Trump may not be a 'madman,' but his foreign policy shows signs of it

The limits of U.S. President Donald Trump's brand of extremely personalized, belligerent diplomacy have never been more apparent than with the negligible outcomes this week involving two of the world's deadliest ongoing conflicts.

In Gaza, Israel's military shattered the tenuous ceasefire on Tuesday by inflicting the largest number of deaths in a single day on Palestinians since the war started in October 2023.

And after Trump's phone call with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, any hope that the Russian president was prepared to roll back or significantly restrain his ongoing three-year assault on the country also proved largely illusory.

Both results were easily predictable, say veteran diplomats, given Trump's almost single-minded focus on scoring quick wins at the expense of the harder work of dogged diplomacy resulting in lasting gains.

"He's imposing timelines that are unrealistic and he's also imposing terms that are not going to be adhered to," said Louise Blais, a longtime Canadian diplomat and former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.

"He's sort of an 'instant gratification president' — he doesn't have the patience to do the work that diplomacy requires," she told CBC News.

In their public statements, Trump's foreign policy team has insisted it was a week of "wins" for the administration — that the Putin-Trump call will lead to more peace talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia over the weekend, and that Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also agreed to a truce on strikes on energy targets.

But Blais says Trump's actions follow a familiar pattern of over-promising and under-delivering.

"You don't bring parties like Ukraine and the Russian Federation or Hamas and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to common ground overnight. It just doesn't happen," Blais said.

And yet that appeared to be exactly what Trump was trying to do with his aggressive bullying and public dressing-down of Zelenskyy in that now-infamous Oval Office meeting in February. 

Trump berated Ukraine's leader and pushed him to make concessions before beginning negotiations with Putin.

When challenged earlier this week that his efforts are not yielding results, Trump officials resorted to hyperbole.

"Trump is a natural-born leader," said his special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who has also taken a lead on the war in Ukraine.

"I can't over state how compelling he was on the call [with Putin]," Witkoff gushed on FOX News. "There is no other human being like him."