Imaginary Peace Treaties and the Ceasefire Illusion

Daniel Warner

June 12, 2026

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Bill Clinton mediates the handshake between Yitzak Rabin and Yassir Arafat outside the White House on September 13, 1993. Photo: White House Historical Association.

“A truce [between Lebanon and Israel] that has been in effect since April 17 has never been respected,” AFP reported. So what exactly is a cease-fire worth if the fighting continues? From Lebanon to Ukraine, cease-fires are announced with great fanfare and violated with remarkable speed. Yet politicians and commentators still speak as if a truce were the same thing as peace.
Donald Trump is one of the worst violators of this confusion. Trump’s claims to have ‘ended’ eight wars follow a familiar pattern. A cease-fire becomes peace, a negotiation becomes a deal, and a temporary pause in fighting becomes the end of a war. Trump’s declarations belie the underlying reality that the conflicts he refers to remain unsettled—much like a schoolyard fight is declared “over” the moment the children are pulled apart.

Did Trump really “end” eight wars? Are the underlying conflicts actually over? Lebanon remains unstable. Iran and Israel continue to exchange threats and attacks. Russia and Ukraine are still at war. The Houthis still fire missiles. Gaza remains unresolved. Kashmir remains disputed. The Democratic Republic of Congo remains violent. These claims often amount to relabelling partial stabilization, normalization, or temporary pause as a final resolution. If these wars were truly “ended” by Trump, nobody seems to have informed the combatants, civilians killed in the fighting, or the millions suffering and displaced.

Cease-fires are among the most celebrated and least understood achievements in modern diplomacy. They generate headlines, press conferences, handshakes, and declarations of success. (See the famous September 13, 1993, photo of Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat White House handshake from the Oslo peace process.) Many cease-fires are violated almost immediately. Some collapse within days. Others survive on paper long after they have ceased to exist in reality.
What is the value of the cease-fire? The New York Times headlined recently: “Israeli Strike Kills 3 Lebanese Soldiers, Days After Truce Was Signed.” While there may be benefits to agreements intended to halt fighting, the cease-fire glass appears not merely half-empty, but nearly drained. Too often, the promises are celebrated while the fighting continues.

Three recent examples of the cease-fire illusion:

1) A new U.S.-brokered cease-fire framework was announced June 3, 2026, under which Israel and Lebanon agreed to enforce a cessation of hostilities and expand Lebanese Army control in southern Lebanon. Within days, renewed exchanges of fire spread across multiple border sectors. Repeated evacuations followed in southern Lebanon. Tens of thousands were displaced. Reports of casualties continued from ongoing clashes. The cease-fire exists in declaration, not in control of events on the ground.

2) The United States and Iran maintain a cease-fire framework. Both sides accuse each other of violations. Military pressure continues across multiple fronts. On June 8, Iran and Israel exchanged missile and drone strikes again, breaking through a fragile truce and triggering renewed escalation. Israeli strikes hit targets inside Iran. Iranian missiles reached Israeli territory. Additional attacks extended across the wider regional network of aligned forces. The cease-fire holds in language, not in conduct.

3) The Russia–Ukraine war. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, repeated cease-fire attempts, humanitarian pauses, and localized truces have failed to hold. Fighting continues across eastern and southern Ukraine. Missile and drone strikes continue on Ukrainian cities. Temporary pauses collapse quickly, often within days. Prisoner exchanges and localized cessations of fire occur, but do not translate into sustained reductions in combat or movement toward settlement. The cease-fires exist in interruption, not in resolution.

There is nothing new about cease-fires. Armies have been pausing wars for thousands of years. Sometimes to negotiate. Sometimes to regroup. Sometimes simply because both sides were exhausted. In the ancient world, Greek city-states occasionally suspended hostilities during religious festivals, while medieval rulers often arranged truces that paused wars for months or even years without resolving the underlying conflict. Sometimes the warriors stopped fighting to return home to harvest the crops.

What cease-fires have rarely done is resolve the conflict they interrupt.

There are exceptions. In modern times some cease-fires have become major turning points to end conflicts rather than merely time-outs. The 1953 Korean War cease-fire froze the battlefield and stopped large-scale combat. Although the conflict was never formally ended by a peace treaty, the cease-fire has largely held for over seventy years.

