Bombs fly after a cease-fire is announced in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Are these announcements real steps towards peace or just a distraction?
The handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yizthak Rabin (left) and Yasser Arafat, chairman of Palestinian Liberation Organization.13 September 1993. (Photo credit: The White House)
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There is a famous photo of then-U.S. President Bill Clinton standing with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat as as they shook hands at the White House.
The handshake between the leader of Israel and the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which represented of the Palestinian people at the time, concluded a historic peace process known as the Oslo Accords.
It was hoped that that handshake would end decades of armed conflict in the Middle East.
Cease-fires are among the most celebrated and least understood achievements in modern diplomacy. They generate headlines, press conferences, handshakes and declarations of success. But what is a cease-fire worth if fighting continues?
From Lebanon to Ukraine, cease-fires are announced with great fanfare and violated with remarkable speed. Yet politicians and commentators still equate a truce with peace.
Ceasefires in the Trump era
Donald Trump is one of the worst violators of this confusion. Trump’s claims that he “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 cites 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.
Bombs stop, then fly.
These claims often amount to relabelling as a final resolution something that only amounts to a partial stabilization, normalization or temporary pause. It seems that nobody has informed the combatants, civilians killed in the fighting or the millions suffering and displaced that Trump has ended their wars.
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.” v
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, promises are celebrated while fighting continues.
A new U.S.-brokered cease-fire framework was announced 3 June 2026, under which Israel and Lebanon agreed to cease 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.
A truce is fragile.
Even as the United States and Iran agree to a cease-fire framework, both sides accuse each other of violations. Military pressure continues across multiple fronts. On 8 June, 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.
Meanwhile, in the war between Russia and Ukraine, which has continued for more than four years, 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.
A long history of short pauses
For thousands of years, warring armies have paused attacks, sometimes to negotiate, sometimes to regroup. Sometimes simply out of exhaustion.
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 70 years.
Peace is possible.
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, 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 between the two countries. Cease-fires can create the breathing room needed for diplomacy to succeed where armed conflict could not.
A cease-fire is never the same as a peace treaty. 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,” said former U.S. Senator George Mitchell while working on the Northern Ireland peace process. “It is hard, painstaking work that requires patience and persistence.”
Peace and talking points
Still, politicians like Trump and his chosen negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — both property developers — keep presenting it as the end of the sentence, all show and closure with little chance of sustainability.
This 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, as well as journalists and the public, to confuse a cessation of hostilities with a resolution of conflict obscures deeper diplomatic efforts to find lasting resolutions.
A team of experienced diplomats, statesmen and foreign affairs specialists appointed by then-U.S. President Barack Obama spent about two years from 2013 to 2015 negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.
Property developers are not 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.
A version of this story previously appeared in the publication Counterpunch.
Questions to consider:
1. What is the difference between a cease-fire and a peace treaty?
2. Why do you think so many cease-fires don’t last long?
3. What did the author mean when he equated a cease-fire between nations to a schoolyard fight broken up by teachers?
Daniel Warner earned a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he was Deputy to the Director for many years as well as founder and director of several programs focusing on international organizations. He has lectured and taught internationally and is a frequent contributor to international media. He has served as an advisor to the UNHCR, ILO and NATO, and has been a consultant to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense of Switzerland as well as in the private sector.