SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Donald Trump is a lousy negotiator. For all his branding as a master of the deal, he understands nothing of the logic or the nuance of negotiation.

https://x.com/RezaNasri1/status/2093054721389187093

Reza Nasri

Donald Trump is a lousy negotiator. For all his branding as a master of the deal, he understands nothing of the logic or the nuance of negotiation. He knows a single formula: apply disproportionate pressure until the other side concedes. It is not a strategy but a reflex, and a losing one. In business it delivered him six bankruptcies. In international relations it has delivered chaos.

Negotiation is a discipline, and a demanding one. It rewards those who study the other party: their history, their culture, their political system, the specificities that make a nation what it is. These are not ornaments; they are the essential data of any serious talks. Trump possesses none of it. He exerts pressure, and when pressure fails to produce the result he wanted, he does not stop to draw the right lesson. He simply doubles down on the only instrument he recognizes.

Iran was his opportunity to prove otherwise, and the terms of a fair agreement were neither hidden nor hard. He had only to recognize Iran's inalienable rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty — its right to run a peaceful nuclear program — and to build mechanisms addressing his professed concern about militarization. 

This is the most basic lesson of the craft, the one Roger Fisher and William Ury lay out in "Getting to Yes" : look past the positions each side proclaims to the interests underneath, then design arrangements that satisfy both. Iran's interest was sovereignty and energy; Washington's was non-proliferation. Those interests were reconcilable. A competent negotiator would have reconciled them.

Trump launched a war instead.

He engulfed an entire region in a devastating conflict. He shook the global economy. He revived dangers that had lain quiet, dragging the Strait of Hormuz back onto the map of catastrophe. He ordered the assassination of a religious leader, and in the campaign that followed thousands of civilians were killed, among them 168 schoolchildren. On the most personal of levels, he authored his own record: that of a war criminal.

Now, with the war still unsettled, he reaches once more for the reflex. The Memorandum of Understanding remains the only framework capable of producing a settlement, the sole structure through which these underlying interests might yet be reconciled. Rather than build on it, Trump has opened an unhinged campaign of economic sanctions aimed not only at Iran but at the entire international community that deals with it. It will not force Iran to its knees. It will only deepen the wreckage and push any settlement further out of reach.

This is the tragedy of a man who mistakes coercion for skill. Real negotiators expand the realm of the possible; they turn adversaries into signatories. Trump knows only how to squeeze, and when squeezing fails, as it inevitably does, he squeezes harder, until the bankruptcy this time is no longer his own, but his country’s.