1 hour ago

Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ is nowhere to be seen with Iran | Mohamad Bazzi

For weeks, Donald Trump has tried to find a way to end the war he started with Iran – a deal that would allow him to declare victory and move past the conflict before it causes severe damage to the global economy and sinks Republican chances in the US midterm elections. But the self-proclaimed master dealmaker can’t seem to stop sabotaging his own negotiations or to acknowledge that Iran is now in a better position to demand concessions than it was before the war.

Over the Memorial Day holiday, Trump skipped his eldest son’s wedding in the Bahamas and canceled plans to spend the weekend at his New Jersey golf club. The last-minute changes heightened speculation that Trump was ready to unveil a deal to end the war. Trump then announced that he would hold a cabinet meeting on Wednesday at Camp David, the presidential compound in Maryland that has been the site of historic diplomatic summits and pronouncements. But that meeting was moved back to the White House, as it became clear that Trump had not been able to close a deal he could announce with great fanfare at Camp David.

Why has an agreement eluded the business titan who wrote (with a ghostwriter) the bestselling 1987 book The Art of the Deal?

Trump admires strongman leaders and is loth to project any sign of weakness – and he’s afraid of reaching a deal with Iran that makes him look weak. The president is also sensitive to criticism that any agreement he negotiates will be worse for the US than the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, which was brokered by Barack Obama’s administration. In 2018, during his first term, Trump unilaterally withdrew Washington from that agreement, setting in motion events that led to the current conflict.

By starting a war aimed at regime change in Iran, Trump cornered himself into mostly bad options. Even by the principles set out in his famous book, Trump is at a disadvantage in his negotiations with Tehran. “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead,” Trump wrote. “The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants.”

Trump’s main problem is that Iran has more leverage than he does – and Iranian leaders are well aware of that advantage. On 28 February, Trump launched a joint US-Israeli war against Iran, killing the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top military and political officials within the conflict’s early hours. At first, Trump was seduced by the prospect of a quick military victory, as he had achieved in January with a US special forces raid that abducted Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and whisked him to New York to stand trial.

But, as many analysts had warned, Iran was not like Venezuela, and the Iranian regime would fight hard for its survival, despite the assassination of Khamenei and other senior officials. Tehran retaliated with missile and drone strikes against US military bases across the Middle East, and it targeted the energy infrastructure of its Gulf neighbors. Iran also deployed its most effective economic weapon: it closed the strait of Hormuz, through which more than a fifth of the world’s oil supply passed each day.

That closure – along with Iranian attacks on pipelines and gas fields in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – disrupted the global economy and increased oil prices. (In the US, average gas prices have jumped by 50%, up to nearly $4.50 per gallon, since Trump launched the war.)

Trump and his ally, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could not topple the Islamic regime that rose to power after Iran’s 1979 revolution. Instead, they ended up strengthening it – by allowing Tehran to deploy its geographic control of the strait of Hormuz into a weapon that could instigate a global energy crisis and a worldwide recession.

After six weeks of intense bombing by the world’s most powerful military, Iran continued its blockade of the strait and kept up its missile strikes on Gulf countries and Israel. The US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on 8 April, but negotiations stalled as Trump vacillated between making a deal and threatening to restart the bombing.

The emerging deal is focused on solving a problem that didn’t exist before Trump started this war: fully reopening the strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping so that oil prices can stabilize. Under a draft agreement being circulated to US allies, Washington would also lift its blockade of Iranian ports and allow Tehran to access about $12bn in frozen assets.

And as Trump had done last year when he brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, his administration left some of the thorniest problems (including disarming Hamas and securing Israel’s military withdrawal from the Palestinian territory) to later negotiations that never got off the ground.

Once again, Trump seems to be aiming for a limited deal with Iran that defers the most difficult questions to future talks, which could drag out for months or even years. The unresolved issues are likely to include Iran’s nuclear program and capabilities; its development of ballistic missiles; and its support for regional militias such as Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. In a video posted on social media on 28 February, Trump laid out those concerns as imminent threats that Iran posed to the US – and the central reason for going to war. None of these issues have been resolved.

In some ways, Iran has emerged stronger after a war intended to decimate its military capabilities. A CIA report sent to Trump earlier this month found that Tehran had managed to retain a significant part of its missile capabilities. The analysis said Iran preserved about 70% of its prewar stockpile of missiles and about 75% of its mobile launchers. The report also concluded that Iran was more resilient than US officials had claimed, and it could survive a naval blockade for months.

Despite his weak position, Trump insists that he will strike a better deal with Iran than the one negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015. That agreement provided Tehran with relief from international sanctions in exchange for limits on its nuclear enrichment. (Iran was allowed to enrich uranium at low levels, enough to run power plants but not to produce a nuclear weapon.) Years after Trump withdrew from the deal, Iran dramatically ramped up its production of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade, but the UN and other watchdogs found it still had not taken steps to build an actual weapon.

At his cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump said he didn’t care about the midterm elections and wasn’t in a rush to reach a deal. “It’s got to be perfect,” Trump told reporters, adding: “I didn’t do this to get a crummy agreement.”

Of course, Trump could have avoided starting a regime-change war that failed, leaving the world to deal with its consequences. Instead, the master negotiator handed Iran a new economic weapon – and more leverage to extract a favorable deal.