Trump: the Art of Blundering a Deal

“Deals work best when each side gets something it wants from the other.” – Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal

SB VEDA <CALCUTTA>

At a lunch, before J.D. Vance was dispatched to Islamabad, Pakistan flanked by Trump Zionist appendages, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff, The President of the United States joked that if a deal was made, he would take full credit but if it failed, “I’m blaming JD Vance,” to the laughter of his attentive companions, including Vance.

There was some truth, obviously, to the quip. Trump’s political history involves rarely admitting to being wrong or losing, instead spinning losses into successes, according to former aides.

Sending Vance to Pakistan instead of say, Secretary of State Marco Rubio with a diktat that Iran capitulate to every US demand before a deal could be struck was setting Vance up for failure. Trump either had forgotten one of his cardinal rules of dealmaking, which he or perhaps ghostwriter Tony Swartz had penned in the book that cemented him in the public eye as a business guru, The Art of the Deal: that “Deals work best when each side gets something it wants from the other.”

Trump didn’t leave Iran even scraps on the table; the Iranians were told by Vance (who, incidentally called Trum around a dozen times, according to reporting in the New York Times while the president watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship with Marco Rubio) that they had to open the Strait of Hormuz, unconditionally, and they were not permitted to enrich Uranium, leaving negotiators from the beleaguered nation with no bargaining chips.

Confusion reigned even as Vance stepped off of the plane at Nur Khan air base as Reuters reported that the Iranians claimed that, in a goodwill gesture before talks were to begin, the United States had agreed to unfreeze some six billion dollars in Iranian assets, which had been seized originally in 2018 by Qatari and foreign banks. The funds – Iranian oil revenues secured from a South Korean Bank – were due to be released in 2023 in exchange for a prisoner swap, but the Biden Administration reneged on the deal after Iran had held up their end, releasing five US prisoners in Doha. After returning two Iranians, Biden failed to follow through with the release of funds due to the October 7^th attack by Hamas in Isreal for which Iran was blamed by the West because of the country’s support of Hamas.

Ironically, the Netanyahu government of Israel allowed Qatar to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza to support Hamas, to keep Hamas in power and prevent a unified Palestinian state. While Netanyahu did not directly transfer Israeli funds, he authorized this aid as part of a strategy to manage Gaza and maintain a divide between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

US officials later denied the claim reported by Reuters.

So, talks began in a fog within a structure that was fragile even when the ceasefire was announced on Tuesday. Indeed, the terms of the ceasefire itself were a point of contention for the US and Isreal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accused war criminal under the International Criminal Court, claiming that it did not apply to Lebanon. In so doing, he justified continued bombardment of a Southern stretch of that country some 40 kilometres into Lebanon, which the Israeli’s have scarcely hidden, they simply want to take. Already, Lebanon is occupied by Israel, which has built military bases there in the wake of invasions in 1977, 1982, 2025 and more recently 2026. The Lebanese government has asked their counterparts in Israel to give back the land – a request that Netanyahu has seen fit to ignore.

WHAT HAPPENED BEHIND CLOSED DOORS?

To say that security was tight in Islamabad while the talks took place is the understatement of 2026. The city was essentially locked down. Roads had been blocked, checkpoints established, and at least 10,000 security personnel, if not more, were deployed throughout the area where talks were to be held, ahead the negotiations.

The airport bore a remarkable sight: one American plane parked along with two planes bearing tailfins of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Iranians had come the night before, and Airforce Two, the official plane of the Vice President arrived the following afternoon. One wonders what the reaction of the pilot – one of the United States Airforce top pilots – must have been as he brought the formidable C-32 plane (a variant of Boeing’s 757-200) to a stop on the tarmac alongside the Iranian aircrafts.

A startling sight: Airforce Two, Vice-President Vance’s Plane parked alongside the two Iranian planes who brought the delegation from Iran. – source: The Global Calcuttan

Since the press were not allowed the only firsthand insight comes from Professor Seyed Mohammed Marand, a member of the Iranian negotiation delegation who met with Vance and his Zionist wingmen. Appearing podcaster, Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube Podcast, he prefaced his remarks to the former New Jersey superior court judge and analyst on Fox News, by saying, “There was very a great deal of skepticism [among the members of the Iranian delegation]. Anyway, they they  [sic.] never expected any breakthrough because of our [sic.] past experiences. Before the 12-day war, we were negotiating and then… Trump secretly was conspiring…against Iran with Netanyahu to launch a war. Before this war, the same thing happened. So, no one here believed…that there was any big uh there was a good chance of an [agreement],” adding: “But the Iranians were willing to give it a try because obviously Trump is under pressure. The shortages of oil and LNG and fertilizer and petrochemicals and helium are obviously taking a toll and things are going to get much worse soon. So ,they went to see if Trump is prepared to shift especially since he agreed on the Iranian framework – the 10point Iranian plan.”

US officials have maintained that they never agreed on the 10-point plan.

