<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/08/donald-trump-difference-making-deal-and-making-peace>
"For the sake of anyone confused by Donald Trump’s apparently supernatural
abilities as a global peacemaker – for which he was given the inaugural (and
perhaps only) Fifa “peace prize” – current events have intervened to offer some
clarification.
Trump has claimed a number of dubious diplomatic successes on the international
peace front, among them a freshly signed deal between Rwanda and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, mediating in Thailand and Cambodia’s deadly border
dispute, and the Gaza “ceasefire”.
In the space of a few hours on Monday, however, those claims were thrown under
a harsh spotlight even as Trump and his officials continued to try to pressure
Ukraine into rewarding Russia for an illegal international aggression by
surrendering its sovereign territory.
On Monday, fighting broke out once again between Thai and Cambodian forces, the
heaviest since a ceasefire in the summer. In the Great Lakes region too, a deal
freshly inked in Washington between Rwanda and the DRC was also struggling,
with the Congolese president, Felix Tshisekedi, telling lawmakers in a speech
that Rwanda was already violating its commitments under a peace deal mediated
by Washington. In Gaza, meanwhile, conditions remain as desperate as ever for
Palestinians among almost daily attacks.
Even if one is tempted to credit Trump’s self-professed efforts as a peacemaker
(as part of which he has renamed the United States Institute of Peace after
himself) foreign policy experts categorise peace in two competing ways first
conceptualised by the late Johan Galtung, the Norwegian sociologist and prime
mover behind the emergence of the discipline of peace and conflict studies.
Galtung and others see two kinds of peace. The first is what is known as
negative peace: in the absence of direct violence, the underlying tensions and
unresolved issues still exist, making the peace fragile and prone to episodic
outbreaks of conflict.
A classic example of a negative peace is the long-running tension between India
and Pakistan, which has resulted in episodic fighting (and is, needless to say,
one of the crises Trump claims to have solved.)
Positive peace, as envisaged by Galtung, is far more taxing on participants and
mediators, and addresses underlying issues, structural violence, and
inequalities affecting the populations in conflict.
The reality, as critics have pointed out since Trump was given his medal and
trophy by the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, is that most of what Trump and
his team are involved in is not even properly categorisable as working towards
even a negative peace.
The business that Trump and his envoys are in is dealmaking, a fundamentally
transactional affair and very different from the hard slog of mediated peace
processes."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
