Negotiating

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, fresh from having conveyed incorrect information that resulted in the attacks on Iran, will be going back to negotiate a ceasefire. They will be joined by Vice President JD Vance, who was seen only last night on teevee dissing the Iranians.

There is no document that both sides  have agreed on as a ceasefire, but there may be less firing today, so hooray? Iran has a ten-point document and the US has a 15-point document of demands, while Israel believes that it is not subject to any of that and continues to devastate Lebanon. Donald Trump seems to have posted on social media that Iran’s document is the basis for talks, although the US rejected it earlier.

The documents are directly contradictory. At this point, it’s hardly worth anyone’s time to go over the specifics. No enrichment of uranium. Ues enrichment of uranium. No missiles. Yes missiles. The biggie is Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump has both used as one of his reasons for screaming imprecations at Iran and has suggested that the US split the tolls levied on ships, in contrast the the historical US position of freedom of the waterways.

Trump has managed to perfect his tactic of making his positions perfectly opaque. He does it by enunciating that kind of negation, often in the same communication, and by acting precipitously, as in the last two attacks on Iran, perpetrated during negotiations. He has said that he doesn’t know what he will do next, and this often seems to be the case. A fully unreliable actor.

The problem with that is, of course, that nobody can trust him, particularly when he accompanies that unreliability with maximal threats of civilizational erasure. Presumably he envisions maximizing threats as an irresistable way to force the other party to his will. Presumably that has worked with his staff as he throws his food against the wall. The Iranians have not been impressed so far.

Game theory says that an actor can afford such behavior if the others are fully subordinate or if an encounter is a one-off. Likewise for a win-lose stance, which seems to be the only way Trump can understand any interaction. But we are all stuck here on the Earth with each other. Trump has painted himself into a corner by not being aware of alternative methods of negotiation, which increases his frustration and escalation. His meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was followed by an all-caps howl of frustration.

His negotiating style has been attributed to his real estate background, but the more I think about that, the less it makes sense. I’ve just sold a house, and I can’t see how Trump’s tantrums would make a difference except for my walking away. I’m in closer contact now with people who do real estate. In this small town, he would be shunned.

It may be that he was dealing in a mafia-inflected milieu, where threats and potential violence were part of the currency. Or that his shouting and threats were at people who worked for him and actually did the negotiating.

Then there’s the narcissism and what this adventure, along with recent developments like the Supreme Court’s taking away his precious tariffs, may have done to his expectations and image of himself, but I’ll leave that to the psychologists.

Susie Wiles has said that she sees her job as enabling him. It would be interesting to know more about why he backed down from his threat against Iran, and if the people around him had anything to do with that. It really is hard to strategize about someone whose behavior is truly random and disconnected from any consideration of benefit except in a very narrow concept of how the world works.

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