Other cease-fires have opened the door to lasting political settlements. In Northern Ireland, repeated cease-fires by paramilitary groups in the 1990s helped create the conditions for negotiations that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement. In the Middle East, the cease-fire agreements that ended the 1973 Arab–Israeli War paved the way for diplomacy between Egypt and Israel, eventually leading to the 1979 peace treaty. Cease-fires can create the breathing room needed for diplomacy to succeed where armed conflict could not.

Despite the limited cease-fire successes, they were never intended to be peace treaties. They are instruments for stopping violence, not for resolving the political disputes that caused the violence in the first place. Their success should therefore be measured by whether they create the conditions under which diplomacy becomes possible. The problem in many of today’s conflicts is not that cease-fires exist; it is that they are increasingly treated as substitutes for political settlement rather than as a first step toward one.

In that sense, a cease-fire is a comma, not a period. “I have no illusions about the difficulty of peace,” George Mitchell said while working on the Northern Ireland peace process. “It is hard, painstaking work that requires patience and persistence.” Yet politicians like Trump, and real estate brokers like Witkoff and Kushner keep presenting it as the end of the sentence, all show and closure with little chance of sustainability. It is like the passing of the eye of a hurricane before the high winds pick up again. Confusing cease-fires and peace may make for a good political talking point and publicity about “ending” wars, but it makes for poor history.

The tendency of politicians like Trump, journalists, and the public to confuse a cessation of hostilities with a resolution of conflict obscures deeper diplomatic efforts to find lasting resolutions. Obama’s team spent about two years, from 2013 to 2015, negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, Under Secretary Wendy Sherman, and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, with close involvement from National Security Council officials including Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes. Real estate salesmen should not be confused with diplomats. A Trumpian announcement on CNN Breaking News should not be confused with “hard, painstaking work.”

A cease-fire can pause a war. It cannot resolve the conflict that produced it. What is often claimed as having “ended” a war is merely political branding. Only sustained diplomacy can turn a pause into a settlement.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.

PAGF 13


Trump’s meeting with Orthodox Christian patriarch sows confusion

(RNS) — The Greek Orthodox leader expects to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin later this month.

Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem, left, meets with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, June 4, 2026. (Photo courtesy Jerusalem Patriarchate)

David I. Klein
June 10, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — The Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, met with President Donald Trump last week in the White House and awarded him one of the highest honors in the church, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.

In return, Theophilos came out of the meeting with an honor of his own, the suggestion of becoming a peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, apparently backed by Trump, Israeli media reported.

The news left many observers scratching their heads. In the constellation of Orthodox Church leaders, Theophilos is seen as solidly in Russia’s camp. The patriarch is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow later this month.

The Ukraine-Russia war is the largest conflict affecting the world’s Orthodox Christians today, with majorities of both Russia and Ukraine’s population identifying with Orthodox churches.

The conflict has divided the wider Orthodox world too, after the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople granted autocephaly to a Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, prompting Moscow to break communion with Constantinople and forcing many of the Eastern Orthodox churches to pick sides. The result has been the largest schism in the church since the break with Rome in 1054.

Though the Jerusalem Patriarchate does not acknowledge the legitimacy of the independent Ukrainian church, Theophilos is one of the leaders who — in some respects — straddles the divide. As a native Greek, he maintains ties with those in Constantinople’s orbit, but the long history of Russian pilgrimage to the Holy Land and number of Russian Orthodox Christians in Israel have kept him close to Moscow, explained Samuel Noble, a scholar of Orthodox Christianity at Belgium’s University of Liège.

People light flares during the funeral ceremony of fallen Ukrainian servicemen in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, June 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Danylo Antoniuk)

“Having goodwill with both the Hellenic world and with Russia is an interesting diplomatic thing,” Noble told RNS, “but I don’t think that it all translates into diplomatic cachet with the Ukrainian state.”

Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian Orthodox theologian and scholar, told RNS he viewed the news as an attempt to replace the White House’s previous efforts to tap the Vatican as such a mediator. “The patriarch of Jerusalem is known for being quite closely attached to Putin,” he noted.

“I think it fits the policy of Donald Trump’s administration to distance itself from Ukraine as a mediator and to bestow this mission of mediation upon someone else,” Hovorun said. “Once upon a time, the Holy See, the Vatican, was considered as such a mediator. … Now that the relations between the White House and the Apostolic Palace — the Holy See — have deteriorated significantly and dramatically, I think this idea to ask someone else, some other religious figure, to do mediation emerged in the White House.”

