The limits of U.S. President Donald Trump’s brand of extremely personalized, belligerent diplomacy have never been more apparent than with the negligible outcomes this week involving two of the world’s deadliest ongoing conflicts.

In Gaza, Israel’s military shattered the tenuous ceasefire on Tuesday by inflicting the largest number of deaths in a single day on Palestinians since the war started in October 2023.

And after Trump’s phone call with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, any hope that the Russian president was prepared to roll back or significantly restrain his ongoing three-year assault on the country also proved largely illusory.

Both results were easily predictable, say veteran diplomats, given Trump’s almost single-minded focus on scoring quick wins at the expense of the harder work of dogged diplomacy resulting in lasting gains.