The ‘Art of the Deal’ Author Hasn’t the Faintest Clue How to Close a Deal
The more Trump threatens, the clearer it becomes that he is weak and desperate.
There are lies, and then there are Trump lies. However, Trump telling reporters that he is in no hurry at all to reach an agreement with Iran was a lie of epic proportions, making him look even more ridiculous to both the Iranians and key players in the region. For a man who is supposedly in no hurry, he acts with remarkable speed and panic: he convenes emergency meetings with JD Vance and Marco Rubio practically every week, which is invariably followed by continuous threatening rhetoric that fools absolutely no one.
It is the style of the clueless, lost kid in a supermarket that distinguishes Trump in the big, grown-up world of international politics – and it has cost him dearly. Crucial to getting him out of the hole he dug for himself by believing Israel’s nonsense in the first place would have been ties with allies around the world, diplomacy, and working on the respect built up for the White House over decades. When Trump starts his mega-tans, all these things naturally disappear immediately, as it becomes clearer every day how isolated his administration is. This is what you get when you fire all the real diplomats around the world and replace them with American ambassadors from his own clique of real estate friends – people who were given the chance to be ambassadors to a particular country so they could use their position to manipulate the market, writes Martin Jay .
And market manipulation has always been the key to everything he does. But over the past few days, we saw devastating news accompanied by Trump’s latest level of clowning, giving us a glimpse of why we keep getting teasers on social media from his people claiming the deal is almost done, only to see it collapse and everyone walk away.
Typical of his erratic, desperate, and capricious style, he throws a spanner in the works and announces that the GCC countries must sign the Abraham Accords — which gives us insight into how misguided and detached from reality he is regarding his own influence, and that of America, in the region. He said that any agreement to end the war with Iran would have to include the requirement that several other countries, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, join the Abraham Accords, the US-mediated agreements from Trump’s first term aimed at normalizing relations with Israel.
This was an extraordinarily stupid statement that immediately backfired on him when Saudi Arabia and others made it clear to him in no uncertain terms that this would not happen. But it demonstrates that, however misguided he may be, he believes that when negotiations get closer to an agreement, the US has the brute power to demand a little extra at the last minute. Perhaps Nixon and Reagan would have pulled this stunt, but the world has changed and Trump is rapidly becoming a living symbol of America’s weakness and decay, while the whole world watches as an empire does not so much fade as plunge into the abyss. Moving the goalposts at the last minute is becoming Trump’s main trick, and the Iranians know this and are doing the same. The result is that an agreement is further away than ever, but this is largely because Trump has absolutely no negotiating skills and simply cannot be trusted. It is also about the fact that he is negotiating from a weak position, which convinces Iran more and more every day that they do not even need an agreement, since they are quite content with controlling the Strait of Hormuz while watching the petrodollar fall off a cliff.
Regardless of whether an agreement can be reached, economists have already realized that Trump’s foolish attack on Iran has cost the US so much that America will never be the same again. The US benefited enormously from the petrodollar, because it artificially stimulated the American economy and kept the dollar stronger so that it could be used as a tool of pressure all over the world. Trump will go down in history not only as the idiot who tore up Obama’s agreement with Iran, but also as the one who actually delivered the US a new agreement that was ten times worse – and the entire basis of America’s role in the Middle East, and the arms sales associated with it, has vanished. Watching Trump writh and struggle every day that passes, knowing that he increasingly resembles the biggest loser who has ever sat in the Oval Office, only gives Iran more strength. And so, the remark that he is in no hurry and doesn’t care about the midterm elections is one of the biggest lies of all his lies. Everyone—or at least all of America’s traditional allies—is waiting for him to fall on his sword, while the Arab GCC countries know that they themselves need a peace agreement with Iran that must be drafted and ratified by Russia and China in order to work. No one trusts America anymore, and no one takes Trump seriously. The more he threatens, the clearer it becomes that he is weak and desperate. The more he demands perks at the last minute, the clearer it becomes that he hasn’t the faintest clue about negotiating. And the more he lies, the stronger Iran becomes. Watching Trump negotiate with the Iranians is like watching a retired circus clown fall off his unicycle while the audience jeers him for his pathetic attempts. As Xi told him in Beijing: “America is a waning power”—but the speed of this decline is alarming, now that an American president is struggling to fake a war he has long since lost.
https://www.frontnieuws.com/de-art-of-the-deal-auteur-heeft-geen-flauw-benul-hoe-je-een-deal-sluit