The 'Good Deal' Lie

Other governments have no interest in accepting Trump's demands for their surrender.

The president continues to pretend to favor a diplomatic solution with Iran:

“I’d rather make a deal. It’s got to be a good deal. No nuclear weapons, no missiles [bold mine-DL], no this, no that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow on Tuesday.

Every aggressor would prefer that the other side yields everything without a fight, so it doesn’t mean anything when the president says that a deal is his “preference.” No doubt he would also prefer that Denmark hands over Greenland without any resistance. Trump’s preference, as always, is for the domination and the humiliation of other nations.

That is why his “good deal” is a laundry list of things Iran will never accept. It is no accident that his diplomatic track record is extremely poor. Other governments have no interest in accepting Trump’s demands for their surrender. The president’s insistence on a “good deal” is bad news for the U.S. and Iran.

Iran hawks feigned interest in a “better deal” with Iran for more than a decade so that they could destroy the successful nonproliferation agreement that already existed. The president’s “good deal” is no different. He sets an impossibly high bar for what a “good deal” would be and threatens to attack if Iran doesn’t comply with his absurd wish list.

The U.S. had a very good deal with Iran in 2015, and Trump despised it. The original nuclear deal ensured that Iran’s nuclear program would remain peaceful, but that was never going to satisfy people bent on conflict and regime change. Trump’s relentless hostility to the result of successful diplomacy proved beyond any doubt that he has never wanted to find a reasonable diplomatic solution to this or any other issue. The attack he launched last year while talks were ongoing confirmed that.

The president recently said, “Last time Iran decided that they were better off not making a Deal, and they were hit with Midnight Hammer — That did not work well for them. Hopefully this time they will be more reasonable and responsible [bold mine-DL].” This is Trump’s international gangsterism on full display. He reminds them of the attack he launched against them last year and faults them for their intransigence. He presents capitulation as the the “more reasonable and responsible” option, and the alternative is always more violence. There are cartoon villains with more subtlety.

Trump has racked up one diplomatic failure after another, but he has learned nothing from those failures. Other governments consistently refuse to agree to his extreme and unreasonable demands. It has never occurred to him to offer more accommodating terms. A real dealmaker would seek to find common ground, and he is no dealmaker. It is an open secret that Trump is a lousy negotiator. He has no grasp of what the other side needs or wants, and he has no imagination when it comes to finding a solution that would satisfy all parties.

The president assumes that only coercion and violence are “strong” and anything else is weakness. He could conceivably secure many diplomatic successes if he were willing to compromise and allow for mutually beneficial agreements, but he thinks that any agreement where the U.S. concedes anything is a “ripoff.” Because he has built his political brand on denouncing his predecessors’ “bad deals,” he has to make preposterous demands for a “good deal” to make him look “tougher” than other presidents.

The Iranian government wants to find a diplomatic solution, but the American president is an untrustworthy maniac who will talk to them one moment and attack them the next. It is understandable that the Iranians want to find a way out of this situation, but there is no reasoning with this president and there is no way to satisfy him without abandoning their own interests. The best they can probably do is to play for time and try to wait him out.

A sane, competent president could secure a solid nonproliferation agreement with Iran without much difficulty. It has been done before, and the basic outlines are clear enough. The U.S. and Iran would both benefit, and the threat of war would recede. Instead we have an unhinged, reckless president creating an avoidable crisis and dragging the U.S. into yet another unnecessary and unjust war that it can ill afford.