Michael-In-Norfolk - Coming Out in Mid-Life

Saturday, May 30, 2026

The price of oil remains elevated, although down at the moment from previous highs, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and the Felon is desperate to find an exit ramp from the war of choice he foolishly launched with no apparent long term strategy. Of course one reason oil prices are down at the moment is the Felon's latest claim (we have heard this storyline numerous times before) that some kind of "deal" with Iran is perhaps in the offing. If negotiations fall apart - which a piece in The Atlantic explains remains possible - oil prices will rise again and continue to drive inflation at home is America even as the Felon's approval rating is only at 34% - likely that high due to MAGA cultists who live in an alternate reality. As the cited piece in The Atlantic observes, the Felon in his delusions thought his war of choice would last mere days whereas Iran's regime has been planning for a war with America for 47 years. Adding to the mix are the Felons lousy negotiation skill and novice negotiators (which were examined in a prior post) up against Iran's "bazaar style" negotiating tactics that aim to wear down the opposing side through attrition. The final obstacle the Felon faces is that now Iran realizes that its ability to close the Strait has greatly strengthen its hand. Here are article excerpts:

For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been preparing for a war that Donald Trump expected would take days.
As virtually every American president since World War II has learned, a monopoly on focus can outlast a monopoly on power. America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department. The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity.
The deadlock is both ideological and structural. To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began. Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.
Trump may pause his war against Iran. But the Islamic Republic’s 47-year ideological war with “the Great Satan, America, and its trained beast, the Zionist regime”—in the recent words of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader—will continue in earnest. U.S.-Iran negotiations yield zero trust and zero closure. A win-win scenario does not exist. Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, regional proxies, and missile programs will menace the Middle East so long as the Islamic Republic is in power.
Tehran is transparent about its negotiating tactics. “The Iranian negotiation style is generally known in the world as the ‘bazaar style,’ which means continuous and tireless bargaining,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in his 2025 diplomatic memoir. “This method is a process of interaction that requires great patience and time,” and thus, “he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.” Trump has twice grown bored with diplomacy and resorted to military action against Iran.
The first phase of any deal would require Tehran to de-mine the Strait of Hormuz and cease harassing vessels traversing it, and the United States to lift its blockade proportionally—restoring, in theory, the prewar reality of an unfettered international waterway. For Tehran, the strait has become its greatest source of leverage. Iran’s implicit control over it—and the global economy—is both a potential fixed-revenue stream and a deterrent against future attacks. “This time, papers and signatures are not guarantees,” Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said. “The objective guarantee for preserving any agreement is the Strait of Hormuz.”
A coordinated reopening of the strait could be a prelude to successful nuclear negotiations, but it could also prove merely an intermission in fighting. The resumption of traffic through the strait would bring down oil prices—a crucial strategic objective in itself for the U.S., because it would make a return to war, if necessary, more sustainable, one senior official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters. Similarly for Tehran, the pause would provide much-needed cash and an opportunity to refortify its military.
Trump-administration officials believe that once the strait is reopened, Tehran will have a hard time closing it again: “It’s a card they can only play once,” the senior official said. Tehran appears confident taking opposite bets: that it has established a de facto Strait of Hormuz protection racket, and that the closer Trump gets to the U.S. midterms, the less appetite he will have to restart the war. For both sides, a tactical pause may relieve economic pressure and make reaching a broader diplomatic compromise feel less urgent, rather than more so.
The most difficult negotiation is the nuclear one. Trump will seek a commitment from Tehran to never pursue nuclear weapons, including a freeze on long-term enrichment, removal of its 400-kilogram stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the establishment of an invasive inspections regime. But Tehran has drawn an obvious lesson from modern history: The regimes that gave up their weapons programs—in Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine—made themselves vulnerable to foreign intervention. North Korea, meanwhile, has survived behind a nuclear shield.
A former Iranian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid government scrutiny, told me that Tehran retains the knowledge and now has the will to build nuclear weapons in short order. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have as many as 30 underground “missile cities,” likely built with North Korean assistance, some reportedly buried deeper than the nuclear facilities already destroyed. Like Gaza, Iran is becoming a place where the authorities and their weaponry thrive underground while citizens languish aboveground.
The U.S. official told me that Washington expects to know “within a few weeks” whether this peace process has legs. The Trump administration plans to present Tehran with two possible paths. The first would require Iran to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, its regional proxies, and its foundational hostility toward America and Israel in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in Persian Gulf investment that could make Iran “one of the richest countries in the world.” The second path would be to preserve the status quo: Iran’s revolutionary ideology would remain intact, but at the cost of a continued naval blockade, crushing sanctions, and the potential renewal of war.
Over the past 47 years, Tehran has made major compromises only twice. The first was its 1988 decision to end the Iran-Iraq War—after eight years and an estimated 200,000 Iranian deaths—a concession that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini likened to drinking poison. The second was the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration. In both cases, when faced with overwhelming economic and diplomatic pressure, a viable diplomatic exit, and no demands to change its revolutionary identity, Tehran showed itself capable of tactical compromise.
“Iran never won a war,” Trump tweeted in January of 2020, “but never lost a negotiation!” This aphorism has become received wisdom, yet it misses a central fact: Any government willing to immiserate its own population rather than compromise can look like a tough negotiator.
“The main principle of bargaining is practice: repetition, repetition, and repetition,” Araghchi wrote, “so much that the other side of the deal, as they say, ‘gets numb’ and gives its consent.” Up until now, Tehran’s negotiating style has not numbed Trump into consent but agitated him into conflict. Yet conflict, like negotiation, has not resolved the fundamental problem that has confounded every American president since 1979: The United States needs a deal, but the Islamic Republic needs the United States as an adversary. America seeks resolution. Iran is committed to revolution.

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Thursday, May 28, 2026

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Why Trump Keeps Getting Rolled By Iran

Another day and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil prices are rising again, and no end to the Felon's war of choice appears in the offing as Iran and the USA trade strikes on each other despite the supposed cease fire. By all reports, the Felon is desperate to find an exit strategy as gas prices and inflation continue to be the largest concerns of many voters, including within the MAGA base. Unfortunately, as a piece in The Atlantic lays out, the Felon is actually a lousy negotiator who has surrounded himself with bootlickers who lack the experience, knowledge and competence to steer the Felon in the right direction, assuming he even listens to them. The Iranians seem to understand who they are up against and appear happy to keep the Strait closed and allow the Felon to twist on the rope of his own making. Meanwhile, Americans increasingly believe that the war will continue and seem less and less inclined to believe the Felon's lies about progress in negotiations. Here highlights from the article that underscore the Felon's poor negotiating position:

Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him.
He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.
The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. . . . . despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday.
Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.
The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach.
First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel.
The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.
Second, as the roller-coaster weekend demonstrates, Trump is mercurial. Keeping one’s bottom line ambiguous in a negotiation is canny, but Trump doesn’t appear to have any bottom line in his own mind. . . . Lacking a goal in the war means he also lacks a goal in the peace talks. Iran may be able to use that to its advantage, but even if its leaders are eager to make a deal, they will be understandably reluctant to agree to anything that requires a leap of faith, because Trump may change his mind at any moment, as appeared to happen amid Republican backlash in recent days.
Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement. . . . Iran, sensing Trump’s need for a deal, has maintained a hard line.
All of these factors combine to mean that Trump is ill-equipped to win any negotiation, much less one that is the result of his own blundering into war. Trump is likely to muddle through, as he has so many times in his career, and reach some sort of agreement with Iran. He will surely say that it’s a great triumph, but reality will be harder to ignore than it was when Trump’s failures merely hurt his own bank accounts.