President Donald Trump is at an impasse diplomatically. He has had a hand in resolving or mitigating a number of conflicts throughout the world, and he has demonstrated an ability to put pressure on U.S. dependents to achieve desired outcomes.
But when it comes to the wars that are being fought disproportionately at U.S. taxpayer expense and most impinge on American national interests while having enormous humanitarian costs for those involved, Trump has yet to make decisive headway.
Trump is back to largely doing what the former President Joe Biden did on Ukraine, after discovering that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin did not view his own side’s casualties as a sufficient reason to wind down the war. Trump would clearly like to do something different on Gaza, but does not wish to abandon or be seen as abandoning Israel and hasn’t won sufficient concessions from Hamas.
The president would like to go down in history as a peacemaker, someone who was able to turn the lessons of The Art of the Deal into a roadmap for statecraft and global diplomacy. “Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen,” he said in his second inaugural address in January. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
Trump’s goals here were not necessarily limited to restraint in American foreign policy, but the resolution of international conflicts to which the U.S. was not a direct party. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said. “That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”
Even Trump’s take on American exceptionalism differs from those of his post-9/11 Republican predecessors. “We will be a nation like no other, full of compassion, courage, and exceptionalism,” he said. “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.”
This distinguishes Trump’s second inaugural address in important respects from George W. Bush’s 20 years earlier. Bush declared it “the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” though he denied this was “primarily the task of arms.”
Nevertheless, Bush must have listened to Trump’s second inaugural address and concluded that, like the first, “That was some weird sh*t.”
Trump’s return to the White House was soon followed by the election of the first American pope. Pope Leo XIV believes the same things that Bush professed about “every man and woman on this earth” possessing “rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth” without necessarily coming to the same conclusions about foreign policy.
Pope Leo has expressed considerable concern about the Russia–Ukraine war. “The martyred Ukraine is waiting for negotiations for a just and lasting peace to finally happen,” Leo said at his inaugural Mass. He has met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife.
The new pope has been even more outspoken about the war in Gaza. “I am following with deep concern the extremely grave humanitarian situation in Gaza, where the civilian population is being crushed by hunger and continues to be exposed to violence and death,” Leo said.
“I renew my heartfelt appeal for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and full respect for international humanitarian law,” he continued. “Every human being has an intrinsic dignity bestowed by God Himself.”
Obviously, these are the types of statements that you might expect a global religious leader to make about wars. A pope in particular would be obligated to appeal for peace wherever possible, and even where seemingly impossible. But could the pope actually play a critical diplomatic role, helping Trump achieve breakthroughs that presently seem remote?
Trump seemed open to this possibility back in May, admittedly during a time period when he was much more optimistic about the prospects of diplomacy with Russia. “The Vatican, as represented by the Pope, has stated that it would be very interested in hosting the negotiations,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “Let the process begin!”
Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, has also floated the prospect of papal involvement in various peace processes. “We talked a lot about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza. We talked a lot about the Russia–Ukraine situation,” Vance told NBC News after meeting with Leo. “It’s hard to predict the future, but I do think that not just the pope, but the entire Vatican, has expressed a desire to be really helpful and to work together on facilitating, hopefully, a peace deal coming together in Russia and Ukraine.”
“We have an American pope of the world’s largest single religion—a guy who doesn’t have an army, but who I think has an incredible amount of capacity to convene and to influence, not just Europe, but, really, the entire world,” Vance added. He told NBC that Leo “does care a lot about peace.”
In May, Leo spoke to the more than 180 ambassadors from nations that have diplomatic relations with the Vatican. “From a Christian perspective—but also in other religious traditions—peace is first and foremost a gift,” he said, as quoted by the Catholic periodical America magazine. “It is an active and demanding gift” that “engages and challenges each of us, regardless of our cultural background or religious affiliation, demanding first of all that we work on ourselves.” He added that “peace is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words. For words too, not only weapons, can wound and even kill.”
The pope recently told reporters it was necessary to “pray for peace, and try to convince all parties to come to the table, to dialogue and to lay down their weapons.”
“The world can’t take it any more,” he said. “There is so much conflict, so many wars.” A POLITICO headline summarized it well: “Pope Leo XIV’s first message to world leaders: End all wars.”
In Ukraine, the pope has specified he is seeking a “just, authentic, and long-lasting” peace. And that is where the challenge lies for everyone involved. Sustainable diplomatic solutions require more than the temporary cessation of fighting. Anyone laying down their arms has to trust that they are not rendering their populations newly vulnerable to additional warfare down the road.
There is much that remains unknown about the pope’s views on American politics. His brother, Louis Prevost, is a well-known Trump supporter who met with the president at the White House in May. Trump evidently takes great pride in counting the first American pope’s brother among his diehard MAGA followers.
