When Diplomacy Fails: How Trump, Macron and Scholz Tried to Shape Peace

Diplomacy is the art of managing contradictions. Yet when confronted with war, it often becomes the performance of managing the inevitable. Since February 2022, a revolving cast of Western leaders has attempted to halt the most consequential war on European soil since 1945. Some approached the task as realists, others as idealists, and a few—famously—as self-styled dealmakers. But nearly all have failed.

Here we delve into the diplomatic efforts of three key leaders—Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, and former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz—to shape peace in Ukraine. Through official initiatives, backchannel contacts, summit theatre, and media posturing, each has sought to impose—or at least inspire—a negotiated end to the war. Their motives vary. Their tools differ. Their outcomes, so far, are the same.

Yet in the ashes of these failed peace efforts lies an unspoken truth: diplomacy is not always the opposite of war. Sometimes it merely reflects the war by other means.

Macron’s Balancing Act: The Ghost of De Gaulle

From the earliest weeks of the full-scale invasion, Emmanuel Macron cast himself as Europe’s chief interlocutor. He maintained open lines to Moscow long after others had gone silent. His telephone diplomacy with Vladimir Putin—dozens of calls throughout 2022—became a hallmark of French engagement. Paris insisted that “Russia must not be humiliated,” echoing a Gaullist impulse to position France as a bridge between East and West.

Macron’s goals were manifold: to preserve European strategic autonomy, to avoid overdependence on the United States, and to prove that Europe could manage its own crises. He floated visions of a new European security architecture, one that would provide guarantees to Russia as well as to Ukraine. These proposals gained little traction in Kyiv, where many viewed them as diplomatic appeasement cloaked in strategic ambiguity.

By 2024, Macron had recalibrated. His rhetoric grew more hawkish. France began supplying long-range missiles and accelerated Ukraine’s path to EU accession talks. But the damage was done. In Kyiv, the Élysée was no longer viewed as neutral—merely naïve.

Macron’s failure was not in his ambition, but in misreading Putin’s terms. He believed a shared language could bridge irreconcilable demands. But in a war of extermination, grammar is irrelevant.

Scholz’s Hesitation: The Weight of German History

Olaf Scholz’s approach to diplomacy was more cautious—less a bold narrative than a gradual recalculation. Initially paralysed by Germany’s entanglement with Russian gas and decades of Ostpolitik (commercial-political relationships with Russia), Scholz hesitated to supply arms, resisted decoupling from Russian trade, and feared escalation.

His 2022 Zeitenwende (turning point) speech promised a tectonic shift in German foreign policy. But implementation lagged. Provision of Leopard tanks was delayed. Tanks were debated more than delivered. Scholz’s diplomacy leaned heavily on multilateralism—deferring to NATO, Brussels, and Washington. He spoke often of “responsibility” but rarely of victory.

Scholz’s peace initiatives, such as they were, aimed at keeping Germany’s coalition intact, her industrial base supplied, and her moral equilibrium undisturbed. Behind the scenes, Berlin hosted confidential technical talks between Russian and Ukrainian former diplomats in 2023 and 2024. These efforts yielded no results.

Germany’s approach, rooted in historic guilt and economic self-preservation, could not adjust fast enough to the brutality of a 21st-century imperial war. In waiting for peace to become possible, Scholz failed to realise that peace had already been rejected.

Trump’s Gambit: Ultimatums and Grace Periods

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he inherited a war he had never fully embraced. From the outset of his second term, Trump signalled impatience with “Europe’s war”. He demanded results, offered ultimatums, and—most controversially—set a 50-day deadline for Russia to halt hostilities or face “severe consequences”, including the imposition of secondary sanctions on China, India, and the Gulf states doing business with Moscow.

Trump’s style was and remains transactional. He dispatched envoys to Kyiv and Moscow not to listen, but to deliver terms. His “peace framework”, leaked in part to the press, proposed a temporary ceasefire along current front lines, Ukrainian neutrality in perpetuity, partial sanctions relief for Russia, and an ambiguous process to resolve the status of Crimea and Donbas. Kyiv rejected the proposal outright. So did Moscow—albeit more tactically.

Trump’s defenders argued that he was willing to do what others feared: impose peace through pressure. His critics noted that the plan ceded Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for a lull in fighting, not a true settlement.

His 50-day grace period was nearing expiry by August 2025, with little sign of compliance. Diplomacy, for Trump, was not a negotiation—it was a countdown. And the countdown continues.

A Broader Failure: The Illusion of Symmetry

All three leaders, in their own way, approached the war as if it were a dispute—something to be arbitrated, measured, and solved. But war, when waged for extermination or absorption, does not yield to symmetrical solutions. Russia does not want a compromise. She wants submission. Ukraine does not want concessions. She wants restoration.

In this asymmetry lies the failure of Western diplomacy. Each initiative assumed that the parties shared some overlapping vision of peace. But Ukraine defines peace as freedom. Russia defines peace as control. Between those visions is a chasm no summit can cross.

The result is not merely a failure of diplomacy. It is a failure of imagination. Of strategy. Of courage.

Lessons for the Future

1. Diplomacy must follow the facts on the ground. When one side advances by force and the other by survival, peace proposals that ignore battlefield reality are irrelevant.

   
   

2. No peace can be built on lies. The Russian Federation has repeatedly violated every agreement she has signed with Ukraine. Treaties will not tame imperial ambition.

   
   

3. The West cannot outsource victory to negotiation. Ukraine’s security—and Europe’s—depends on enabling Ukrainian military success, not papering over Russian occupation with diplomatic formulae.

The Peace That Must Be Earned

Peace will come. But not because of Macron’s phone calls, Scholz’s caution, or Trump’s ultimatums. It will come when Ukraine’s sovereignty is made undeniable by force, resilience, and the unshakeable conviction that some lines—on maps and in morality—are not up for debate. In due time, Russia's economy may deteriorate so severely under the weight of wartime expenditures and sanctions that she sees revolution or some other kind of regime change.

Until then, diplomacy will remain what it has been: a mirror of war, not its end.