The talks lasted for hours. Yet on key issues – above all, territory – there had not been so much as a baby step toward compromise. It was a deeply disheartening message to have to carry back to the White House.
Those words could equally well describe two attempts at U.S. shuttle diplomacy, 50 years apart.
Most recently, earlier this week in the Kremlin, Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Those talks made no breakthrough. On Thursday, the pair met Ukrainian negotiators in Florida.
Why We Wrote This
Donald Trump’s bursts of shuttle diplomacy to resolve international conflicts recall an earlier practitioner of the art – Henry Kissinger. But he treated negotiations as a marathon; Mr. Trump tries to sprint to success. That has significant consequences.
An almost identical deadlock confronted America’s original shuttle diplomat, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in March 1975. He showed open irritation on his flight back to Washington after talks in Cairo and Jerusalem failed to achieve a troop disengagement in the Sinai.
But the differences between the shuttle missions then and now far outweigh the similarities.
The latest stage in Mr. Trump’s effort to end the Ukraine war – and his interventions in other conflicts – has revealed a new, distinctly Trumpian approach to American diplomacy.
He has secured undeniable achievements: chiefly a cease-fire and hostage release in Gaza, and also a de-escalation of border conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, and Thailand and Cambodia.
Yet his departure from Kissinger-style diplomacy explains the doubts surrounding his forays into conflict resolution: what will he do next in Ukraine? How will he implement key security provisions in still-simmering Gaza?
And, amid continued flare-ups of violence in the other conflict areas, will the peace agreements that he has announced hold?
President Trump shares Mr. Kissinger’s belief in realpolitik, a conviction that not only should U.S. diplomacy advance American interests, but also that Washington should deploy whatever leverage is available to do so.
Secretary Kissinger did secure an Egypt-Israel disengagement a few months later. One factor was the prospect of a U.S. “reassessment” of economic and military support for Israel. That helped nudge a reluctant Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to sign.
Yet Kissingerian diplomacy was a marathon, not a sprint.
He negotiated three disengagement accords in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war: one between Israel and Syria, and two involving Israel and the Egyptians.
He began with a firm view of what the agreements would look like, buttressed by a team of seasoned diplomatic, military, and legal experts.
He had a clear geopolitical endpoint in mind: to demonstrate America’s indispensable role in the region, even for Kremlin Cold War allies such as Syria and Egypt.
And he kept at it, through multiple shuttle missions, dozens of hours of meetings, attention to every detail in draft texts, and an exhaustive search for language the rival sides could live with.
He also knew from the start what was not possible, so soon after the war had ended: full-scale peace.
For President Trump, peace agreements are the aim. And it’s a sprint, not a marathon – witness his frequent references to having “ended” a whole series of wars, and his undisguised frustration over his inability so far to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine.
He has shown little interest in expert opinion. Nor has there been any sign of drafts explaining how key provisions of the agreements would be implemented.
Instead, the key documents have read more like bullet-point lists, or offer sheets for commercial transactions. The agreements announced so far have almost all included provision for U.S. economic benefits.
Mr. Trump still has every reason to claim them as significant accomplishments: an end to fighting, even just an ultimately fragile de-escalation, is no mean diplomatic feat.
But whether such truces can last, or lead to full-scale peace, is being tested by the two most intractable conflicts he has taken on.
In Gaza, the ceasefire deal’s requirement that Hamas will disarm and play no part in governance seems far from being met. An agreed upon international security force has yet to be assembled, much less deployed.
The challenge in Ukraine seems even more daunting: to persuade Mr. Putin, who launched an unprovoked invasion nearly four years ago, to settle for anything less than a treaty punishing the Ukrainians and validating Russian territorial claims.
Since the sprint has now become a marathon, Mr. Trump could be tempted to make a renewed attempt to lean hard on Kyiv to accept Moscow’s terms. He could ratchet up pressure on Russia, though there was no sign of this in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s Kremlin meeting.
Or he might simply walk away, as he has suggested in the past he might do, and let Russia and Ukraine fight it out.
But whichever path he chooses, and however the Gaza situation evolves, both diplomatic efforts highlight another core difference between Messrs. Trump and Kissinger.
The Kissinger marathons were rooted in a belief that the litmus test of any diplomatic accord was whether it took hold as intended, and endured.
In 1973, he received a reward that Mr. Trump has openly coveted: the Nobel Peace Prize.
That was in recognition of the Vietnam War ceasefire he negotiated with the North’s Le Duc Tho.
Amid growing U.S. opposition to that war, and anger over Mr. Kissinger’s role in supporting and widening it, the honor was highly controversial.
Less well known, however, is that when the war ended in U.S. defeat two years later, he wrote to the Nobel committee asking to return his prize.
He wasn’t doing so in repudiation of the war. It was because a much-vaunted diplomatic agreement had unraveled.
“The peace we sought through negotiation,” he wrote, “has been overturned by force.”
