The Iran Negotiation

I’m inclined to think that the Trump administration doesn’t have any idea what it’s doing in negotiations with Iran:

Now, at a moment the Iranians are far closer to being able to produce a weapon than they were when the last accord was negotiated — in part because Mr. Trump himself upended the deal in 2018 — the president has his chance to show how it should have been done.

So far, the gap between the two sides appears huge. The Iranians sound like they are looking for an updated version of the Obama-era agreement, which limited Iran’s stockpiles of nuclear material. The Americans want to dismantle a vast nuclear-fuel enrichment infrastructure, the country’s missile program and Tehran’s longtime support for Hamas, Hezbollah and other proxy forces.

What is missing is time.

And:

The negotiations begin on Saturday, with Steve Witkoff, the president’s friend and fellow New York real estate developer, reportedly leading the American team. Mr. Witkoff, who is also handling negotiations over Gaza and Ukraine, has no known background in the complex technology of nuclear fuel enrichment, or the many steps to nuclear bomb making.

The first question he will face is the scope of the negotiation. The Obama-era deal dealt only with the nuclear program. It didn’t touch Iran’s missile program — that was under separate strictures by the United Nations, which Tehran ignored — or its support of terrorism.

Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, has said a new agreement with the Trump administration must deal with everything, and that Iran’s vast nuclear facilities must be completely dismantled — not just left in place, running at dead slow, as they were in the 2015 deal.

Well. Okay then. I am forced to remind everyone that Witkoff has not ended the Israel-Hamas War or the Russia-Ukraine War, and that dividing his attention and responsibilities by adding a portfolio that is very possibly a tougher haul than either is, in word, insane.

One of the things that I’ve learned in my twenty years at the Patterson School is that diplomacy requires more time and investment than many scholars of international relations are willing to allow. A large country like the United States has many professional diplomats (even in these dark days), but executive attention is limited; if the President and his/her principals are not focused on a negotiation, it is difficult for even professional diplomats to reach the kind of agreement that actually resolves an international problem. Strategic wargames that include diplomacy usually abstract this in some sense by creating a limited pool of “diplomacy points,” which serve simply to indicate that executive attention can’t be everywhere at once. Erik mentioned the report indicating that Joe Biden was spending a lot of his mental energy in the final year of his term managing the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts, and as such it’s not at all surprising to me that he didn’t have a lot left over for the most difficult job in the world, running for POTUS.

It is also not surprising that President Trump has not yet ended the Russia-Ukraine or Israel-Hamas wars. These are exceedingly difficult diplomatic tasks and better men than he have tried and failed (I do reserve some contempt for those who thought Biden could just wave his magic President wand and make either war go away). Negotiations with Iran will be equally difficult, no matter how many B-2s are stationed at Diego Garcia. It is evident, however, that the President’s attention is not locked on ANY of these three problems at the moment. As such, I am absolutely not optimistic that any of the three are going to resolve into a successful negotiation anytime soon. We shall see.