Ukrainian officials quickly shut down the idea of Theophilos as a mediator, noting his opposition to the Ukrainian church’s independence.

“Patriarch Theophilos’ participation in negotiations with Ukraine is unrealistic,” a high-ranking diplomat of the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel told Ukrainian media. “Ukraine will never do such a thing.”

Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III speaks during a joint press conference with Latin Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, not pictured, after their visit to the Gaza Strip in Jerusalem, July 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

The embassy also said Theophilos had not responded to any of the embassy’s initiatives previously but participated in Russian diplomatic events.

The ancient Jerusalem patriarchate, one of nine independent churches governing Eastern Orthodoxy, has long seen its role as protecting Christian communities and sites in the Holy Land. The meeting came at a time when the Christian population of the Holy Land, including many Orthodox Christians, are facing heightened tensions against their communities and while the Trump administration has shown signs of willingness with Israel to topple the fragile status quo governing sacred sites in the region.

“The Patriarch presented the President with a range of concerns and challenges confronting the churches of the Holy Land. Foremost among these were sustaining the authentic Christian presence, safeguarding holy sites, promoting human dignity, and reinforcing the Church’s mission of pastoral care, mercy, and peace building,” the patriarchate said in a statement.

After his meeting with Trump, Theophilos met with the Greek prime minister with the same agenda to protect Christians and the church’s holy sites.

Over the past several years, Jerusalem and the wider region have seen a rash of harassment, violence and legal pressures against Christian communities in the Holy Land. According to a recent report by the Jerusalem-based Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, 2025 saw more than 150 attacks on Christians in Israel, up from 111 in 2024 and 89 in 2023. Only about 1.9% of Israel’s population is Christian, and 80% of Israeli Christians are Arab.

Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem, left, meets with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, June 4, 2026. (Photo courtesy of Jerusalem Patriarchate)

Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian Christian and human rights lawyer, noted that despite the influence of Christian Zionism, anti-Christian sentiment — as something separate from anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab sentiment — is a growing problem in several sectors of Israeli society.

“There’s a very strong, almost gut level anti-Christian sentiment that is never acknowledged, but in some places and in some cases — like these days — it’s coming up to the surface,” Kuttab said, citing examples of ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting at nuns and priests and religiously motivated attacks against Christian villages, cemeteries and churches in the region.

“There is a very clear sentiment there, which is almost never addressed or expressed openly, unless, you know, you’re somebody crazy, like (Bezalel) Smotrich or (Itamar) Ben-Gvir who say it up front,” he said, referring to Israel’s finance and national security ministers, who both helm far right parties in the Knesset and have a history of defending sectarian attacks.

RELATED: Israeli attacks on Christians and Christianity demand answers

In April, an Israeli soldier smashed a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer in southern Lebanon while another soldier photographed the act, resulting in their removal from combat service and prompting the Jewish state to appoint a special envoy to the Christian world. In May, a man chased, pushed down and kicked a French Catholic nun in Jerusalem.

An undated photo of an Israeli soldier smashing a statue of Jesus Christ with a sledgehammer in southern Lebanon. (Image via social media)

“We have witnessed incidents of harassment, acts of disrespect toward clergy and religious symbols, and growing concerns surrounding the preservation of Christian life and heritage in the city,” said Levon Kalaydjian, a Jerusalem Armenian Christian activist. “These are not abstract concerns; they affect the daily sense of dignity, belonging and safety of communities that have been rooted in Jerusalem for centuries.”

Rabbi Eugene Korn, the former academic director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation, said the mentality has been growing in certain sectors, such as the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist communities.

“Problems that have gotten a lot of attention — and rightfully so — in Jerusalem, are kind of localized to Jerusalem, because you have these radicals and many of them are represented in the government and the government doesn’t take action against them,” Korn said.

Jerusalem’s many church bodies have faced legal pressures as well. The Jerusalem municipality froze the Greek Orthodox Church’s accounts last summer in a tax dispute that critics allege was an attempt to force the church to sell its prized land holdings. The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem has similarly been embroiled in a long court battle to defend a portion of the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City from being taken over by developers. The two patriarchates, and particularly the Greek Orthodox Church, are among the largest landholders in Israel, controlling large swaths of land far beyond historic churches and religious institutions. But the Jerusalem Patriarchate has also recently sold off properties — to the chagrin of its local Palestinian flock.

