https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/08/30/18879436.php
The strong weak man
Donald Trump lacks the competence and the power to deliver on his foreign policy promises.
He wanted to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. It didn’t work. He wanted to persuade the Israeli government to de-escalate. It went wrong. Shortly after the start of his second term in office, Donald Trump has to realize that his authority is not nearly as strong as he had assumed.
[This article posted on 7/8/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/der-starke-schwache-mann.]
Donald Trump sees himself as a deal maker. As a businessman, you may or may not be successful, and in Trump’s case, his business deals may have gone one way or the other. That’s how it is in business: sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But the deal principle cannot be applied so easily to politics, especially when you are the president of the United States.
Trump and the war in Ukraine
Those involved in the real estate business do not necessarily need to understand geopolitics. However, anyone who is elected president of the United States—especially if their name is Donald Trump—assumes precisely that: they believe they can control the fate of the world, after all, they are the “leader of the free world.”
This is not about a psychological remote diagnosis of Donald Trump. Such a diagnosis is fundamentally prohibited and would be limited to speculation and deductions that may be incomplete, and in many cases are. Nevertheless, Trump’s behavior suggests that he assumed certain conditions that led to his political announcements. Trump has thus attributed or granted himself so much power that his actions are independent of influences, factors, and powers that occur or operate in the background. At least, that is an obvious assumption.
As is well known, Trump has not yet succeeded in ending the current war in Ukraine, and his grandiose promise to do so in such a short time must be dismissed as campaign rhetoric. It can be assumed that he himself did not believe that this project could be realized within this time frame.
Nevertheless, he tried. He probably also believed that he could succeed in ending a war that had been prepared by the US for years and, after it broke out, was massively supported by the European Union. Donald Trump wanted to end this war, even if his motives are debatable. Whether he was keen on winning the Nobel Peace Prize, wanted to drive a wedge between Russia and China, or even came to the realization that he could not prevent the unstoppable rise of the BRICS countries and thus of a multipolar world, is not so important.
The fact is: it didn’t work, at least not yet. And that’s not only because of Trump’s lack of political and, in particular, geopolitical experience, although that should not be underestimated. You can’t simply reverse a geopolitical decision made by the most powerful players in the world just because you are now the American president.
Trump has therefore thoroughly overestimated his ability to exert influence; he probably assumed that if he expressed his desire for peace in Ukraine often and vehemently enough, it would work out.
However, there are a few other players who also have interests in Ukraine. First and foremost, of course, is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who, admittedly, has far less geopolitical influence than Trump as an individual. Zelensky is a pawn on the global chessboard, being moved back and forth and ultimately having to follow the powers above him that dictate how he should behave. Zelensky does not make independent geopolitical decisions; anyone who claims otherwise must be out of their mind. Zelensky is also not the one who conducts the negotiations or moves the bargaining chips. He is dependent on the global players, and they are based in the US and the EU. However, this does not contradict the statement that Zelensky has his own (domestic) political interests and pursues them by any means necessary. Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country, and the president of this country, who at the time stumbled and was half-hoisted into office, became, in a sense, the father of this corruption. For Zelensky, the question of Ukraine’s future is literally a matter of life and death – so he will do everything he can to assert his interests and keep his enemies in his own country at bay.
Then there is Russia. And that certainly does not mean Vladimir Putin alone, even if the West likes to portray the war in Ukraine as the product of an imperial psychopath. For Russia, the Ukraine issue is an existential one, representing the culmination of NATO’s eastward expansion. The willingness to compromise is therefore very limited, and the fact that Russia has long been in a better position militarily does not make negotiations any easier from the Western perspective. Trump’s planned raw materials deals with Ukraine are also unlikely to have inspired boundless confidence in Russia.
And we must not forget the EU, whose political actors clearly and unquestionably want to continue the war in Ukraine and are also temporarily engaged in a war of words with the US.
The EU’s warfare clearly overwhelms Donald Trump, even if his sometimes quarrelsome rhetoric seems to suggest otherwise. The man with the red cap simply cannot cope with the bag of fleas from Brussels.
Even the EU’s immense military spending, which was primarily brought up in the first place because of its aversion to Trump, cannot hide this fact.
