WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has vowed to be a peacemaker in his new term, but his aggressive early actions threaten to alienate US friends in a way that could hinder his ambitions, experts say.
\nIn an inaugural address on Monday, Trump said that his \u201cproudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier\u201d and pointed to his support for a new ceasefire in Gaza.
\nSpeaking to reporters as he returned to the White House after four years, Trump also suggested he would press Russia to make a deal to end its three-year invasion of Ukraine, quipping that President Vladimir Putin \u2014 with whom he had famously warm relations in the past \u2014 knows he is \u201cdestroying\u201d his own country.
\nBut in the throwback to the bedlam of his 2017-2021 term, Trump\u2019s return was also consumed by rage over grievances at home, and the most memorable foreign-policy line of his inaugural address was a vow to take back the Panama Canal, which the United States returned in 1999 but where Trump charges that China has gained too strong a foothold.
\nTrump has also spoken of seizing Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, moved to send the military to the Mexican border to stop migration, vowed tariffs even against close allies and announced the withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization and Paris climate accord, both home to almost every other country.
\n\u201cTrump\u2019s worldview seems to be contradictory. He has a streak that is pro-peace and another streak which seems more confrontational and militarist,\u201d said Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, which advocates restraint.
\nDuring his first stint in power, Trump ordered a strike that killed senior Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and vowed confrontation with China, although he also boasted of keeping US troops out of new wars and sought diplomacy with North Korea.
\n\u201cIn the first term, the more confrontational and militarist streak won out more often than not\u201d on tension spots such as Iran, Friedman said.
\nThis time, he said, at least on Ukraine and the Middle East, Trump appears to have shifted to a more progressive stance.
\nBut on Latin America, and in his selection of aides with hawkish views on China, Trump remains hawkish, Friedman said.
\nHe said that Trump essentially had a 19th-century philosophy in line with populist president Andrew Jackson, feeling a comfort with threatening the use of force to achieve national interests.
\nSuch a way of thinking, for Trump, \u201cisn\u2019t consistent necessarily with being a peacemaker or a warmonger\u201d but rather is a mix.<\/p>\n
Trump made no clear mention of US allies on his inaugural day. In the past he has described NATO allies as freeloaders and pushed them to pay more for their own security.
\nHowever, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was meeting Tuesday with counterparts from Japan, India and Australia \u2014 the so-called Quad of democracies which China sees as an effort to contain its rise.
\nJon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Trump should be mindful of lessons from China, whose assertive \u201cWolf Warrior\u201d diplomacy brought together a number of Asian countries on the receiving end.
\n\u201cIt would be a profound shift if the United States went from being seen as the principal provider of security to being the principal source on uncertainty,\u201d Alterman said.
\nTrump, as he seeks to negotiate deals, \u201chas an interest in keeping friendly countries on his side,\u201d Alterman said.
\nKori Schake, who served in senior defense planning roles under former president George W. Bush, said it was too early to tell the impact of Trump\u2019s \u201cchaos\u201d on peacemaking and said that early actions could have been even more severe.
\n\u201cBut the actions he did take are still damaging. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization will give us less warning of emergent disease,\u201d she said.
\n\u201cAntagonizing Panama is counterproductive and will fan anti-Americanism throughout the hemisphere,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has vowed to be a peacemaker in his new term, but his aggressive early actions threaten to alienate US friends in a way that could hinder his ambitions, experts say. In an inaugural address on Monday, Trump said that his \u201cproudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":75939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75940,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75923\/revisions\/75940"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}