While the church’s flock is overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking Palestinian and Jordanian Christians, its leadership has for centuries been — almost invariably — transplants from Greece or Greek-speaking communities.

“The Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem has never reflected the sentiment of the Palestinian, the people in the pew,” Kuttab said.

Geopathology and the Econopathology Behind it

Michael Hudson

 June 8, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

America’s 2025 National Security Strategy calls for gaining control of the world’s oil trade. Toward this end, Donald Trump’s Oil War aims at depriving Iran, Iraq and its neighboring OPEC countries of their sovereignty over whom they may sell their oil to, just as he has done to Venezuela. There is no remorse for the collateral damage being caused by the disruption in energy trade that is plunging most of the world’s economies into depression.

Such reckless (and wreckful) behavior conforms to the letter of what psychologists call a sociopath. The Mayo Clinic applies this term to “a person [who] consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.” To cap matters, “people with antisocial personality disorder [who] often violate the law, becoming criminals. They may lie, behave violently or impulsively …” This diagnosis can readily be applied to any nation aspiring to empire by conquest. But U.S. foreign policy has carried it to new extremes.

Just as sociopaths lack a sense of right and wrong (and fight against any such moral values constraining their abusive behavior), U.S. diplomats have rejected the United Nations Charter’s body of international laws of war that ban attacks on civilians. American weaponry and missile guidance systems are serving religious and ethnic genocide from Ukraine to the Middle East as Ukrainian, Israeli and various Wahabi al-Qaeda client armies have been recruited to serve as America’s foreign legions.

Trump’s impulsive, aggressive and manipulative demands, accompanied by bullying violence, violate the most fundamental laws of international behavior that formerly were considered to be the essence of civilization. The UN Charter’s rule not to interfere with the sovereignty of foreign countries is the legacy of Europe’s 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended its Thirty Years’ War. The United States has overthrown foreign governments and tried to bring about regime change from Russia to Iran by bombing civilians, especially young students and doctors, schools and hospitals, in the hope that such terrorism will lead populations to replace their governments with U.S. client oligarchies to stop the bombings that have become the hallmark of U.S. policy.

U.S. diplomacy also violates international maritime law, bombing fishing boats from Venezuela and Colombia in Latin America to the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf, without warning or probable cause, simply to demonstrate its immunity from the constraint of international law and the inability of the United Nations or any other international body to prevent piracy and murder on the seas.

Insisting that other countries obey its own sanctions aimed at isolated Russian oil production, the United States has destroyed Libya and grabbed Iraq’s oil production and taken control of its revenue, refusing Iraqi government demands for the United States to leave. It has likewise seized control of Venezuela and devoted all its oil-export proceeds to U.S. accounts in Miami under the Trump Administration’s direct control.

Trump’s behavior has gone seamlessly to the U.S. presidency from his background as a notoriously cheating real estate developer, lying and breaking contracts with his suppliers, bankers and labor, and treating fines and penalties simply as a cost of doing business, not to mention his predatory behavior toward women. There is almost a natural kinship between his former life and his present political role. Much as U.S. foreign policy seeks to block countries from having their own sovereignty and self-reliance, today’s financial and real estate magnates in the One Percent class, along with the ambitious politicians they recruit to gain control of U.S. policy, are reducing a widening swath of the U.S. population to debt dependency and the insecurity of living paycheck to paycheck.

U.S. strategists fear (and bullies are cowards) that foreign independence from U.S. control of trade in oil, information technology and automatic intelligence would enable them to resist the demands of America’s abusive imperial power. The creditor class, monopolists and other members of the rentier One Percent share a similar fear that the U.S. government might enact and apply laws that would limit their concentration of financial power and monopolization of wealth at the expense of the increasingly indebted 99 Percent, being forced more deeply into debt (and debt arrears) just to make ends meet.

Similar drives for power characterize the CEOs and CFOs of today’s largest corporations, as well as gangsters, religious cult leaders and many politicians pursuing their respective ambitions. Sociopathic self-indulgence is celebrated as the driving force of progress, “free” of public checks and balances to permit economic polarization and the kind of self-destructive decadence that brought down the Roman Empire.

