I was listening to an NPR story about the Trump administration's negotiations with Iran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and it got me thinking about what's actually going on here.
Apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has talked about leaning on third-party countries — China, mainly — to impose additional economic sanctions on Iran, since the U.S. doesn't have direct banking or business ties with Iran to sanction in the first place. The NPR commentator, who'd worked in the Obama administration on the original Iran nuclear deal, thought that approach might actually work; China had come to the table before. But it got me thinking about what's going on in Trump's head, and in his inner circle, and among his most hardcore supporters, all of whom seem to believe he's this fantastic dealmaker.
I've done enough business, and worked with enough salespeople and business development people, to know something about how deals get negotiated — and, more specifically, how they get renegotiated. Say you've got a signed contract with a customer or a partner, and one day you decide you don't like it anymore and want to change it. To do that, you need leverage. The term I learned for it was: you need an angle. You look at the contract and figure out what your angle is to get the other side back to the table.
I think Trump is looking at this entire geopolitical situation the way he'd look at a business deal. His first angle with Iran was literally bombing them, on the theory that if he hit them hard enough, they'd come running to the table and accept his terms. Instead, they closed the Strait of Hormuz. Now they've got an angle too.
Here's what Trump doesn't seem to understand, and what nobody around him seems willing to explain to him: doing a business deal inside the United States means operating inside a system — uniform commercial codes, courts you can go to, a place to file a lawsuit if someone won't play fair. Negotiating with another country is nothing like that. There are some international courts, loosely tied to the UN and the EU, but when you're negotiating with a country like Iran, there's no court to appeal to. It's a negotiation between equals, man to man. You think you have leverage, you think you have an angle — and your opponent has leverage and angles of their own. Iran essentially invented the modern game of chess. The people running that country have spent their entire lives thinking in moves, and countermoves, and moves after that.
I've heard people say Trump is playing 3D chess. I don't think he's playing 2D chess. Even if he were, he's playing against a culture considerably better at it than he is.
Which brings me to the timeline. The commentator on NPR pointed out that when the U.S. first negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran under Obama, they budgeted six months for negotiations. It took sixteen. So as I sit here, however many months into this current standoff, I have to wonder whether we're looking at sixteen more months of this — or longer — before there's an actual deal, rather than just an extended state of hostility with no agreement in sight. Something tells me the people who negotiated the first deal with Iran understood what they were doing a little better than the people negotiating this one.