There are visionary statesmen and high-minded negotiators, pragmatic mediators and professional diplomats – and then there are meddling fools. As ceasefires implode, vast numbers of civilians die or flee, and wars Donald Trump started, fuelled or pledged to resolve rage unchecked, there’s no doubt which category he belongs to. In baseball parlance, in Ukraine, Iran-Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, Trump is “0 for 3”. He boasted he alone could cut deals and bring peace. He’s delivered neither. In striking out, he mostly makes matters worse.

The heroic age of 19th-century diplomacy, typified by Prince Metternich’s great power-balancing “concert of Europe” and Benjamin Disraeli’s Balkan “peace with honour”, is history now. But it’s not that long since Nobel-winning peacemakers such as the UN chief Kofi Annan and the Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, or the US senator George Mitchell, who brokered Northern Ireland’s Good Friday agreement, were troubleshooting intractable conflicts the world over. Where are the successors to Desmond Tutu, Andrei Sakharov or Yitzhak Rabin when you need them?

Nowadays, ceasefires fail with grim regularity. Lebanon’s latest effort flopped this week. Others, like that in Iran, are broken daily. Sudan has no ceasefire at all. And why has it become so hard to end “forever wars”? Amid record levels of global strife, a lack of respected, impartial go-betweens and bold political risk-takers is one key reason. The gulf in ability between, say, Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat who helped settle the Bosnian war, and Trump’s amateur envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, is akin to that between Arsenal and a Sunday park football XI.

Factually speaking, Trump’s diplomatic record is lamentable. He promised to resolve the Ukraine war in a day. It’s now in its fifth year. He blatantly sided with Russia, told a browbeaten Ukrainian president,........

© The Guardian