A vocabulary to describe today’s global fracture and its civilizational war

We need an appropriate vocabulary to describe these phenomena, and also to characterize their attempt at self-justification by promoting today’s neoliberal ideology. I suggest the following two words:

Geopathology: the abusive conduct of international relations in an exploitative manner that injures and victimizes other countries by imposing a unilateral double standard of behavior. All imperialism aspiring to empire building is characterized by such geopathology.

Econopathology: the doctrine to defend the absence of social empathy. Its core is today’s libertarian “greed is good” individualism advocating unlimited self-interest and rejecting any government constraint or regulation to protect the basic social principle of reciprocity and mutual aid that provided the foundation for civilization’s takeoff.

Early civilization could not have evolved if Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek and Alan Greenspan had managed to send themselves back in a time machine and arrive as gods from the future offering to enlighten chieftains, priesthoods and the kings of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. Civilization never could have taken off if it had taken their advice. There would have been no protection of their subjects against falling into debt bondage, losing their land tenure. Such a takeoff would have gone directly from incipient civilization to an economic polarization and subjugation to a narrow oligarchy lording it over the population and fighting to prevent any alternative attempts at takeoffs by protecting personal liberty and widespread self-support as a precondition for progress.

Only a system of mutual aid and protection of personal self-sufficiency for the citizenry could have enabled archaic low-surplus economies to survive. They could not afford the luxury of inequality and deprivation of the population’s liberty and land tenure rights. And by the same token, today’s economies require some public authority empowered to prevent economic and physical aggression from leading to predatory oligarchies. Most have been financial in character and have sought to monopolize the land.

Greek philosophy realized the need to protect society against the pathological behavior that was an inherent result of money-addiction. All wealth, especially in monetary form, was recognized as being addictive, leading to behavior that injured others, and accordingly was regarded as asocial and frowned upon. Usurious creditors assigned such “dirty” activities to their slaves or freedmen to avoid being shunned in polite company. Rules for basic reciprocity and respect for the human rights of others acted to constrain the kind of behavior that today’s financialized and neoliberalized Western societies have lost. Money addiction plays no role in today’s utilitarian economic theory, or in the principles of law or political philosophy. Business school students are taught that their task as corporate managers should be to maximize capital gains for their stockholders and pursue profits to pay dividends toward this end by cutting costs and conquering markets ruthlessly, as if all the ensuing exploitation and destruction is creative.

The common denominator between geopathology and econopathology is their denial of freedom and self-direction for other countries and people. Viewing foreign sovereignty and self-reliance as enabling other countries the ability to resist U.S. diplomacy, it views such sovereignty as threatening the U.S. security of maintaining its tributary empire. And like geopathology, econopathology aims to reduce other individuals to the dependent status of clients, debtors, renters, and ultimately to serfdom.

Wealth and power addiction are natural drives, but societies through the ages have sought to socialize. them Socrates found the ideal to be a wise central authority to keep this drive in check. That social protection against oligarchy was seen to be equally natural as a precondition for societies to avoid polarization and stagnation. But as Aristotle observed, democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies, which then to make themselves hereditary rentier aristocracies. And such nations seek to “free” kindred oligarchies from the constraints of public regulation (e.g., as Trump supports the libertarian Javier Milei in Argentina), and to prevent any such regulations from being applied on an international scale.

How can today’s economies cope with geopathology and its econopathology?

Sociopathology is not self-curing. Neither is econopathology nor geopathology. Ancient societies had cities of refuge to which such sociopaths and other lawbreakers were exiled, at least temporarily until such time as they became socialized and learned to regret and feel remorse for their behavior.

Today’s U.S. foreign policy has spent the past eighty years since 1945 putting in place a body of neoliberal anti-government doctrine and its anti-socialist rhetoric, rejecting all ideas of diplomatic and domestic economic reform. The challenge confronting today’s Global Majority is to create an alternative multipolar system of international institutions and alliances based on the principles of mutual aid and tolerance for each other’s autonomy that has always been the ostensible ideal.

Creating such an alternative requires an alternative doctrine to that of neoliberalism, and also re-creating the basic laws governing international relations. What makes this possible today is that for the first time since 1945, a critical mass of countries now exists to establish new institutions to protect their autonomy and sovereignty.

Michael Hudson’s Killing the Host, The Collapse of Antiquity and The Destiny of Civilization are published by CounterPunch Books.