Never in the history of mankind has a real estate transaction ended a war. I may be wrong on this, so if you have examples where swapping land or simply ceding territory has led to lasting peace, please let me know.
The real estate tycoon in the white house does not know that. He believes that almost any conflict can be resolved by a real estate transaction. His proposal to end the Gaza conflict: Real estate re-development of the territory into a sort of Mar al Gaza. The solution to the war in Ukraine: Swapping real estate between the warring parties. Countering Russian aggression in the arctic region: Acquire Iceland.
This fixation on re-distributing land and re-drawing borders as a means of bringing about peace, completely ignores that territory is rarely, if ever, the true reason for the conflict. Ceasing or defending territory is nothing more than a means to an end, an aim that may have nothing to do with real estate. Russia invaded Ukraine not because it wanted the territory, but because it wanted to prevent a successful democracy being formed at its border. It wanted to install a puppet government in Kiev. But because it could not achieve this goal after its initial push towards Kiev was bungled by its own incompetence and the courageous and masterful resistance by the Ukrainian army, Russia had to resort of a strategy of seizing territory to put pressure on Ukraine.
Now Putin wants the World to accept that the illegally seized territory, plus some additional portions it does not yet control, is formally now part of Russia. He demands that Ukraine not only relinquish land but also abandon people who live on this land. To Trump that seems reasonable. For him the real estate is the only thing that counts; the people living on this land are merely a nuisance.
But to Putin the population in these territories is important. Russia faces a big problem: It’s own population is shrinking. Given the World they live in, not all Russians feel a strong urge to procreate. To compensate for this shrinkage, Rusia is quickly turning the people in the occupied territories into new Russian citizens and is undertaking concerted efforts to kidnap Ukrainian children to distribute them to Russian families so that they may become a new generation of “Russians”.
To Trump, who approaches every problem as a real-estate deal, such considerations are alien. He believes if we only split the real estate in a manner acceptable to all (primarily acceptable to Putin) the problem is solved and the war is over. He fails to see that such a deal fails to address the non-territorial disputes that divide the warring parties. Questions of population, ethnicity, language, tradition, aspirations and hope for the future are together much more important than questions of real estate. Failing to address these in a peace deal imbeds the seeds of future conflict, more deadly than the current one.