No Deal: Why Trump's Negotiations With Iran Are So Unlikely to Succeed

Joe Conason
Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:20:06 -0700
Opinion

With the Iran ceasefire scheduled to end this week, Vice President JD Vance has returned to Islamabad with his sidekicks Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to resume the abortive peace negotiations that have so far failed. While everyone should wish for success, we have little reason to anticipate news of anything more than an extended truce from the Pakistani capital. We must hope that if and when these talks fail, the president will refrain from his hideous plan to obliterate Iranian civilization and stand warned against such war crimes.

The outlook remains dim, however. Even if Donald Trump had actually written "The Art of the Deal" (he didn't write a word of that bestseller, his first big fraud), it would be foolish to expect that the president or his hapless envoys can deliver a viable agreement with the Iranians anytime soon. Taken together, they lack all the qualities required to achieve the complex diplomatic resolution required in this crisis — like the agreement that Trump so cavalierly discarded in 2017.

During the days after Trump first won the presidency, I consoled my distraught family with a prediction that his combination of arrogance, ignorance, impatience and incompetence would likely blunt his impulses to ruin the country and the world. That insight — based on many years of observing him in New York — proved accurate in many ways, but in this second term we're seeing the downside of the president's personal weaknesses, and those of the figures around him. Having gotten us into another bloody and very costly mess in the Middle East, neither he nor his underlings have a clue how to get us out of it.
Updated: Tue Apr 21, 2026

With the Iran ceasefire scheduled to end this week, Vice President JD Vance has returned to Islamabad with his sidekicks Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to resume the abortive peace negotiations that have so far failed. While everyone should wish for success, we have little reason to anticipate news of anything more than an extended truce from the Pakistani capital. We must hope that if and when these talks fail, the president will refrain from his hideous plan to obliterate Iranian civilization and stand warned against such war crimes.

The outlook remains dim, however. Even if Donald Trump had actually written "The Art of the Deal" (he didn't write a word of that bestseller, his first big fraud), it would be foolish to expect that the president or his hapless envoys can deliver a viable agreement with the Iranians anytime soon. Taken together, they lack all the qualities required to achieve the complex diplomatic resolution required in this crisis — like the agreement that Trump so cavalierly discarded in 2017.

During the days after Trump first won the presidency, I consoled my distraught family with a prediction that his combination of arrogance, ignorance, impatience and incompetence would likely blunt his impulses to ruin the country and the world. That insight — based on many years of observing him in New York — proved accurate in many ways, but in this second term we're seeing the downside of the president's personal weaknesses, and those of the figures around him. Having gotten us into another bloody and very costly mess in the Middle East, neither he nor his underlings have a clue how to get us out of it.

The problem isn't only that Trump and his team of morons neglected to fashion any plan for their sudden urge to attack a faraway country with a million men under arms, a big weapons arsenal and a long history of ideological resilience. That was a historic and particularly stupid mistake, characteristic of Trump's shallow intellect — but now, after inflicting massive damage on Iran, the world and our own economy, he and his government are evidently stuck in the quagmire they created.

The manifest incompetence that has so often hindered Trump, often to our great benefit, is now on full display as he flounders in attempting to secure a negotiated peace. He is unable to firmly decide what terms he is seeking, what is up for discussion, and even who will be doing the talking. He berated our European allies, went to war without building a coalition, then demanded their assistance to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and finally said that nobody needed their help. That childish pout is his usual approach to all global issues but is even more wrong now.

As his predecessor, Barack Obama, understood when his State Department began work on the first Iran nuclear agreement, an international coalition was vital to success. So it would be now if only Trump had the wit and the will to build one.

What Obama also had that Trump disdains is an experienced team of negotiators. The idea that Witkoff, his real estate crony and crypto corruption partner, or Kushner, his son-in-law and nepo billionaire, possess any of the requisite knowledge or skills to achieve a peace agreement is simply ludicrous. The same goes for Vance, whose brief stint in the Senate qualifies him for nothing, let alone a sensitive diplomatic mission. The sight of this gang spending a "marathon" 21 hours in Islamabad and then departing in pique when the talks broke down demonstrated how naive and foolish they were. The final stage of Obama's nuclear deal went on for months.

Of course, we know that Trump lacks the capacity to stay with the process long enough to achieve a worthwhile outcome. The Iranians, as our friend Lucian Truscott IV observes, no doubt believe they can just wait him out.

Finally, Trump lacks the integrity to conclude a lasting peace agreement. He has proved more than once to the Iranians that he is untrustworthy, after ordering the bombing attacks that actually killed not only their supreme leader but his negotiators as well. They know that to him, a treaty that they signed after years of intense bargaining, with the force of law in the United States, meant nothing. Neither did the honor of our country.

The only deal that Trump or any of these men can be expected to uphold is one that enriches them personally. That is the "art of the deal" that this president has been pursuing since the day he returned to the Oval Office.