President Donald Trump hasn’t found his recent phone calls with war-entangled leaders encouraging.
“Very disappointed,” Trump said of his last conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose war in Ukraine is only escalating, despite Trump’s efforts to end it.
“It was sort of disappointing,” Trump said Friday of a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose war in Gaza continues amid a dire humanitarian crisis.
With those two conflicts so far unresolved — impeding his chances for a Nobel Peace Prize — Trump is discovering the limitations of his complicated personal ties with Putin and Netanyahu, whose respective wars Trump once insisted he could quickly resolve. And he’s clearly grown frustrated he can’t seem to solve the crises any better than former President Joe Biden, who he regards as a failure on foreign policy in particular.
In Trump’s telling, Putin tells him one thing, then does another. The Kremlin leader, whose relationship with Trump has been the subject of fascination for a decade, has gone “absolutely crazy” in his relentless waves of missile and drone attacks in Ukraine, Trump insists.
