strategy. They claim the cunning US objective is to split Russia from its partner, China. This grand strategy would reverse the partner swap executed by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, when in 1972 they split China from the Soviet Union, after the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s.

In my interview of Michael Rossi, I briefly discussed my view that this “Kissinger Strategy” is a myth and a delusion. At least, it should be called the Nixon Strategy. The President, not his national security adviser, deserved the credit for establishing diplomatic relations with China. Kissinger was his untested adviser and distrusted emissary. Nixon’s strategy emerged from American weakness and Nixon’s remarkable, but private admission that America could no longer command the world.

The Kissinger myth misunderstands the Chinese role. In 1971, the USA still supported the rebels of Taiwan occupying China’s seat at the UN. China wanted that to end. The Soviets could not help with that. Mao also thought the USA was the declining power, and the Soviet Union was the rising power and a challenge to his influence in the Third World. He feared unreasonably a Soviet invasion. At home, he was in the midst of the ten years of chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

Kissinger’s strategy had very little to do with the rapprochement. It did not shape China’s later transformation. It was not the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. It was a convenient set of misunderstandings in a period of détente (de Gaulle’s term for relaxation of tensions) between China, Europe, the Soviet Union and the USA.

That détente lasted less than a decade, before the USA and Henry Kissinger blew it. By the time of Gerald Ford’s presidency, Nixon’s replacement banned the term from his campaign. Kissinger was then his Secretary of State. Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter presided over a divided administration. His Secretary of State supported détente, and clung on to hopes long enough to deliver on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT). But the hawks and émigré Ahabs of the American state, principally Zbigniew Brzezinski, turned the evangelical President into a crusader to overthrow the Soviet Union and reassert American supremacy. By Reagan’s election, American Supremacists ruled the roost again. As Odd Arne Westad wrote:

“Ultimately, though, détente was defeated by politics in the United States. Nixon and Kissinger had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept…. Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in the 1970s or ever. And they elected Ronald Reagan president to make sure that such a devaluation of the American purpose would not happen again.”

(Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History, p. 500)

On this topic I recommend reading Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History, and specifically the chapter on Nixon going to China. I also discussed the broader history of détente, and the Euro-American split, in this piece, The West has lost the will for peace: but yearns for endless war. I am yet to be convinced that Trump or the USA or the wider West has recovered the will for the difficult process of peace.

Lost Peace: How USA resumed Cold War in 1989

That difficult process of peace is the theme of Richard Sakwa, The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (2023). It skewers another myth of American grand strategy, that the USA “won the Cold War.” This triumphalist myth has had tragic consequences, including in Ukraine. Sakwa wrote:

This is a story that begins in hope but ends in unmitigated tragedy, in both the classical and modern senses. There was a positive peace to be had after 1989 but it was squandered.

(Sakwa, The Lost Peace, p. 11)

Sakwa’s reference to 1989 is to the brief period between 1986 and 1990 when, on the initiative of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, the two superpowers, which for forty years had glowered at each other over the iron curtain of Eastern Europe, abandoned their most hostile rhetoric and negotiated an end to the Cold War. Those negotiations led to significant nuclear disarmament agreements and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev hoped that NATO would do the same. He declared to the United Nations in 1988 that the Soviet Union would abandon the ideological foreign policies of the last 70 years, and implement active measures to de-militarise.

But again America blew it, together with its too willing partners in Europe and the political West. I will be talking with Richard Sakwa next week, and will be sharing the conversation with you shortly.

Can the USA make peace in its current state?

Regrettably, no.

Its record of war is remarkable, with scholars demonstrating that it has undertaken military interventions in all but 17 years of the republic’s history. The frequency of interventions has increased since 1989. So much for democratic peace theory.

Its record of diplomacy is dismal. The last few years may be the darkest of American nights. At least a process has begun for the two largest nuclear super-powers to establish normal diplomatic relations. Occasionally, I think Marco Rubio shows signs of prudence, reason and dialogue. But then JD. Vance, the intern from Ohio, barges in and insults everyone in the room with his hillbilly harangues.

Fundamentally, the USA has some negotiation tactics to end the war. It has no strategy to build the peace. Trump has redefined American war aims. To his credit, he may save many lives and prevent a catastrophic escalation. But his aims are short-term and selfish. Get the loot. Avoid the blame. Move on to the war with China. Pretend to be a Great Statesman who can perform the Kissinger flip. He remains as madly devoted to American Primacy as previous American leaders. He acknowledges multipolarity and no longer wants the cares of a sole superpower, with all that global responsibility. He has reinterpreted primacy as the USA being the mountain in a triad of great powers.

The present USA government’s peace talks are yet another All-American Hustle. Trump is incoherent, incapable, incompetent and complicit in many breaches of international law and norms. But so too is the American state, and many in its leadership elite, foreign policy think-tanks and vast media commentariat.

Trump is not a herald of world peace. He is a herald of “Ten Years of Chaos.”

That is the phrase used in China today to describe the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

I will be commenting on these issues on my YouTube channel while we continue the world history world tour to China and beyond. Do check out these recent videos, if you have not already watched them:

• The end of the Ukraine war and the start of Europe's next refugee crisis (8 March 2025)

• When JD Vance fought Niall Ferguson, the historian was the loser. (28 February 2025)

• What everyone is missing about the peace negotiations over Ukraine (28 February 2025)

Many thanks

Jeff