Mick Hartley

Ooh, Trump says a new Iran deal is about to be signed. How exciting. Except these claims about the latest new deal happen every few days – and nothing happens. Maybe, just maybe, this time it’ll be different. The problem is, though, that Tehran really has no interest in making deals. Or, to put it another way, the Iranian rulers aren’t the sort of people you can make a deal with. Trump operates in this world of give and take where everyone has a price, but Tehran operates in the completely different world of theological imperatives. Trump just doesn’t get it. At bottom, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

Jonathan Spyer in the Spectator:

It is difficult not to draw the conclusion from all this that Trump’s administration entered the war on 28 February without a proper analysis of what the Iranian regime was, or of its strengths and weaknesses. The President is correct, as he often notes, that Iran has little left by way of a navy. ‘Their navy is totally gone – 100 per cent,’ he told Fox News recently. ‘The air force is totally gone – 100 per cent.’

The problem with this is that the particular strengths possessed by the Iranian regime are not located in the field of conventional air or sea power. The regime in Tehran is an Islamist, ideological gathering, engaged in a ‘forever war’ of its own – of society against society, rather than army against army. Its practical successes, both in retaining power in Iran and in building influence and strength from the Gulf of Aden to the Mediterranean, derive from its ability to mobilise (mainly but not only) Shia Muslim loyalties and commitments and to use these as the engine for political and paramilitary mobilisation.

It is likely that nothing like this really exists in Trump’s world. One imagines him and those around him dismissing such issues as unreal or unimportant, assuming that in the end, everyone’s motives are similar, everything is for sale and a deal can always be reached. His remarks this week following exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran that ‘each of them had their fun’ but that now it was time to ‘get back to the table and make a deal’ appear redolent of such a view.

Trump, caricatured before his presidency as a warmonger, is nothing of the kind. The place, very clearly, where he feels comfortable is where deals are made. And in particular, where deals reflecting the greater physical strength of his side are concluded, with the other side coming to understand the benefits of accepting the power differential and understanding how it can gain from it.

The problem is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not an entity which is prepared to play this role. The US could force it back. But the political support for the inevitably costly means required to do this isn’t there. Hence the present shenanigans.

For a more devastating take-down of Trump in Iran, see Lee Smith at Tablet Magazine:

Less than three months ago Donald Trump was mocking the 2015 deal Barack Obama made with Iran that cleared the regime’s path to a nuclear bomb. “They sent Boeing 757s over there, loaded with cash, hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Trump, referring to the cash ransom Obama aides delivered directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, to bribe the Iranians to agree to the phony deal. “That’s not going to happen with Trump.”

And yet it seems that’s exactly what’s happening with Trump. According to reports Friday, the United Arab Emirates, a key U.S. regional ally, is making $20 billion of frozen Iranian assets available to the Islamic Republic, with $3 billion of it having already been delivered to Tehran, perhaps by a Boeing 757, and maybe even on wooden pallets like those Obama stacked with cash to pay the terror state. Emirati officials deny that they’re buying off Iran on behalf of the U.S., but if Abu Dhabi thought Trump was going to put the clerical regime down for the count, they wouldn’t be giving money to a neighbor that since March has set fire to high-end real estate properties with hundreds of missile and drone attacks. Instead, the Emiratis are paying tribute to the side that looks like a winner.

Thus it seems that what Trump has frequently called the worst deal ever negotiated, and has identified for more than a decade as Exhibit A in the case against American loserdom, has now become the pattern of his own Iran policy. And like Obama’s, the plan is to gorge the IRGC with money and pave the way to a nuclear bomb while restraining Israel from responding to missile attacks by Iran and its proxies for the sake of what it euphemistically calls regional order….