But Leo himself likely wishes to be seen as neither a Trump acolyte nor a Trump antagonist. (His predecessor, Pope Francis, was often perceived as playing the latter role.) While Trump has tried to be respectful of religion since entering national politics a decade ago, his sharing of AI images of himself as the pope was a reminder of his more irreverent side. And the renewed controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein files has returned to the headlines Trump’s playboy days, which are certainly at odds with Catholic teaching. The former President Joe Biden, only the second Catholic president in the nation’s history, once described Trump as having “the morals of an alley cat.”
While Trump has generally governed as a social conservative and appointed most of the justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, between his two, nonconsecutive terms, he also triangulated on abortion in last year’s campaign. Trump watered down the Republican platform planks on abortion and marriage while suggesting taxpayer-funded IVF treatments, which produce babies but at a high cost in terms of embryo destruction.
Yet a president and a pope don’t have to have total agreement to work together internationally. Even as Europe secularizes, the pope is admired in quarters where Trump is despised. Trump for his part has far more credibility in Israel and among the Jewish state’s supporters in America and abroad than does Leo. Trump won 59 percent of the Catholic vote last year, according to exit polls, and carried 63 percent of white Catholics. Trump’s background as a New Yorker and his years-long political alliance with the religious right gives him a connection to evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews that few other U.S. political leaders could easily claim to share.
One possible model for Trump and Leo is the collaboration between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. In his 2006 book The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister, the veteran conservative journalist and former National Review editor John O’Sullivan gave JPII credit alongside Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for the West winning the Cold War.
The differences are obvious, of course. Leo and Trump seem at odds over nationalism in a way that John Paul II and Reagan were not about the Soviet Union. John Paul II was also important in beating back radical liberation theology, which was often little more than Marxism under a Christian and peacenik veneer. The theological obstacles to Trump’s diplomacy come from a very different wing of modern Western Christianity. Leo has almost certainly thought these things through more carefully than Trump.
Yet it is unmistakably the case that John Paul II’s election as pope was geopolitically consequential, even if he broke with the self-styled neo-Reaganites after the Cold War. (He was no supporter of the war in Iraq, for example.) That could prove true of the current pope as well, even if things seem as hopeless on many fronts today as they undoubtedly appeared to many in 1979.
Pope Leo XIV is unlikely to advocate the type of coercive diplomacy that has been a hallmark of Trump’s approach. But he cannot—how many divisions has the pope?—and should not. Perhaps the U.S. should no longer be the policeman of the world, but to the extent that it remains such there may need to be a good cop and a bad cop. We know the role for which the pope is best suited.
Trump understands that moral suasion is not always the best way to motivate or move other actors on the world stage, especially those who don’t share certain basic Western values. This differentiates him from most of his recent predecessors in both parties and much of the bipartisan congressional leadership of the post–Second World War era. Yet moral suasion is one of the biggest tools in a pope’s toolbelt.
That doesn’t mean that Trump would be an easy partner for peace for any religious leader. He vacillates between seeming to want creative diplomatic solutions and demanding unconditional surrender. It is seldom clear whether his varied pronouncements represent a firm position, his current bargaining posture or negotiating tactic, a head-fake to distract from whatever he is going to say or do next, or a threat meant to project power.
When Trump sought to use U.S. leverage over Ukraine to push Zelensky to the negotiating table, many of his supporters cheered but others found it off-putting (especially those who find Trump off-putting in general). The contentious White House meeting between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky was in many respects a rebuke to the bipartisan Washington foreign-policy establishment. Yet a nontrivial segment of the American electorate felt Trump and Vance bullied the Ukrainian leader.
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Many of these same people would be more comfortable with Trump’s recent tougher tone with Putin, though similar rhetoric did not not prevent or end the war under Biden. The pope spoke by telephone with Putin in June. A readout of the call from the Vatican said the war in Ukraine was a major topic. The exact language the pope used with Putin was not disclosed.
Even one of Trump’s most recent calls for peace, made shortly after bombing Iran, was far from the kind of public rhetoric a pope would use. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing,” Trump said of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran which appeared to be on the precipice of breaking down. (The ceasefire subsequently held, though the Middle East is always a region of uncertainty.)
If the wars of the world were easily solved, they would have been by now. Not even the transactional Trump has been willing to use the bluntest instruments at his disposal to force major changes to the wars in Ukraine or Gaza. The pope could be helpful, as a spiritual leader with a temperament, skills, and moral cachet that Trump lacks, as well as a standing in the world no secular political authority can muster. At times, however, it feels like peace on these fronts would take a miracle.
