The Guardian

Trump’s failure to maintain ceasefires is part of the new world disorder – and ordinary people pay the price | Simon Tisdall

The US president brags about ending wars but look at Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Lebanon to see what his casual disregard for diplomacy and obsession with instant results have achieved There are visionary statesmen and high-minded negotiators, pragmatic mediators and professional diplomats – and then there are meddling fools. As ceasefires implode, vast numbers of civilians die or flee, and wars Donald Trump started, fuelled or pledged to resolve rage unchecked, there’s no doubt which category he belongs to. In baseball parlance, in Ukraine, Iran-Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, Trump is “0 for 3”. He boasted he alone could cut deals and bring peace. He’s delivered neither. In striking out, he mostly makes matters worse. The heroic age of 19th-century diplomacy, typified by Prince Metternich’s great power-balancing “concert of Europe” and Benjamin Disraeli’s Balkan “peace with honour”, is history now. But it’s not that long since Nobel-winning peacemakers such as the UN chief Kofi Annan and the Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, or the US senator George Mitchell, who brokered Northern Ireland’s Good Friday agreement, were troubleshooting intractable conflicts the world over. Where are the successors to Desmond Tutu, Andrei Sakharov or Yitzhak Rabin when you need them? Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator Continue reading...