By Lisa Van Dusen

January 2, 2025

At the risk of ushering in the new year to a soundtrack of collapsing illusions, Donald Trump may not the  stable genius he claims to be. He is definitely not a peace negotiator.

As McGill University Russia expert and Policy Columnist Maria Popova pointed out in her piece this week, Trump’s role in what she Popova has previously dubbed the “Groundhog Day diplomacy” of the Russia-Ukraine negotiations is tainted by a flagrant conflict of interest.

“The intractability stems, in part, from Russia’s intransigence,” writes Popova, “and, in part, from the Trump administration’s failure to act as an honest broker or mediator, let alone an ally to a European democracy defending itself from unprovoked aggression.”

Those two elements of the dynamic are enmeshed in that Trump’s well-documented bias toward Vladimir Putin emboldens Putin’s intransigence. The degree to which that alchemy has made an agreement unattainable remains, at this writing, a mystery.

This week, Volodymyr Zelenksy met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. No breakthrough was announced because none was expected, and in his New Year’s message, Zelenksy said that 90% of a deal was agreed, with the last 10% representing the most difficult issues, including land concessions and the fate of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.

Ukraine is a democracy, which means Zelensky will have to answer to voters for any land concessions. If Russia were a democracy, Alexei Navalny would likely be alive and well and sitting in the Kremlin and Ukraine would be blissfully un-invaded. This dichotomy also informs the dynamic in these negotiations.

When democracies control peacemaking, citizens benefit. When autocracies control peacemaking, autocrats do.

Canada has a long history of being an honest broker, from Lester Pearson on Suez to de Chastelain on Good Friday.

In the days before the power consolidations of the past 25 years that have seen the rise of autocracies and the imperilling — most notably and recently by Trump — of the liberal world order in which diplomacy, peace and negotiations are valued, peacemaking was a diplomatic role assumed by experts who succeeded precisely because their status as honest brokers prevented the process from being skewed.

Richard Holbrooke (Bosnia), Sergio di Mello (East Timor, Kosovo), and the Northern Ireland dream team of George Mitchell, Harri Holkeri, and Canadian general John de Chastelain on paramilitary decommissioning were successful because they were legitimate, and they were legitimate because their objectivity and expertise made them so.

As presidential negotiators go, Jimmy Carter sealed the Camp David Accords, but Trump is not Jimmy Carter.

In recent years, credible peace negotiations have been replaced by more brutal solutions both kinetic and genocidal, and the mercenary conflict resolution stylings of the Abraham Accords, the Gaza peace deal and other ludicrously asymmetrical arrangements that invariably fail to secure their stated goals.

Next week, Prime Minister Mark Carney, who, based on anecdotal evidence may indeed be a stable genius, will meet in Paris on Monday and Tuesday with the Coalition of the Willing, the 35-country group struck by France and the UK to enable Ukraine to offset the honest-broker deficit caused by Trump’s pro-Russia bias.

Canada has a long history of being an honest broker, from Lester Pearson on Suez to de Chastelain on Good Friday. This may be that sort of hinge moment.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.