Since the beginning of his term in office, Donald Trump has turned friends into enemies and enemies into friends, putting himself in an unbelievable position. He flatters, he rants, he announces and then rejects – he is as predictable as a moody wildcat and as reliable as a German coalition agreement.
Trump and Israel
When it comes to Israel, Donald Trump acts similarly to Friedrich Merz. He pretends to condemn the Israeli government’s incomprehensible crimes and criticizes it gently, only to tolerate or actively support those very crimes in the next step. He fires senselessly and haphazardly at Iran to destroy nuclear facilities and rants and raves at the Israeli and Iranian leadership without really contributing anything constructive.
On the contrary, Trump’s confused actions tend to create additional unrest and uncertainty in the region. Trump himself bears double the blame. On the one hand, he unilaterally terminated the nuclear agreement with Iran during his first term in office. On the other hand, in 2017 he declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, which, to put it diplomatically, was anything but a political masterpiece.
The choice of words used by the US president at the time is interesting:
“I have decided that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
This was not someone speaking who was aware of the situation, but someone who wanted to show everyone else up. Trump justified his move at the time by saying that his predecessors in the White House had made a lot of announcements but had not taken any action. In his eyes, the dealmaker did what others could not or would not do: make deals.
To make the bizarre slide into the absurd, Trump also said at the time that his decision was a good deed for peace between Israel and Palestine. Even a sympathetic listener cannot see the connection between his decision and a détente between Israel and Palestine.
And Trump said something else at the time:
“I will do everything in my power to work toward a peace solution that is acceptable to both sides.”
How Trump’s policies were supposed to bring about a peace solution was a mystery then, it is a mystery now, and it will remain a mystery given the current approach to the Gaza Strip and the entire region.
And once again, we see that Donald Trump’s power and influence are not nearly as pronounced as the US president himself assumes. The Israeli government’s lobby has long reached deep into the power structures of the US and the White House. Its influence is probably comparable to that of the US intelligence services on the German political and media landscape. Nothing happens in these political fields without the influence of the relevant lobbies.
Donald Trump is therefore not pursuing an independent policy in the Middle East; he is dependent on the powerful actors in the background, who can be called the “deep state” or something else – whatever name they are given, their dominance over US politics remains unchanged. So when Trump said in 2017, “I will do everything in my power to work toward a peace solution that is acceptable to both sides,” on closer inspection, that wasn’t even a lie. It merely proved that what is within Trump’s power is fairly limited. One could also say that it is not Trump who decides whether and how much power he has, but entirely different people.
As long as Trump runs after the Israeli government like a drooling dog, there will be no peace in which Israel even participates. This is also tragic because Trump does not even recognize his insignificant role in this “game.”
Trump: Guaranteed to be aimless
It was like this in his first term, and it is still like this today: Donald Trump is clueless, he acts spontaneously and without any sense of geopolitics, while the world focuses its attention solely on him – without taking into account that US presidents have never made decisions alone. Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump does not seem to be aware of his role – or at least not yet. In his perception, he is the most powerful man in the world, who makes his decisions as he sees fit. The puppet masters behind the scenes are fine with that. They always have been, because the real power brokers in US politics never sat in front of cameras and gave press conferences; they stood in the shadows, far away from the media spotlight, and from there, unnoticed and unobserved, they steered the fate of the United States.
Finally, one could ask to what extent Donald Trump’s intellectual deficits play a role in this whole disaster. The man does not seem to be very well-read, nor does he appear to have a minimum level of general or political education. However, this question falls into the realm of speculation, as mentioned at the beginning of this text, and remote diagnoses are, as is well known and as described, always controversial and flawed. Moreover, they are not conducive to the geopolitical situation.
And so we are left with a sobering realization: the “most powerful man in the world” is far from actually holding this role, and he is accordingly even further from being able to exert a truly constructive influence on geopolitics. This is not good news for the world situation as a whole.
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- Tom J. Wellbrock is an author, speaker, and blogger. He was co-editor of neulandrebellen and has recorded numerous articles for NachDenkSeiten. As editor of his podcast “wohlstandsneurotiker” (prosperity neurotics), Wellbrock has already spoken with many interesting personalities.