The headlines were all over the news sites. Trump to push for concessions to the Russians. President Donald Trump got nothing from the Alaska Summit. Trump handing over a win to Putin. European leaders are coming to woo Trump. One headline after another dissing the president and his attempt to bring world powers together for peace in Ukraine. News analysts managed to find a negative angle to every single aspect of the attempted negotiations.
The reality is obviously different, and the headlines would have been different with just about any other president. Imagine if Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Barack Obama had pulled off meetings with all the combatants directly and in record time. The headlines would have been fawning in admiration, calling for a second Nobel Prize. But that's not what happened. In fact, President Obama sat idly by while Russia rolled into Crimea in March 2014 - the real beginning of the problem. The Russian reset never happened. The red lines were crossed with impunity as the American deterrence withered.
As President Trump himself has said, these efforts may fail if Putin is unwilling to end the war, but the effort being undertaken at the highest levels is unprecedented. President Joe Biden could barely attend the G7 meetings and was caught wandering off into space during photo opportunities.
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The previous president was not capable of the kind of top-to-top diplomacy needed to resolve complex world situations, and the U.S. was at serious risk because of that lapse and the reliance on aides instead. The real danger of the cover-up of the last president's health was not in relation to domestic policy but the way it left the U.S. incapacitated when it came to foreign affairs.
Compare that to the country today. We see Trump taking meetings and initiating discussions that usually take months and years to set up. He's pulled it off in days.
European leaders dropped whatever they were doing to show up at the White House on Monday to have the kind of allied meeting we have not seen, ever. And this is with all the talk that Trump had damaged the European alliance.
Yet the president has pulled off both a trade deal and pan-European negotiations in just a few months. When he got to a certain point, he simply called Putin on the phone in a scene that might have been out of "Dr. Strangelove." Direct conversation, world leader to world leader.
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Trump may or may not be successful here but he has all parties talking about how they could end a war that has been at a standstill for years - one that has cost over a million lives and counting. Rather than just throw money at the problem as was done by the last administration, Trump has put his presidency and America behind finding a solution outside the battlefield.
This is in the finest tradition of what America can and should do as the leader of the free world. America First should never mean allowing the world to spin out of control and become engulfed in endless conflicts.
I always say that diplomacy is about getting people to do things they do not want to do without shooting them. And in that vein, Trump is clearly practicing the fine art of diplomacy, and the press and the country should be rooting for his success, not trying to pick apart everything he does.
This is what is keeping our country more divided than it can or should be - when one side does something that is clearly good, like trying to solve the world's biggest war, the headlines should reflect that effort, regardless of the party.
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