The American leader considers that “the war in Gaza is over”, when in reality the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is already at risk of collapsing. On Friday, he welcomes the President of Ukraine to the White House, but the meeting promises to open a new battlefront rather than bury the hatchet of war. For those who are more attentive, their ultimate objective is just one: “being able to focus on the essentials”
Donald Trump has more to worry about and a frantic week that is only halfway through proves it. Having opened a new front of trade war with China – over Chinese exports to the USA, which have already received one from Beijing – the American president wants, by force, to bury the hatchet of war in the two major conflicts that hang over his administration. And he does so at the expense of the truth, if necessary, having already proclaimed the “end of the war in Gaza”, before announcing a meeting with the president of Ukraine in Washington DC next Friday.
“Trump is a leader who needs media attention and, when he makes a decision, he announces it as a final decision without worrying about the consequences of that decision”, says José Filipe Pinto, specialist in International Relations, to CNN Portugal. “For him, the war in Gaza is over, even if it is not actually over – and, in the same way, he will try to focus on the Ukrainian and Russian issues with a very similar attitude”, anticipates the also professor at Universidade Lusófona.
One day after Trump proclaimed the inauguration of a “new golden era in the Middle East”, yesterday the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was already threatening to fail. In the first phase of the peace agreement proposed by the US administration and discussed at the peace summit in Egypt – which was absent from representatives of Israel, Hamas and Iran – the Palestinian group committed to releasing all hostages, living and dead. But with the living freed, the second part is proving to be more difficult – and this can be used by Israel to put an end to an agreement that is far from uniting all Israelis even before being fully negotiated.
“There were those who said that the second phase has already started, but that is not correct, we are still in the first phase and still are today [ontem] for the International Committee of the Red Cross to locate the bodies of the hostages who died, because we are talking about a two-year conflict – if there are no minimally dignified conditions from a humanitarian point of view in terms of supplying the living, we cannot expect better treatment for the dead”, highlights José Filipe Pinto.
The “first problem” with the ceasefire agreement in Gaza has to do with the handover of the dead hostages, highlights José Filipe Pinto, “especially because for a long time some of the hostages were in the possession of other groups, namely the Palestinian Islamic jihad [na foto]”, with which Hamas is now involved in clashes on the ground (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)
Faced with this difficulty, Israel has already accused Hamas that it is not respecting the ceasefire agreement, using the logistical difficulty as “a pretext to say that there is no compliance on the part of Hamas”. This is what the expert highlights as “the first problem” of the current agreement, at a time when Israel has already carried out an action that killed at least seven Palestinians, and to which a second problem is added, evident in the fact that the enclave is already immersed in hand-to-hand fighting between Hamas and other armed groups.
“This is the other fundamental element that shows us the clear risks of this agreement collapsing”, says José Filipe Pinto. When on Monday, he announced that the US authorized Hamas to “rearm” to be able to police the Gaza Strip until a new international force is deployed to the territory – but, for the analyst, “we don’t understand what Trump said about who will guarantee security in Gaza”.
“Trump gave the idea that it would be Hamas, but what Hamas is already doing is settling scores with rival groups and with members of the group itself accused of collaborating with Israel. Basically, what is called not the night but the – and putting these two elements together, it is clear that the agreement is unlikely to last for long.”
From the day of long knives to a new battlefront
In a logic of peace by force without regard to the consequences, Trump was in Jerusalem and Sharm el-Sheikh without providing details about the future of the peace agreement. Instead, still in Egypt but already aboard his Air Force One, ready to return to the USA, the American leader announced that he will receive Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday, assuming that this meeting could result in the delivery of Tomahawk missiles to Kiev – albeit indirectly.
“I can tell you [aos russos] that if the war is not resolved, it is quite possible that we will, perhaps not, but it is possible that we will,” Trump said when asked by journalists about the matter. “Will they [russos] Do you want Tomahawk missiles flying your way? I don’t think so.”
The meeting at the end of the week will be the fifth between Trump and Zelensky since the businessman-turned-president returned to the White House in January and comes after two phone calls between the leaders in recent days to discuss Ukraine’s air defenses and long-range capabilities in the context of a renewed Russian attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
The calls, Zelensky acknowledged this week, “were not enough” to discuss the most urgent topics, which is why the live meeting is necessary – and it is the Tomahawk, long-range cruise missiles with the capacity to hit targets up to 2,500 kilometers away, that promise to dominate the meeting in DC, now that they appear to be a “topic of extreme concern” for Moscow, as the spokesman for the Kremlin – “This is indeed a very dramatic moment”, acknowledged Dmitry Peskov, “taking into account that tensions are rising on all sides”.
“Just as Trump does not want US troops in Gaza, he also does not want to get directly involved in Ukraine and, therefore, the path he will follow will be indirectly”, assumes José Filipe Pinto about the imminent meeting.
“When it comes to Ukraine, first it tried to achieve peace, then it moved away and we realized that it got closer to Putin, then there was a rapprochement, albeit indirect, with Zelensky, through NATO and the EU, and now Trump returns with a similar perspective to the one he had in the Middle East, which is to assume that the USA will be able to supply material indirectly, in this case the Tomahawks – because nothing prevents him from supplying them to members of the NATO, so that they can then supply them to Ukraine.”
Trump’s meeting with Zelensky on Friday could lead to the unblocking of the Tomahawk missiles “indirectly, through a coalition of willing countries”, but it will hardly allow the North American President to demand another peace agreement, even if he is managing to isolate Putin in the other hot spot of geopolitics (AP photos)
The axis in view
The difficulties anticipated in this search for a resolution to a war that has been raging for more than three years in Ukraine are immense, especially considering that the three largest EU countries – France, Germany and Spain – are grappling with their own internal problems, and at a time when the European bloc continues to debate whether or not to use frozen Russian assets to finance Kiev, in what would be read as an entry into war with Moscow.
“In both the case of Gaza and Ukraine, Trump does not want American troops on the ground, but he does not mind making military elements available on the ground, such as information and technologies”, considers José Filipe Pinto. “In Gaza, it wants to appear as a promoter of peace, but not with troops on the ground as the Arab countries intended. And in Ukraine it is the same thing, in this case through the so-called coalition of the willing, which includes the United Kingdom.”
Still on Monday, in his speech to the Israeli Parliament, Trump assumed that, to resolve a conflict, it is necessary to resolve other things, saying that “it would be great if we could have a peace agreement with Iran”, but that to achieve this, “first of all we have to resolve Russia”. Reacting to the statements, Peskov said that Moscow “certainly welcomes such intentions and the confirmation of the political will to do everything possible to promote the search for peaceful solutions.”
All of this cannot be dissociated from the major strategic objectives of the team of negotiators led by Trump, namely to isolate the USA’s biggest rivals and reduce their geopolitical influence in different regions, including the Middle East. In this context, it is worth noting that Russia was not invited to participate in the peace summit in Egypt that was attended by the leaders of at least 27 countries, after the Kremlin was forced to cancel a summit with the Arab League for later this week because .
“Russia has not been diplomatically marginalized in the Middle East in this way since it intervened in Syria in 2015”, highlighted yesterday Hanna Notte, director for Eurasia at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. And pulling Russia into the pits is also isolating China, the biggest of the USA’s rivals, says José Filipe Pinto.
“What Trump will do is create a problem endorsed by Europeans, supporting Ukraine indirectly so as not to open a new front in the US battle with Russia – and all so that he can focus on the essentials, which is, the country that, at this moment, already dominates the global economic axis.”
