Call it the Trump Peace Doctrine: a simple prescription — tell your enemies and terrorists and their proxies to surrender or face the democracies.
In practice, the prescription looks like blunt coercion backed by selective partnerships: pressure Iran with sanctions; starve Pakistan of aid until it curbs militants and surrenders to India in Operation Sindoor; reward Arab states for normalising with Israel. The appeal is obvious. It is theatrical, immediate and sells well on a headline: peace through punishment, with friends ready to step in as the hammer. But does it last? History and theory both answer: sometimes, briefly — often, no.
There are successes to point at. The Abraham Accords — brokered during Trump’s first term — produced tangible diplomatic normalisations between Israel and several Arab states, a payoff built on incentives and diplomatic choreography rather than pure coercion. The accords changed some regional calculations and opened economic and security channels that were previously taboo.
But the doctrine’s signature tool — maximum pressure — is less convincing. The U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and the reimposition of sanctions aimed to compel Tehran to capitulate; instead, Iran progressively rolled back JCPOA commitments and accelerated parts of its nuclear programme, at least until different diplomatic configurations later emerged. Coercion delivered leverage but not sustainable compliance.
On Pakistan, the Trump-era tactic of suspending security assistance was headline-grabbing and signalled American impatience with Islamabad’s handling of militants. It changed tone — and perhaps behaviour in the margins — but it did not settle the deep strategic drivers of India–Pakistan rivalry: territorial disputes, national identity and the Kashmir question. Aid suspensions are a stick; they are rarely a substitute for political settlement. That he got Munir to surrender, like with Hamas, and call the other side (India) in exchange for a photo opp, as Trump did with the Syrian former terrorist now President is working in the near term.
India, instead of denying Trump’s involvement because they do not want to be seen having 3rd party involvement, should have simply stated the obvious – Trump called the Pakistanis and told them to surrender and to call the Indians. India thanks President Trump for getting Pakistan to feel the heat since they could not see the light.
That mixed record is predictable to students of coercive diplomacy. Coercion can work when the target is constrained, isolated and faces an affordable choice; it fails when the enemy has domestic rallying incentives, asymmetric resilience, or alternative patrons. In short: threats can produce concessions, but they rarely settle underlying grievances. Scholarly work shows the conditions for coercive success are narrow and often fleeting.
Comparisons are instructive. The Bush Doctrine’s pre-emption and regime-change experiments promised security but left long tails of instability; Nixon’s “Vietnamization” ceded fighting to local proxies and left wounds that decades of policy could not fully heal. Trump’s approach mixes punitive pressure with transactional diplomacy (and spectacular media theatre). Its advantage is speed; its liability is fragility.
So will the Trump Peace Doctrine stick? It can produce episodic order: hostages freed, deals signed, aid withheld. But durable peace requires institutions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, incentives for moderation and the removal of existential drivers of violence. Threats get headlines; institutions get history. If “peace” is defined as the absence of immediate violence because rivals recalculated the cost, that is achievable. If peace means a durable settlement of rival claims and grievances — ask any student of Kashmir who faces terrorists on the India side and Pakistani military force daily on the Pakistani occupied side, Tehran’s domestic politics, or Gaza — the prognosis is poor.
Verdict: the doctrine is useful as theatre, occasionally productive as coercion-plus-incentives, but a poor substitute for the slow, patient architecture of lasting peace. If Trump “brought peace” somewhere, it will be the kind that holds until the incentives to return to conflict reassert themselves. That is not a tribute to strategy; it is a reminder that geopolitics rarely bows to slogans. I just hope the West watching the Pakistani puppet PM fall at the feet of President Trump don’t think all ‘Asians’ are subservient grovelling fools.
