- 08:30
Warning: the following lines may upset the delicate.
Like it or not, Donald Trump keeps rewriting the script. While much of the mainstream media dedicates entire columns to tearing him down, the American president is busy bending global diplomacy to his own rhythm. A single post on X is enough to send foreign ministries into overdrive, forcing diplomats to improvise responses they hadn’t even imagined hours earlier.
Where others sit back, content to manage crises from a safe distance with hollow statements and endless declarations, Trump throws himself directly into the fray. He is convinced that even the fiercest fires of global conflict can be contained, and he acts accordingly. Gaza, Kyiv, Damascus, Beirut: he’s everywhere, multiplying efforts, opening channels, brokering talks.
In Gaza, he’s pressing for lasting ceasefires and the release of hostages.
In Ukraine, he’s trying to pull off the unthinkable: getting Zelensky and Putin into the same room, with the ambition of staging a summit that could point to an endgame for the war. If he manages to stop the bloodshed tearing Europe apart, his critics will have no choice but to concede that their moral high ground was built on nothing more than paralysis.
In southern Syria, after the massacres in Sweida, Trump has been pushing for agreements between the Druze leaders, Damascus and Israel in hopes of stabilizing one of the region’s most volatile fault lines.
To drive it home, he’s sent his trusted ally Tom Barrack as special envoy to draft and supervise a deal aimed at halting the Syrian bloodbath, a tragedy still fueled by the wreckage of the Assad family’s brutal regime.
Meanwhile, US envoy for Lebanon Morgan Ortagus has been visiting Beirut on a regular basis, closely monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, and pressing for full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Central to that resolution is the disarmament of Hezbollah, a point on which Ortagus has shown no compromise. For her, the equation is straightforward: a militia loyal to Iran has no place alongside the institutions of a sovereign Lebanese state. Her clarity, spoken without diplomatic hedging, has given new momentum to the Lebanese government’s decisions of August 5 and 7 –decisions that might otherwise have stalled in a haze of hesitation.
Trump, however, does not rely on diplomacy alone. On occasion, he has reached for hard power to force a halt to hostilities. In June, during the Israel–Iran conflict, he ordered US warplanes to strike Iranian nuclear installations. Analysts, almost uniformly, predicted regional conflagration. It never came. Instead, a ceasefire quickly followed, Tehran having received the message in unmistakable terms. The episode demonstrated that firmness, when applied decisively, can itself become a pathway to de-escalation, or at least to a pause in bloodshed.
What sets Trump apart is the latitude with which he acts. Unencumbered by the slow rituals of traditional diplomacy, he moves quickly, disrupts entrenched patterns, and forces dialogue where others have long resigned themselves to stalemate. His style jars in a world that still clings to carefully worded communiqués and protocol-bound negotiations, but precisely because it jars, it creates openings that more conventional approaches have failed to deliver.
Increasingly, Trump is carving out a role that transcends the office he holds. He is not simply the president of the United States, he is presenting himself as an active broker of peace, convinced that global stability is worth the risk of bold moves, personal involvement and unorthodox methods.
His approach unsettles many, yet it is steadily gaining adherents. In an international order saturated with caution and paralyzed by impotence, one reality stands out: Trump is shaping events not by talking about them, but by acting on them.
Georges Clemenceau put it this way, “One must know what one wants. When that is clear, one must have the courage to say it. And once said, the courage to carry it out.”
Comments