When Donald Trump signed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Versailles on June 17 after the G7 summit, it dominated the headlines around the world. This is no more than you’d expect. The 60-day ceasefire, which – despite a few wobbles – appears to be largely holding in both Iran and southern Lebanon, was a major breakthrough, even if US concessions to secure the deal raised more than a few eyebrows.
But the noise from Versailles effectively obscured some very significant developments at the G7. First, and most importantly, the G7 leaders’ adept handling of the US president, Donald Trump, seems to have edged him back into line with Europe over the war in Ukraine.
As we’ve come to know over Trump’s presidencies, this could easily change. But for now, the European G7 countries’ pledge to provide more military aid to support Ukraine over the winter will have come as a considerable fillip for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. And the American president’s promise to provide “backstop” for these efforts made this all the sweeter.
These, and the success of recent strikes on targets deep inside Russia, have greatly improved the mood in Kyiv.
But the apparent unity of the G7 on Ukraine concealed some important differences of approach developing as European members work out if – and how – they might “go it alone” when it comes to their security arrangements. This has been an issue greatly exercising European leaders’ minds as the US downgrades its commitment.
Stefan Wolff, of the University of Birmingham, and Richard Whitman, of the Royal United Services Institute and the University of Kent highlight a row among EU leaders about how to present a united front to Russia as symptomatic of this disunity. And Germany’s recent decision to pull out of a showcase Franco-German collaboration to build state-of-the-art warplanes shows how two of Europe’s “big beasts”, so often at loggerheads in the past, are competing for leadership on key defence issues.
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One of the big things complicating all this is that the diplomatic world has changed significantly during the Trump years. The US president’s singular and mercurial approach to international relations – and his preference for using personal friends or business associates instead of professional diplomats has made if tricky for allies and adversaries alike to navigate complex situations.
We’re lucky to have the insights of Nicholas Westcott, a former British ambassador to Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Togo and Niger. Westcott, professor of practice in diplomacy at SOAS, University of London, parses the US president’s unique diplomatic style, pointing out five distinct features of the US president’s approach and the way other countries’ leaders are having to adapt to cope.
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One of the issues complicating America’s diplomatic efforts is that Trump’s main envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are often pursuing parallel business opportunities, sometimes in countries where the US is playing an important role in the mediation of conflicts.
And sometimes these business interests themselves have sparked conflict. This can be seen currently in Albania, where thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest about a coastal resort being developed by companies associated with Kushner on southern Albania’s unspoiled Zvërnec coastline and surrounding wetlands.
Apart from environmental objections, there are also land ownership issues. The protests have snowballed into a broad anti‑government movement, writes Altin Gjeta, a political scientist at the University of Birmingham. Gjeta says the public anger has been exacerbated by the public perception of decades of official corruption – although there’s no suggestion this relates in any way to the Kushner-backed project.
But the unrest is causing problems for Albania’s ruling Socialist party and prime minister Edi Rama, several of whose former cabinet ministers are publicly criticising him over the issue.
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Flawed agreement
When it comes to the MoU itself, the agreement prompted a great deal of criticism from both the US and its close ally Israel. Israelis were furious, claiming that the US president had sold them out for reasons of his own, putting their long-term security in jeopardy. Many in Trump’s Republican party thought the deal was a capitulation on the president’s part.
Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/American Photo
The deal highlighted what many of us already suggested: that Iran’s ability to spark economic turmoil by closing the Strait of Hormuz gives it considerably leverage over the US. Ben Soodavar, an expert in foreign relations in the department of war studies at King’s College London, identifies a vicious cycle that presents the US with a serious quandary.
Israel has a right to defend itself against Hezbollah attacks. But when it takes action against Lebanon, Iran reacts by threatening to close the Strait. The US puts pressure on Israel to stand down and Israel resists. The ceasefire deal was largely prompted by Trump’s realisation that the US in unable to put sufficient military pressure on Tehran to break this cycle.
Soodavar fears that once all the players realise that restraint is also unlikely to solve anything, then “escalation ceases to be a choice. It may come to be the only available logic”.
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Bamo Nouri and Inderjeet Parmar, international security experts at City St George, University of London, foresee a strengthened Iran continuing to flex its muscles in the region.
Tehran, they write, will be encouraged by the clear geopolitical shifts the war has already prompted – not least the cessation of any hopes that the US might have harboured to expand the Abraham Accords and the normalisation of Arab states’ relations with Israel. So the Islamic Republic is likely to continue to compete for influence via its proxies in the region and via “grey-zone” tactics such as cyber-warfare.
Meanwhile the underlying drivers of the conflict remain intact, they write: “US-Iran-Israeli relations are therefore likely to continue oscillating between confrontation and accommodation.”
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