Trump appears not to know the difference between making a deal and making peace

For the sake of anyone confused by Donald Trump’s apparently supernatural abilities as a global peacemaker – for which he was given the inaugural (and perhaps only) Fifa “peace prize” – current events have intervened to offer some clarification.Trump has claimed a number of dubious diplomatic successes on the international peace front, among them a freshly signed deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mediating in Thailand and Cambodia’s deadly border dispute, and the Gaza “ceasefire”.In the space of a few hours on Monday, however, those claims were thrown under a harsh spotlight even as Trump and his officials continued to try to pressure Ukraine into rewarding Russia for an illegal international aggression by surrendering its sovereign territory.On Monday, fighting broke out once again between Thai and Cambodian forces, the heaviest since a ceasefire in the summer. In the Great Lakes region too, a deal freshly inked in Washington between Rwanda and the DRC was also struggling, with the Congolese president, Felix Tshisekedi, telling lawmakers in a speech that Rwanda was already violating its commitments under a peace deal mediated by Washington. In Gaza, meanwhile, conditions remain as desperate as ever for Palestinians among almost daily attacks.Even if one is tempted to credit Trump’s self-professed efforts as a peacemaker (as part of which he has renamed the United States Institute of Peace after himself) foreign policy experts categorise peace in two competing ways first conceptualised by the late Johan Galtung, the Norwegian sociologist and prime mover behind the emergence of the discipline of peace and conflict studies.Galtung and others see two kinds of peace. The first is what is known as negative peace: in the absence of direct violence, the underlying tensions and unresolved issues still exist, making the peace fragile and prone to episodic outbreaks of conflict.A classic example of a negative peace is the long-running tension between India and Pakistan, which has resulted in episodic fighting (and is, needless to say, one of the crises Trump claims to have solved.)Positive peace, as envisaged by Galtung, is far more taxing on participants and mediators, and addresses underlying issues, structural violence, and inequalities affecting the populations in conflict.The reality, as critics have pointed out since Trump was given his medal and trophy by the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, is that most of what Trump and his team are involved in is not even properly categorisable as working towards even a negative peace.The business that Trump and his envoys are in is dealmaking, a fundamentally transactional affair and very different from the hard slog of mediated peace processes.As Arthur Boutellis wrote in an essay for the Global Observatory of the International Peace Institute in October: “Dealmakers bring valuable skills to peace mediation, including pragmatism, persistence and a results-oriented mindset.“Yet there is a fundamental difference between dealmaking and peacemaking. In the business world, dealmaking focuses on bargaining between positions. It is inherently transactional, zero-sum and contractual: one party transfers ownership to another in exchange for payment.“Peacemaking, by contrast, seeks to shift parties from bargaining over fixed positions to addressing their underlying interests and needs in pursuit of durable ‘win-win’ outcomes. It aims to build trust, transform relationships and address the structural and historical injustices that gave rise to conflict.”When it comes to peace efforts, Trump’s instincts are more performative than interested in hard graft. The handshake and the signing matter more than an inclusive process and a durable and fair peace, perhaps not surprising given his own record in business, where winning is seen as everything.Most dangerous of all is that this lack of commitment is transparently obvious to all involved, turning negotiations into long-winded exercises in bad faith, where the game is to be able to trade recriminations over failure, and a mediator (in the shape of Trump) who is often the most unreliable and bad faith actor.