There’s a crater where “Peace through Strength” used to be. And Donald Trump is standing in it, grinning, while Vladimir Putin reloads.
This was supposed to be the doctrine that saved us. The swaggering promise of a man who said he’d end the war in Ukraine on day one. Who said Putin respected him. Who said he alone could bring order to chaos because “Putin speaks to me. He doesn’t speak to anybody else.”
Well, he was half right. Putin is speaking. In missiles. In mass graves. In a June drone and missile strike on Kyiv that killed 15 people, including a 62-year-old American citizen. Rubble buried the living. A school was destroyed. Apartment towers collapsed. It was the deadliest attack on Kyiv all year—and it happened just hours after Trump stood on the global stage at the G7 summit and said Russia should never have been kicked out of the G8.
Let’s be clear: Trump is not spitballing hypotheticals from a golf cart in Bedminster. He is the 47th president of the United States. And while Kyiv burned, he was floating the idea of letting Putin back into the diplomatic clubhouse. Not as leverage. Not for peace. But as a favor.
“Putin should be at the table,” Trump said. “It was a mistake to remove him.”
A mistake? Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, and has spent the years since turning apartment blocks into cemeteries. But to Trump, the real tragedy was hurting Putin’s feelings.
And if you’re wondering what kind of deterrence Trump offers? Here it is: He has discouraged new sanctions, said Europe should go first, and left the G7 early. And now, Putin is back to killing civilians—because he knows Trump won’t stop him. Trump is too busy trying to get invited to dinner.
This isn’t foreign policy. It’s diplomatic necrophilia: digging up the corpse of the G8 so he can kiss Putin’s ring in public while Ukraine bleeds out in private.
But Russia isn’t the only place that’s been set on fire under Trump’s return to power. If Ukraine is where his weakness is exposed, then Gaza and Iran are where his brutality thrives.
On June 16, Israeli tanks opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians waiting for food aid in Khan Younis. They weren’t fighters. They weren’t holding weapons. They were starving people lined up for bread. 51 people were killed. The images were harrowing: mangled bodies near aid trucks, survivors screaming beside the injured, chaos amid gunfire.
Trump’s response? Not horror. Not condemnation. Just a $2.5 billion weapons package to Israel and a grotesque proposal from February that the United States should “take over Gaza,” clear out the population, and turn it into a luxury paradise. His words. Not ours. He literally described Gaza as a “Riviera” project. The UN called it “a roadmap to ethnic cleansing.” Trump called it a smart investment.
Meanwhile, across the border in Iran, Israeli airstrikes—greenlit by Trump—killed hundreds of people, many of them civilians. And when his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said publicly that U.S. intelligence had found no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, Trump brushed her off.
“I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters.
That’s the guy running the country. A president who appoints his own intelligence chief and then openly admits he doesn’t give a damn what she tells him. Because in Trump’s world, there are only two facts: what he believes, and what he needs you to believe. Everything else is noise. Even dead civilians. Even your own DNI.
So let’s drop the branding. There is no “peace through strength.” What we have is escalation through ego, deterrence through delusion, and diplomacy by hostage video.
Trump swore he’d end the wars. Instead, he romanticized a genocidal tyrant, sold weapons to a government bombing aid lines, tried to whitewash ethnic cleansing as a real estate deal, and openly contradicted his own intelligence agency in the middle of an international crisis.
This isn’t leadership. It’s collapse with a gold-plated podium.
And while the headlines will fixate on the strikes, the missiles, the death tolls—don’t forget what you’re actually watching: a man who promised peace and delivered the illusion of power. A man who flirts with Putin while Kyiv grieves. Who greenlights slaughter and calls it strategy. Who turns global war into a reality show about himself.
There is no peace. There is only Trump. And the world burns in his reflection.
If this truth matters to you, help us keep telling it.
This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.