The Art Of The Demand--60 Days To Hell

Well, I think we can call this progress. The Trump regime has dropped the pretense of offering a “deal”. As I understand deal making, each side gives a little and each side gains a bit of what they want. But the Spokesgirl has made it plain for all—ain’t no deal making going on here, just demands:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

JUST IN:

 The White House has again threatened WAR on Iran:

"Iran has a choice to make. You can agree to President Trump's demand, or there will be all hell to pay."

US President Donald Trump has given Iran a 60-day deadline to reach a deal on its nuclear program, saying he will intervene militarily if no agreement is reached within that period. — Politico.

At first glance there doesn’t appear to be much art in this art of the demand. You simply announce that it’s my way or the highway and start making threats. Then the other side throws up their hands and says: I give up—you win! Please, may I kiss your bum?

That’s how it worked with the tariffs, right? Well, no. It turns out that international geopolitics isn’t really just the same as New York City real estate dealing, or even like American political debates, where you call people names and nothing much changes. China just said, No, and now Trump is telling us to pay no attention, that China really, really wants a deal, but the Chinese “peasants” don’t know how to get the deal making process started—they need to call him and surrender. It sounds like Trump hasn’t met many Chinese. But maybe he’s beginning to realize that the Chinese wrote the book on deal making long before he did:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

JUST IN:  President Trump exempts smartphones, computers, and chips from the new tariffs on China

Some of these furriners are rather shrewd—and not just the Chinese. While Trump threatens war, look what Iran is up to:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

NEW:  US-Iran nuclear talks in Muscat, Oman, will begin today.

Reportedly Iran will propose to the US to support the 'establishment of a nuclear-free Middle East', essentially the denuclearization of Israel - Iran Nuances reports

It looks like Iran has embraced the art of the deal, while Trump has descended into the art of the demand, which ain’t so artful. My guess is that most of the world will prefer the Iranian deal to the Trumpian demand—a demand that supposedly ends in hell, when the Strait of Hormuz closes. Guess what? Trump doesn’t get to exempt oil tankers from destruction or blockade while inflicting hell on Iran—Iran has its own choices. This is a two way street, not a one way highway.

Now, some may say, No, you don’t understand the art of the deal. The art here is that Trump blusters and threatens and then accepts the other side’s deal. Pay no attention to what Trump says, because that’s not what the US negotiators will actually say behind closed doors. To Americans, it will look like Trump won by his threats when Trump trumpets that he has won, because Americans won’t read the details and won’t much care.

Just like with China. The tariffs will, hopefully, come down gradually or take a different shape, and Trump will claim victory. The problem with that is that in the shark tank of American politics Trump begins to look to the sharks like he’s simply treading water and is vulnerable, and that’s not a good look when he should be resolutely striking out for the ladder to get out of that tank. So, maybe Trump only cares about how all this foreign policy stuff looks to Americans, who famously pay little attention to the rest of the world? To the rest of the world it may end up looking like China or Iran is the winner, but Americans won’t really care? Is that the art—what Trump is banking on?

Well, first word from the talks kinda looks that way, if that’s your preferred narrative. Just as Iran demanded, it looks like the actual talks—as opposed to the Trumpian rhetoric—were restricted to Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief. None of the other nonsense about demands for Iran to surrender its missiles, its foreign policy, and its sovereignty to the Anglo-Zionist combine appears to have been on the table:

Saeed Azimi @SaeedAzimi1772

Iran MFA says in a statement talks will continue next week.

"Talks were held in a constructive atmosphere, based on mutual respect," and the delegations exchanged the views of their respective governments about "Iran's nuclear program and sanctions relief with the mediation of Oman FM," says the MFA statement.

