Why There’s No "Art of The Deal" in Iran
And why Trump keeps lying about it
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal - was an agreement between Iran and a group of six countries (China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and The United States). It restricted Iran’s nuclear program to civilian use only, in exchange for sanctions relief, and it included a number of concessions agreed to by the Iranians, including regular IAEA inspections and other ways to verify compliance. By all estimates, it successfully pushed back Iran’s nuclear weapons program by at least a decade or more.
While the JCPOA should have been hailed as a diplomatic win for the entire world, we live in a binary culture so divided that we would rather deal with loose nukes than admit that our opposition could ever do a good thing. And since the JCPOA was largely negotiated by the Obama White House, Trump immediately tore it up, promising that there would be a new deal, negotiated by him, and that it would be greatest deal in the history of deals, ever.
Now we’re at war, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, gas is over five bucks a gallon almost everywhere, and inflation is massively outpacing wage growth, meaning that while oil execs are getting filthy rich, the rest of us are getting a huge pay cut. Oh, and our economy could collapse at any moment. And even if Trump wanted to do something about it, he has very few choices, and none of them are the “win” he so desperately needs. There is no deal to be made because Trump himself removed all of his options the moment we dropped the first bomb on Iran.
So, there will be no deal. At least not anytime soon.
Trump won’t make a deal because he can’t, and Iran won’t make a deal because they don’t have to. So we get what we have now – the quagmire we all knew was coming when Trump announced the start of the war from his golf resort. And as American families struggle more and more each day, as our soldiers are taken away from their families and put in harm’s way for one man’s vanity, we are beginning to understand that there is no plan, there never was a plan, and all of this chaos was unleashed for no good reason at all. That’s what we’re paying a billion dollars a day for – chaos for no good reason.
What I mean when I say Trump “can’t” make a deal is that there are no good deals to be made. Iran would never agree to the terms of the JCPOA again, first because they’re clearly winning the war, and second because they would have no reason of any kind to believe we would honor the terms of any deal Trump made, a lesson the Ukrainians learned when they gave up their nukes in exchange for our protection, a promise Trump broke immediately after being sworn in.
As much as the GOP likes to pretend the whole “Art of The Deal” nonsense isn’t just another Trump scam, the reality is that no one is going to deal with Trump because Trump cannot be trusted. He only negotiates in bad faith, and his only goal in any negotiation is to elevate himself and claim a win. And there are no wins in this scenario, only different degrees of loss. Trump must either create an agreement inferior to the JCPOA and suffer the diplomatic loss we all know is coming, or the war will continue. Neither of these is a win, because there are no wins.
They can declare victory all they want, as they do every time they get in front of a camera, but no one is buying it anymore. Just like we’re not buying gas, food, or healthcare anymore because working-class families can no longer afford them, and Trump has better things to do with our money.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.