\u201cI don\u2019t want to have a wasted meeting. I don\u2019t want to have a waste of time,\u201d Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart on Monday failed to yield breakthroughs.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s disappointment was the latest shift in a confusing week in which he seemed poised to send\u00a0cruise missiles\u00a0to Ukraine, was talked down by Putin and then had a new Oval Office clash with\u00a0Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.<\/p>\n
So far, Trump\u2019s Ukrainian efforts are only achieving one thing \u2014 disproving his own questionable assertions that Putin wants peace.<\/p>\n
The vice president\u2019s hurried attempt to shore up progress in the Middle East, meanwhile, is meant to stop the administration\u2019s other big peace initiative suffering a similar fate. After the fanfare of Trump\u2019s victory lap in the region, the liabilities of his approach are becoming clear.<\/p>\n
The big question was always how to bridge an initial pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas and the ambitious peace plan that envisages Hamas giving up weapons and disengaging politically.<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s visit followed \u2014 seeking to create an illusion of forward momentum to allow negotiators time to try to fill vacuums.<\/p>\n
The ceasefire teetered after Israel accused Hamas of killing two Israeli soldiers at the weekend and launched a wave of airstrikes that killed dozens of people in Gaza.<\/p>\n
But Vance, seeking to stop the situation deteriorating further, sought to reassert the big picture in a symbolic warning to Israel and Hamas to stick to the terms of the agreement. His visit also demonstrated US commitment to key Arab states needed to implement Trump\u2019s plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen the past week gives me great optimism the ceasefire is going to hold,\u201d Vance said in an upbeat assessment that didn\u2019t necessarily jibe with reality. \u201cI feel very optimistic. Can I say with 100% certainty that it\u2019s going to work? No.\u201d<\/p>\n
How the latest Russia plan fizzled<\/h3>\n
If Trump needed confirmation that Putin is not ready to make peace in Ukraine, he got one in a swarm of drones that attacked Ukrainian power plants in a return to a brutal strategy of\u00a0using winter as a weapon against shivering civilians.<\/p>\n
The US president had hoped for signs of true policy shifts from Russia to justify a relaunching of his personal diplomacy with Putin. But the Kremlin strongman just played his classic card, calling Trump a day before he hosted Zelensky in the White House in a show of flexibility designed to mitigate new US pressure and the president\u2019s anger and frustration.<\/p>\n Trump had been speculating about sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine that would allow Kyiv\u2019s forces to reach deep into Russia. But he snatched the idea off the table after speaking to Putin and rounded on Zelensky instead. But then, the call between Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday showed that any fresh summit would mirror Alaska\u2019s impasse.<\/p>\n Russia has not fundamentally changed a position that Ukraine could never accept. It wants Kyiv to cede territory in two eastern regions,\u00a0Luhansk and Donetsk, that it has been unable to fully capture in three years of fighting. Ukraine says such a step would leave it dangerously vulnerable to a future attack by Russia launched from the key lands.<\/p>\n The melodrama repeated a well-worn cycle. Putin reacted when Trump looked like he might impose a price for Russian intransigence. Then the US president, after speaking to Putin, imposed pressure on Ukraine to give up territory. Then the process hit a wall again, leaving Trump frustrated.<\/p>\n Trump is now back to his previous position that the enemies should stop fighting at current frontlines. \u201cThe rest is very tough to negotiate if you\u2019re going to say, \u2018You take this, we take that,\u2019\u201d he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday.<\/p>\n Zelensky had earlier predicted that nothing will happen without Trump trying to coerce Putin to the table. \u201cAs soon as the issue of long-range capabilities became a little further away for us \u2014 for Ukraine \u2014 Russia almost automatically became less interested in diplomacy,\u201d he said in his daily address on Tuesday.<\/p>\n The impasse suits Putin, who shows no sign of wanting to stop fighting and could use more time to pursue his war of attrition with the goal of winning as much Ukrainian territory as possible before any peace talks.<\/p>\n After a week of acrimony and shifting positions, nothing much has changed.<\/p>\n Time is also a problem in the Israel-Hamas standoff. The current interregnum between the ceasefire deal and the implementation of later steps of Trump\u2019s deal are allowing tensions to boil and threats to its durability to grow.<\/p>\n Hamas has used the end of fighting with Israel to reassert its control over Palestinians in Gaza with revenge killings against alleged collaborators, raising doubts that it will ever lay down its arms as Trump demands. An international peace force is envisaged to keep permanent peace in the Gaza Strip, but until it can be formed, the ceasefire will remain fragile.<\/p>\n Vance\u2019s trip was a sign to Netanyahu of just how important maintaining the ceasefire is to Trump and to states including Qatar and Turkey that they must keep up their pressure on Hamas to follow his 20-point plan. US negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff will seek to use the cover provided by Vance to try to create some progress to keep momentum alive.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s about 10 Tier-1 priorities, and we\u2019re working all of them in parallel,\u201d Kushner said in an interview with CBS\u2019 \u201c60 Minutes\u201d Sunday.<\/p>\n But more incidents in which Israeli soldiers die would almost certainly prod it to reopen hostilities with Hamas. This is why the complex transitional elements of the peace plan must be implemented quickly.<\/p>\n \u201cThe critical issue right now is to begin to put in place the alternative administration. That starts with the Board of Peace, reinforced by having this technocratic Palestinian administration, and it is further strengthened by having the International Stabilization Force,\u201d former US peace negotiator Dennis Ross told CNN\u2019s Bianna Golodryga on Monday. \u201cAll that has to be implemented sooner rather than later. That creates some momentum on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n So far, however, the stabilization force hasn\u2019t got much past the theoretical stage, prompting Trump to try to push regional powers into hurrying along.<\/p>\n \u201cNumerous of our NOW GREAT ALLIES in the Middle East, and areas surrounding the Middle East, have explicitly and strongly, with great enthusiasm, informed me that they would welcome the opportunity, at my request, to go into GAZA with a heavy force and \u2018straighten our Hamas\u2019 if Hamas continues to act badly, in violation of their agreement with us,\u201d Trump wrote on Truth Social.<\/p>\n No regional states are publicly lining up to send their young soldiers into Gaza to insert them between Israeli and Hamas forces. So the president\u2019s post was closer to hope than reality \u2014 a description that regrettably also applies to his interrupted plan to end the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n But at least he\u2019s trying. And it\u2019s not too late yet.<\/p>\n For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at\u00a0CNN.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wishing for peace is far easier than making peace. President Donald Trump\u2019s grand ambitions in the Middle East<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2105,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,51,53,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-russia","category-ukraine","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2106,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions\/2106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Middle East win was meant to inject a boost into the Russia effort<\/h3>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n