This is getting silly at this point

Some people argue that you can actually negotiate with people you don't trust, but there's a not-so-small caveat to that:

Last night was short testing Grok’s new minions feature so this morning’s coffee hit especially hard. Not to mention that the first thing that pops up on my X timeline was this:

Don’t try to click on it, it’s just a screenshot. But it’s an official account and the transcription is accurate. “I don’t trust Iran… why are you saying I trust Iran? I’m the last person to trust Iran. They’ve lied to me constantly.”

So I asked myself the question that I have asked a couple times before (because this is not the first time Trump declares his lack of trust on Tehran), what is the point of negotiating with them?

Then I thought of nothing better but hitting my followers with this wall of text…

Before we get into the thick of the current situation in the Arabian Gulf, I got some interesting replies in here. The main argument is that “people negotiate with parties they don’t trust all the time”. And that’s accurate. Maybe caffeine hadn’t kicked in so my first statement lacked the proper nuance, but that is reality. In business, for example, can happen with a disturbing frequency that could draw deeper face lines on the faint of heart.

But the way I see it, in the majority of circumstances in which you negotiate with people you don’t trust, and sign a document with them, there is usually a higher authority that would enforce the terms of the agreement in one way or another. If all else fails, you can take the offending party to court (which is, in turn, a higher authority at least in theory).

Between the US and Iran there is no higher authority. No entity is going to come to the table with actual power and leverage over them and tell them “Hey boys, you better behave with each other, or I’ll put you together in an oversized shirt for hours on end.”

I don’t know who originally came up with this idea, but it was genius

And no, either Pakistan or Qatar or any other country trying to make the US and Iran ‘get along’ don’t have the leverage or power to actually enforce the getting-along part. In other words, the parties in this case could sign any agreement, break it, and there would be no higher power to punish them for it. The only ‘higher power’ here is the military mojo of either one, and for all intents and purposes I’ll put my chips on the Stars and Stripes side.

But hasn’t Trump been pushing for negotiations since forever?

Totally. I have lost count of the times that Trump has said that ‘negotiations’ are happening in one way or another with Tehran, only for Tehran to say nay a couple hours later. I’d go back and count those instances myself but I ran out of coffee. Maybe I’ll ask an AI agent. They’re good at big numbers.

Anyway, I wrote an essay exactly about that. That Trump keeps crying ‘negotiations’ and they either never materialize, or last less than Biden’s average train of thought during his only term.

But to summarize that essay, there was at least some rationale about Trump’s behavior. ‘Negotiations’ were just signaling an instrument to serve as off-ramp for Tehran to use as escape route before being turned to ground beef. I also explained why was critical to send JD Vance to the slaughterhouse in a hopeless no-win situation.

My research bot tells me that there have been at least 3-4 confirmed negotiation announcements from Trump / denials from Iran, so there’s that. It surely feels like more.

So the problem was not really signaling the negotiations over and over again (and we know that Iran could have been actually in conversations in private, but had to signal the opposite for their own local audience), but Trump saying, out loud, that he doesn’t trust Iran for a second.

I have explained before that Trump says outrageous stuff mostly to 1) insert noise and fog into the media cycles and 2) test crazy policies to see how both Americans and the world react to them. Example of the latter was the 600k Chinese students remark that left Howard Lutnick embarrassed trying to explain it on Fox News. Example of the former is… well, pretty much every other Truth Social post. Few beat Trump’s reaction to Rob Reiner’s death, though.

If ‘lack of filter’ was a guy

But saying that you don’t trust Iran is not something outrageous. Because nobody does. Nobody in their right mind trusts Tehran, and I mean: not even its allies. That’s how regimes work, especially if their brand is based on beliefs, and (more!) especially if their beliefs are aimed at destroying the US, and the Western world at large. In that regard, the Iran regime has been anything from subtle.

Nope, the real problem is when you try to argue that negotiation with people you don’t trust is possible, WHEN, and this is important, there is no higher authority to enforce said negotiations. Precisely one of the perks of having nukes is that you get to enforce anything harder than anyone else, and the most pressing reason the Ayatollah had to be glassed is because of Tehran’s obsession with nukes.

You might try to argue that Trump is playing some kind of 5D chess and that’s why he’s playing dumb, putting ‘negotiations’ and ‘lack of trust’ together three times already, but that would be a hard sell. And you know I love Trump. I love his no-nonsense approach to stuff, but in this realm the optics are going from bad to worse.

Trump might be one of the greatest political figures we have seen in some time, but he’s still only human. He can make mistakes. His inner circle can make mistakes (And I think Hegseth and Rubio is the absolute BEST team he could have for this job), and there’s also the odds of chaos and entropy getting in the way. “There’s a 8% chance this goes South”, someone could have said, and Trump went for it. Well, turns out maybe the 8% chance of the milk being spoiled, happened. And to avoid any unnecessary metaphors, the circumstances are that the attrition war we’re witnessing, it seems that Iran was unusually adept at keeping at it for months. We’re close to half a year of this.

But for the sake of the mental exercise, let’s ask the opposite question:

What IF Trump is actually playing 5D chess?

The only reason that I could come up with is that he wants other GCC countries to join the Abraham Accords, and the only way to do so is to have some ‘pressure’ on them. And which better pressure than to kick the hornet’s nest and see what happens? The UAE already found out, in a very intense way, Iran’s reaction to that kick. Six months in and Iran’s proxies have been more than nagging Saudi Arabia for a while. What would have the US to gain if it just ‘fixes’ the Iran situation, just like that? They already virtually stopped Iran’s nuke ambitions for a long time, which was the initial objective. The second objective, which is ongoing, is safe transit through Hormuz without the looming threat of Iranian vessels and blackmailing whenever Tehran felt like it. That’s… still cooking, let’s say.

The Abraham Accords being expanded would be great for that sought-after stability in the region AND for the American defense-nuclear-compute complex. None of that would happen if Trump just went and ‘finished the job’.

The math that ain’t mathin’ is that the midterms are dangerously close and even if many, many people still support Trump, I’m sure they’re still asking the question: at this point, is this war worth it? And in my humble opinion it still is, but when Trump gives statements like “I don’t trust Iran”, goodwill is inevitably eroded, because that’s how public relations work, and more deeply, that’s how human behavior works. The average American (and the rest of the world) puts the negotiation argument against that, and it’s hard to keep them both nicely paired.

We’ll see what happens…