Is Donald Trump a good dealmaker?

Donald Trump wants to use his second term to revolutionise America and its relationship with the world. He is engaged in an astonishingly wide range of international crises and negotiations, in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It is perhaps the most intense bout of White House diplomacy for a generation. So it offers clues as to whether Mr Trump is as skilled a dealmaker as he says. The answer so far is that he is good at catalysing negotiations, but bad at closing them.

You cannot deny his ambition and energy. On May 6th he cut a deal with the Houthis. On May 10th he claimed credit for a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. A day later his envoy met Iranian officials to discuss a possible nuclear deal. On May 12th America and China declared a trade truce. Mr Trump is now in the Gulf, where he said he would lift sanctions on Syria and has met its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, re-establishing relations after 25 years. Gaza is on the agenda. He has pushed Russia and Ukraine to meet for talks this week in Istanbul.

From the Bosphorus to the Brahmaputra, Mr Trump’s impulse is to shake up what he sees as ossified orthodoxies. He has deployed force, bombing 1,000 Houthi targets. More often he makes threats, hinting he may strike Iran, sell out Ukraine and further weaken NATO. Sometimes he neglects conflicts America used to mediate, allowing them to escalate. He may let Israel smash up Gaza again and left India and Pakistan to duke it out until Pakistan hinted at using nuclear weapons on May 10th. His 145% tariffs on China caused a trade shock, a Wall Street slump and a mini-run on the dollar.

Wild escalation is often followed by reconciliation. Mr Trump pivots to sup with enemies, bring adversaries together and somehow find common interests, often via business deals and a shared desire for investment. On April 30th he struck a minerals agreement with Ukraine. His Gulf tour is being oiled by huge promised transactions on warplanes, artificial intelligence and more. “Let’s not trade nuclear missiles, let’s trade,” he told India and Pakistan.

The president’s pragmatism can deliver results. Helping Syria’s government avoid an economic collapse is the right call, as we have long argued. The Middle East hungers for growth, a fact he harnessed to secure the Abraham accords between Israel and various Arab states in his first term. NATO’s shocked members are raising defence spending. Stockmarket investors are now buying into his escalate-then-mediate logic. Remarkably, the S&P 500 index has more than recouped its losses since his “liberation day” tariff-bomb exploded on April 2nd.

The problem is that after stoking crises, Mr Trump seldom succeeds in solving them. The deals he has notched up are narrow. His truce with China covers tariffs on goods but the trade war encompasses a far larger range of issues. A trade deal with Britain on May 8th was similarly thin. Details of the Houthi truce are murky, but it may cover only American ships, which account for a tiny share of container traffic heading through Houthi-menaced waters to the Suez canal. The Iran talks reportedly address nuclear enrichment but not missile technology or Iran’s support for militias abroad. So they appear no more expansive than the Obama-era deal that Mr Trump scrapped in 2018. Any lasting peace in Ukraine would require muscular deterrence of Russia for years to come; Mr Trump ignores this obvious truth.

His deals may also prove transient, because fundamental disagreements are unresolved. He is often willing to broker talks, rarely to act as a guarantor or enforcer. The Gaza truce reached in January, in part thanks to Mr Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, lasted only 58 days. The Houthis carried on launching missile attacks on Israel. The China truce is for 90 days. The US-Ukraine proposal to Russia is for a 30-day ceasefire.

Mr Trump’s clumsy negotiating is storing up trouble ahead. By bowing too easily to Pakistan’s demands after its nuclear sabre-rattling and ignoring its tolerance of terrorism, America has created an incentive for India to strike harder and faster next time. After backing down on his trade war, Mr Trump mumbled about an opportunity for “unification” with China, a remark the administration hastily retracted but which spooked Taiwan.

Mr Trump’s limits as a dealmaker have long-term consequences. One is to embed a risk premium into economic decision-making, discouraging investment. Stockmarkets have bounced back but the dollar has not, as investors worry about America’s reliability. The shipping market expects a temporary reprieve on China-US trade and more disruption of the Suez canal, not a return to normal.

Those same doubts affect diplomacy. The world leaders who flatter Mr Trump in public are quietly making plans to be let down by him. His tactic of “escalate, then negotiate” will have diminishing returns as other countries conclude America is bluffing. Some of his dealmaking will succeed, but at the expense of fomenting broad and long-lasting instability. America and the world deserve a better deal than that.■