The US administration appears to have a patience gap added to the expertise gap in the difficult negotiations over a ceasefire to the war in Ukraine, The Guardian reported.
In an analysis article published on Friday, the Guardian’s Andrew Roth wrote that President Donald Trump said he could stop war in 24 hours, but team appears daunted by negotiation with ‘a lot of detail attached to it’.
The author started the article by saying: “One key to a successful negotiation is always being willing to walk away from the table. But it isn’t clear whether the Trump administration has threatened to give up on a Russia-Ukraine peace deal as a negotiating tactic or simply because it lacks the concentration for a complicated negotiation – a shortcoming that has dogged the administration’s foreign policy through its first three months in office.”
Roth then set forth recent remarks by US officials including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff.
“Standing on a tarmac in Paris, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, issued a threat that the US could simply “move on” from mediating the biggest military conflict in Europe since the second world war,” Roth wrote from Washington.
He added that “the 24 hours that Donald Trump promised he would need to halt the fighting in Ukraine have long since passed. And the administration has done little of the hard diplomatic work that was required to secure landmark deals like the Dayton agreement or the Camp David accords in the past.”
Roth cited a comment by Rubio who said: “We’re not going to continue to fly all over the world and do meeting after meeting after meeting if no progress is being made.”
He cited other comment by Witkoff, who appeared surprised on Fox News that Russia wanted “so much more” than just a ceasefire. “I mean, it’s just a lot of detail attached to it,” he said. “It’s a complicated situation from, you know – rooted in some real problematic things happening between the two countries.”
The author then concluded the article by saying: “There was always an expertise gap in the difficult negotiations over a ceasefire to the Russian war in Ukraine. Now the administration appears to have a patience gap and has signaled it is ready to walk away. Ukraine does not have that option.”
Source: The Guardian (edited by Al-Manar English Website)
