President Donald Trump has long boasted about his ability to cut deals with the world’s strongmen. But now that he’s back in the White House, his charms haven’t worked on the leaders he professes to admire.
In the last 48 hours, Trump has been rebuffed by the leaders of Russia, China and Iran, countries that he promised swift accords with on the campaign trail. His promises to end the conflict in Ukraine, cut a trade deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping and get a better nuclear deal with Iran have yet to bear fruit.
“I like President XI of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!” Trump wrote in a social media post early Wednesday. Hours later, he held a phone call with Putin and conceded it was “not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace.”
Those laments marked reversals from Trump and his team, who have said repeatedly the only way for those problems to be solved would be through Trump’s direct involvement. Instead, the president is coming face to face with the fact that leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi aren’t as willing to back down as he’d predicted.
It’s also a reminder that Trump’s promise to American voters and the rest of the world was that he had the cunning and toughness, forged in the rough and tumble of New York City real estate, to stare down leaders like Xi and Putin in ways that his predecessor couldn’t.
Some allies, such as the United Arab Emirates, have remained faithful thanks to the promise of massive investment. At the same time, the president has managed to twist arms and curry favor among smaller countries such as El Salvador and Panama.
“The countries that the president can bully are America’s friends, because they don’t want a rupture in the relationship, whereas America’s adversaries are perfectly willing to run that risk,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Trump has all but taken the threat of sanctions off the table with Russia, and his social media post on Wednesday appeared to concede Putin’s claim that he has a right to retaliate after devastating Ukrainian drone strikes on air bases over the weekend.
Putin himself has rejected calls for talks to end the conflict as Trump has demanded.
“How can such meetings be held under these conditions? What is there to talk about?” Putin said during a televised meeting with government officials, citing separate attacks on bridges he blamed on Ukraine.
The US is also trying to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons but Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday criticized a US proposal for a nuclear agreement and called American officials “arrogant” for expecting the Islamic Republic to cease uranium enrichment.
And Trump has lost much of his leverage with China, which has ramped up export controls on much-needed rare earth minerals that go into car batteries and mobile phones. Instead, China is shifting its attention toward Europe, where it sees an opening for deeper trade ties.
Contrary to his apparent conviction that a trade war would prove devastating for Beijing, Xi’s government has turned the tables, using export controls on rare earth metals to squeeze key US industries as it seeks to weather higher US tariffs, tighter tech restrictions and efforts by the administration to array regional allies against Beijing.
Trump doesn’t necessarily prefer authoritarian strongmen, said Jeremy Shapiro, director of the US program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. But “he relates better to them, and he respects them more. So he’s more wary of threatening them or wary of trying to make unequal bargains with them.”
In dealing with Russia, US officials have said the Biden administration’s strategy of hitting Moscow with sanctions failed to end the war so they are trying new approaches. Yet some leaders fear that it also means Trump is closer to washing his hands of the conflict, as he’s threatened to do.
Trump has bristled at the idea that he’s backing down. “It’s called negotiation,” he said last week when asked for his response to the new term coined by investors known as the Taco Trade — Trump Always Chickens Out.
“If the world reacts weakly to Putin’s threats, he sees that as a willingness to turn a blind eye to his actions,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a social media post. “When he feels neither strength nor pressure, but weakness, he commits yet more crimes.”
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
