The more Trump threatens, the more it is clear he is weak and desperate, writes Martin Jay. Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su There are lies, and then there are Trump lies. Trump telling reporters that he is in no hurry at all to get a deal with Iran, though, was a lie on a grand scale, making him look even more ridiculous both in front of the Iranians and key players in the region. For a man not in a hurry, he moves with great haste and panic, calling emergency meetings with J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio practically on a weekly basis — which is always followed by a constant menacing narrative that is fooling absolutely no one.
It is the clueless, lost child in a supermarket style that sets Trump apart in the big, grown-up world of international politics — and it has cost him dearly. Critical to getting him out of the hole he dug for himself by believing the BS of Israel in the first place would have been the bond with allies around the world, diplomacy, and working on the respect built up over decades for the White House. When Trump starts his mega tantrum, of course all of these are dissolved instantly, as it becomes clearer each day just how isolated his administration is. This is what you get when you fire all the real diplomats around the world and replace them with U.S. ambassadors from his own cabal of real estate business cronies — people who have been given the gift of a certain country to be ambassador in so that they can use their position to manipulate the market.
And market manipulation has always been key to everything he does. But in recent days, we saw devastating news that accompanied Trump’s latest level of buffoonery, giving us a glimpse as to why we keep getting social media teaser posts from his people claiming that the deal is very close, only for it to collapse and everyone walks away.
Typical of his erratic, desperate, capricious style, he throws a spanner in the works and announces that GCC countries should sign the Abraham Accords — which gives us an insight into how deluded and detached from reality he is about his own, and America’s, influence in the region. He said that any agreement to end the Iran war should include a requirement for several additional countries, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to join the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements from Trump’s first term aimed at normalizing relations with Israel.
This was an outstandingly stupid declaration that immediately backfired on him when Saudi Arabia and others told him in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t going to happen. But it shows that, as deluded as he is, he believes that when negotiations get closer to an agreement, the U.S. has the brute power to ask for a last-minute sweetener. Perhaps Nixon and Reagan would have pulled this stunt, but the world has changed, and Trump is rapidly becoming a shining symbol of America’s weakness and decline as the whole world watches an empire not so much fade as crash into the abyss. Shifting the goalposts at the last moment is becoming Trump’s main ruse, and the Iranians know it and do the same thing. The result is that a deal is farther away than ever, but this is largely down to the fact that Trump has no negotiating skills whatsoever and simply can’t be trusted. It’s also about him negotiating from a position of weakness, which convinces Iran more and more each day that they don’t even need a deal, as they are quite content with controlling the Straits of Hormuz while watching the petrodollar fall off a cliff.
Regardless of whether a deal can be struck, economists have already seen that the foolish Trump Iran strike has cost the U.S. so much that America will never be the same again. The U.S. benefited so much from having the petrodollar, as it artificially boosted the U.S. economy and kept the dollar stronger to be used as leverage around the world. Trump is not only going into the history books as the idiot who tore up the Obama deal with Iran but actually negotiated the U.S. into a new deal that was ten times worse — and the whole basis of America’s Middle East role, and the arms sales that accompany it, has gone. Watching Trump wriggle and writhe as each day passes, knowing he is looking more and more like the biggest loser ever to sit in the Oval Office, just gives more strength to Iran. And so the comment about him not being in a hurry and not caring about the midterms is one of the biggest lies of all his lies. Everybody — or at least all of America’s traditional allies — is waiting for him to fall on his sword, while the GCC Arabs know they themselves need a peace deal with Iran that will need to be put together and endorsed by Russia and China for it to work. No one trusts America anymore, and no one takes Trump seriously. The more he threatens, the more it is clear he is weak and desperate. The more he demands last-minute sweeteners, the more obvious it is that he has no clue about negotiating anything. And the more he lies, the stronger Iran becomes. Watching Trump negotiate with the Iranians is like watching a retired circus clown fall off his one-wheeled bike while the crowd jeers him on for his pathetic efforts. As Xi told him in Beijing, “America is a declining power” — but the speed of this descent is alarming, as a U.S. president struggles to fake a war he’s lost hands down.