One safe conclusion amid the confusion is that it remains, a decade into the Trump era, extremely difficult to distinguish between Trump in dealmaking mode and Trump in meltdown mode. Was the President lying when he said that Vance was on a plane to Islamabad? Out of the loop? Playing some clever game of head-fakery with his adversaries? At one point earlier this week, Trump gave interviews to four different publications suggesting that he had a deal with Iran and listing specifics, including that the regime had agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program and to hand over all its enriched uranium. Not only was this not true but it was almost impossible to believe that it could ever be true with this Iranian government, as experts quickly pointed out. “They’re running into the same fundamental hurdle that shaped the long decade-plus of negotiations” that led to Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, Suzanne Maloney, of the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post, “which is that the Iranians are completely immovable on the question of enrichment.”
In foreign-policy circles, there tends to be a lot of learned discussion of just how one is meant to differentiate the signal from the noise at such fraught geopolitical moments. But the wise men, so far as I know, have historically been silent on what to do about a situation in which it’s the President himself who is responsible for so much of the noise while at the same time seeming oblivious to any of the signals.
Trump’s instability and inability to read his adversaries correctly aren’t the only reasons to wonder: Why would anyone make a deal with this man?
Top of mind for Iran’s negotiators, no doubt, is that Trump could hardly be counted on to keep his word even if they were to reach an agreement. There’s also the very real possibility that a future American President would reject Trump’s deal, just as Trump, in the course of his two terms in office, has rejected so many deals made by his predecessors. The long list includes Trump ordering the U.S. to pull out of the Paris climate agreement (twice), the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the World Health Organization, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and, of course, the original Iran nuclear deal negotiated under Obama. In January, he issued an executive order to exit sixty-six different organizations that the U.S. had agreed to participate in during past Administrations, including groups ranging from the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations to the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships in Asia.
The list raises many unanswered questions, not least of which is the possibility that the United States is now in favor of piracy on the high seas. But the general point is relevant not only to the Iranian government, which has plenty of credibility issues of its own after decades of pursuing a nuclear program while publicly disclaiming any interest in doing so, but more broadly to whether any U.S. guarantees—to anyone—will still be valid beyond the limited time horizon of Trump’s erratic Presidency.