So, then, in this understanding the art begins to look a bit like a complicated cut and run, or climbdown, or both. Is Trump really just positioning to significantly reconfigure America’s Middle East presence, after making his demands/deal and then announcing peace in our day? Has Iran agreed to help Trump save face while giving up essentially nothing? And is that why Witkoff spent the day before his talks with Iran the way he did? Instead of closeting himself to do intense prep work on Iran and the Middle East, he was in St. Petersburg talking to Putin. We know that the Russians haven’t budged on Ukraine, but we also know that Putin brokered the current US - Iran talks. So is Putin helping to facilitate Project Extricate—for a price? Is the real deal, when all is said and done, more with Russia than with anyone else?

Even under this scenario there are still major complications. The first is Israel and how Jewish Nationalists in America will react to this sort of deal. Then again, will Israel withdraw in Syria while Turkey advances? What will happen in Gaza? These problem areas will not go away. The second complication is, obviously, totally related. What about Yemen? Does Trump activate another Operation Climbdown and walk away from his war on Yemen, writing off the $1 billion-and-counting expended in that losing venture as seed money for the deal with Iran—which will simply look like a return to the Obama JCPOA under new, Trumpian branding? That could work domestically—virtually no Americans think about Yemen from one day to the next—but a climbdown will signify a major defeat for America and its way of ruling the world.

This all looks super complicated—so many moving parts—and definitely not something you should try at home.

In some Trumpian sense, I kinda get this. Trump is actually accomplishing a lot domestically, with his revolution in American politics. Trump’s problem from that standpoint is that he doesn’t garner much publicity from that gradual process. Sure, he tries, he does what he can, but defying judges doesn’t sell as well domestically as does defying Chinese or Iranians. He ends up having to wait while the wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine.

What Trump really needs, politically, is to stay before the eyes of America like a MAGA colossus. On the foreign policy front he can do that by threatening all and sundry, by carefully picking countries to bomb that can’t really retaliate too much, by launching high profile negotiations with traditional “enemies”. Looked at in the light of the old adage that all publicity is good publicity, it works. However, the problem that arises is that America’s maneuver room on the world stage has become more restricted with the rise of Russia, China, and BRICS, yet the Trumpian style is to raise expectations.

Can Trump pull this off? Can he remain before the public eye by raising expectations for grand peacemaking deals, while substituting withdrawals, climbdowns, and even slapdowns of erstwhile war mongering allies? That can work in some areas—Ukraine and NATO definitely come to mind—may be quite a bit tougher with regard to the Middle East, and could potentially backfire big time on the economic front, as we saw with the tariffs fiasco. The last two areas have the potential to seriously affect domestic politics. To my mind, what he really could use at this point is a significant domestic victory—one that will appeal to his non-base voters, and not just to political news junkies. Perhaps that was the idea behind the tariffs, but we saw how that worked out.

All we can say is, wait and see. America is in a danger zone, and Trump isn’t leveling with America. Parse this as you like—where does it fit in with the preceding speculations:

Trita Parsi @tparsi

58m

As predicted, both sides can say they were right. Talks were held for 2.5 hours indirectly, and at the end, @araghchi and @SteveWitkoff briefly spoke to each other directly as well.

It would have been a huge mistake and a missed opportunity if the Iranians had not agreed to the direct chat at the end.

But the direct chat is also an indication that on substance, the talks were constructive and fruitful.

Hopefully, the talks next week will become increasingly direct.

The process is self-reinforcing. The more direct the talks are, the higher the likelihood of success. And the more successful the talks are, the more open the Iranians are to conducting them directly.

For Trump, he will take pleasure in knowing that there were never any direct talks at this level between the US and Iran under Biden...

At this point it looks like a Trump win—depending on his actual goals. It seems obvious that Witkoff did NOT simply relay Trumpian threats of death and destruction—that was for the domestic constituency, and especially for the Jewish Nationalists who funded Trump’s campaign. But if this initiative is to succeed, at some point in the not too distant future Trump will need to bring the hammer down on Israel. Simply put, neither Trump nor the US can afford to maintain its Middle East war indefinitely. There’s too much else going on that involves Trump’s and America’s true interests. This highjacking of America by Jewish Nationalism will need to end.