Challenges to peace in Donald Trump’s second term

AS DONALD Trump’s second presidential term approaches the completion of its first year, renewed expectations have emerged that a recalibration of US foreign policy might finally force an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

- DR CLYDE NS RAMALAINE

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin (left) and US President Donald Trump at a meeting held in Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on August 15 in Anchorage, Alaska. For the US, particularly under a Trump administration sceptical of alliances yet sensitive to perceptions of weakness, the conflict functions as a strategic test case, says the writer.

(AFP)

Trump's return to office has revived familiar assumptions: that a more transactional diplomacy, reduced ideological framing or diminished American enthusiasm for alliance commitments could compel negotiations or impose a settlement. Yet such expectations misread the nature of the conflict as it now exists.

The war has evolved beyond discretionary diplomacy into a structurally entrenched confrontation sustained by domestic legitimacy imperatives, military equilibrium, ideological absolutism and global strategic signalling.

This analysis argues that the war cannot easily end, not because peace is undesirable, but because peace, as currently imaginable, imposes prohibitive political, strategic and ideological costs on all principal actors involved.

The war's continuation is not primarily the result of diplomatic inertia or leadership obstinacy alone, but of a hardened configuration in which the costs of ending the war under presently conceivable terms outweigh the costs of prolonging it.

Political leadership in Moscow and Kyiv operates within narrow margins of survival, military conditions reward endurance rather than compromise, alliances are constrained by credibility logic, and external actors treat the conflict as precedent-setting for the future of global order.

For Russia, any negotiated outcome that falls short of recognised territorial consolidation risks undermining regime legitimacy, fracturing elite cohesion and exposing the limits of its great-power posture.