"Facing Iran, Trump should consult the Trump of 1987."

【Today’s Briefing】How good would it be if President Trump took his own advice from when he was younger? Since Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz and threw the global economy into chaos, he has shown several times that he is, seemingly, eager to reach an agreement.

When it comes to dealing with Iran, Donald Trump in 1987 offered useful advice to today’s Donald Trump. In his book The Art of the Deal, he warned: “The most deadly thing when doing a deal is to appear to be eager to get the deal done. It makes the other side smell blood, and then you’re dead.”

How good would it be if President Trump took his own advice from when he was younger? Since Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz and threw the global economy into chaos, he has shown several times that he is, seemingly, eager to reach an agreement.

▲ This video screenshot shows that on April 1, U.S. President Trump delivered remarks at the White House in Washington. (Xinhua News Agency photo)

Eager to calm the markets, Trump announced on March 30 that he had made “significant progress” in reaching an agreement with a “more rational” new administration. If he can’t reach a deal, he will completely destroy Iran’s power plants, oil facilities, and perhaps even desalination plants. He had twice unilaterally delayed his final ultimatum to Iran—moving the deadline from 48 hours to a week, and then loosening it to more than two weeks.

Another highlight in the book is “controlling costs.” The young casino mogul said: “You can have an incredible dream, but if you can’t turn it into reality at a reasonable cost, it’s never going to have much value.” Trump ignored this wise advice. Estimates suggest that the war has already swallowed up about $25 billion in direct military costs for the United States, and the Pentagon is now seeking an additional $200 billion. Indirect costs could be much higher. The OECD estimates that if the war continues, next year’s global GDP could fall by 0.5%, while the inflation rate could rise by 0.9 percentage points.

How did Trump get stuck with this mess? The Art of the Deal suggests that both retaliatory attacks and blind optimism are at play. The book says that if someone wrongs you, “you have to hit back—hard”; “risk makes things worse, (but) in the end, things usually turn out for the best.”

Trump has always followed this advice. Sometimes, it has paid off for him. But in Iran, his war has offered almost no benefits so far, other than destroying most of Iran’s conventional weapons. The regime has kept hold of highly enriched uranium—and now has even more reason to build nuclear weapons.

A member of former President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, Thomas Raitt, argues that negotiations between Iran and the United States, conducted through intermediaries, are “doomed to fail.” One of the obstacles is a complete lack of trust. In the book, Trump admits that he gets deals done by lying. Nathan Rappaport of the International Crisis Group says that Iranian leaders rarely trust the U.S. president, especially with ample reason to doubt Trump’s sincerity. He tore up the agreement the United States reached with Iran during President Obama’s tenure, and approved bombing operations before the scheduled meeting.

This article was published on March 30 on the website of the British magazine The Economist, originally titled “The art of Trump and bad diplomacy.”

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