December hasn’t been kind to President Donald Trump’s global peacemaking efforts.
On Dec. 4, Trump hosted the presidentsof Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo at his newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, hailing the two leaders for launching “a new year of harmony and cooperation.” But on the ground, the fighting raged on. Days after Trump’s Washington peace summit, the Rwandan-backed M23 militia group seized the key Congolese town of Uvira, forcing 200,000 people to flee.
Then, on Dec. 7, fierce fighting once again erupted along the border between Thailand and Cambodia, reigniting a conflict Trump claimed to have resolved after a ceasefire signing ceremony in October. The two sides traded artillery fire, Cambodia launched rockets and armed drones into Thailand, and the Thais responded by carrying out airstrikes against Cambodian military targets. Eleven Thai soldiers have been killed along with at least 11 Cambodian civilians, and more than a half million people have been displaced on both sides.
Trump called the prime ministers of Thailand and Cambodia last week and later announced on his Truth Social platform that the two sides had once again agreed to a ceasefire. But the two prime ministers both denied a new ceasefire was in effect, and the fighting raged on.
All this comes as signs that Trump’s proudest accomplishment, his 20-point peace plan for ending the war in Gaza, appears to have stalled. The plan’s initial phase saw the cessation of most hostilities and the release of Israeli hostages being held by the terrorist group Hamas. But so far, no country has been willing to put up troops for the international forcemeant to disarm Hamas. Trump has delayed the announcement of his “Board of Peace,” meant to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction, until next year. And Hamas has reasserted itself as the power to be reckoned with in the populated areas of the enclave.
The setbacks show that in the complicated business of peacemaking, signing a ceasefire deal before the cameras is usually just the beginning. Changing the realities on the ground — and getting combatants to lay down their weapons — requires a more sustained level of follow-through and commitment. It’s a lesson to keep in mind as Trump aims for what would be the grandest peace deal of all: an agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end the war about to enter its fourth bloody year.
The Ukraine war is itself the product of entering into flimsy peace agreements and not following through. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 came on the heels of two other failed ceasefire deals collectively called the Minsk agreements, signed in 2014 and 2015. Those accords only brought the illusion of peace. When I visited Ukraine in 2018 to talk about war reporting for a media conference in the Donbas region, Ukrainians spoke as if the war was still ongoing. And it was. Russia’s proxy militias were firing artillery across the front lines only a few miles away.
All of the conflicts Trump is trying to solve have roots going back decades.
The war in Central Africa stems from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, that saw Hutu extremist militias slaughter some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis over three months. A Tutsi rebel army based in Uganda marched in and stopped the massacres. Its commander, Paul Kagame, is still president today. Over a million Hutus, including perpetrators of the genocide, fled over the border into the eastern regions of Congo, formerly called Zaire. Some have formed a militia trying to destabilize Rwanda. Meanwhile Rwanda has backed a Tutsi-led militia called M23 that has been seizing towns in Congo.
The Thai-Cambodia conflictdates back at least a century, when the French colonized Cambodia and drew a map that placed two ancient Buddhist temples and the surrounding land on the Cambodian side of the border. Fighting in the disputed borderlands has erupted periodically over the years, including in 2008 and again last July when dozens of soldiers were killed and tens of thousands of villagers displaced.
The Gaza war has roots going back to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands following the 1967 Six Day War — though more precisely to 2006 and 2007, when Hamas won elections in Gaza, and then violently forced Fatah, the dominant party of the Palestinian Authority, from Gaza. Hamas has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and since its barbaric attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, has been at war with Israel.
In all these conflicts, enmities run deep, and are passed on through generations. They are not easily undone by handshakes in Washington, Kuala Lumpur or Cairo. And they defy quick and easy solutions.
Trump fancies himself a peacemaker and a dealmaker. But solving historically complex conflicts is not like making a real estate deal, where everyone can walk away satisfied. Solving a war takes time, patient diplomacy and follow through. Artificial deadlines are meaningless. And as Trump should have learned this month, announcing ceasefire deals is easy, but the people with the guns also have a say.
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