Moreover, Marc A Theissen, a prominent neocon who worked as Bush-Cheney era former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s speechwriter, and author of a much criticized 2010 book, Courting Disaster, which defended the CIA’s use of torture, drafted a piece that the Washington Post published in which, Thiessen brazenly called for Trump to order the assassination of the negotiators. The US, he wrote, must, “carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations. Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed.

That The Washington Post could publish such a piece just three days before the negotiations, indicated that the “media echo chamber,” which former US Counterterrorism Director Joe Kent, a conscientious objector who resigned because he did not agree with the Iran  war, had already poisoned the atmosphere of good faith negotiations before Vance even sat down at the negotiating table. The Post has long been known as “the Agency’s paper” (meaning many of the ‘journalists’ are mere stenographers for the CIA). Carl Bernstein, himself, a former Washington Post journalist, famous for being one-half of the pair who broke the Watergate Story that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, wrote a glaring exposé of the CIA’s tentacles surrounding and squeezing The Post and other news outlets. Unfortunately, according to reports, this has only continued after then Amazon Chairman, billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013. Theissen’s bloodthirsty article evidences the continued influence of intelligence agencies on the media.

Marandi paints a disparate picture of the talks in his interview, saying that the Iranian team had full authority to represent and negotiate for their country. “They didn’t call Tehran,” he claims, elaborating: “Dr. Galibba [chief Iranian negotiator] spoke with the Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei extensively. He new the framework of what was to be negotiated but the other side was not prepared.”

Continuing, Marandi paints a picture of Vance being held hostage by Israeli influence: “Vance was surrounded by two Israeli firsters [Kushner and Whitkoff]… but also he was constantly making phone calls and one of those people who he was calling was Netanyahu and Netanyahu himself said Vance reports to him, which is quite stunning for…the prime minister of a tiny colony to be saying that uh the vice president of the United States reports to him.”

Marandi claimed that Vance talked frequently to Netanyahu, and at one point, one of those calls totally derailed the talks. President Trump reportedly never left his seat while watching a UFC championship with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take even a single phone call.

Marandi claims that Netanyahu was at the root of why negotiations failed. “Netanyahu wrecked uh and the Zionists wrecked the negotiations just like they wrecked the ceasefire because we had a deal with the United States which included Lebanon. The Pakistani prime minister stressed this point and then Trump said ‘no’. And that again was was [sic.] because of Netanyahu. And since Netanyahu is continuing with his genocidal attacks on Lebanon, Iran decided not to allow those extra number of ships to pass through the straight of Homos during the last few days. So, so what Netanyahu did by violating the ceasefire and forcing Trump to violate it, and also by crashing by wrecking the negotiations, he’s made the global economy suffer worse,” Marandi said.

PLOY TO WEAKEN VANCE?

It is clear that Vance had been left to take direction from Netanyahu who had a vested interest in the war continuing. Some say Vance was set up to fail. Before the war began, Vance was the most vocal opponent within the administration starting a war with Iran, the New York Times reported. By abandoning Vance and leaving him flanked by two staunch Zionists, left to take directions not from his President but rather from Netanyahu – a foreign prime minister, who was spending his time in the meanwhile going on TV saying that Israel’s war with Iran and its proxies continues, may well have been a ploy by Trump designed to weaken him.

Why would Trump put his no. 2 in a position to marginalize him when it wasn’t so long ago that he had announced with much fanfare, his choice for VP the 2024 Republican convention? It likely to be yet another sign that Trump has completely reversed gears. The onetime critic of the Iraq War, antithetical to West Asian engagements and forever wars, opponent of aiding Ukraine military while he supported mediating a peace deal with Russia – at some point, something or a sequence of events, caused him to pivot 180°.

Trump, today, is arguably more radically neocon than all the Presidents who preceded him. It happened sometime after the assassination attempt at Butler Pennsylvania and Charlie Kirk’s very public execution. Kirk, one may recall was a supporter of Vance, and he was likely an even more committed opponent of war with Iran. Kirk had also questioned why it had taken the IDF nine hours to respond to the brutal October 7^th attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians. “Was there a stand-down order given,” he asked on his podcast and other public venues. The implication is that Netanyahu had been complicit in the mass murder of his own citizens, something the Israeli government would be loath to have Kirk’s tens of millions of young followers come to believe.

And, then, Charlie Kirk was gone. A voice in public affairs, which had the ear of the President, which had taken decades to build was silenced in an instant – this too publicly and traumatically. Might this have been the inflection point when the neocons took over the Trump Administration?

Vance was already leading in polls of CPAC (an influential conservative organization) members in 2025 with 61% support to become the 2028 Republican nominee for President, though he was not the favorite of the neocons who were advancing Rubio as their prime candidate. Rubio has long shared neocon views. Since the start of the Iran War this popularity has come down by 8%. Rubio, who at one time was polling at 3% has shot up to 35%, making him the main challenger. If Trump had wanted to curry favour with neocons and Zionists, he would have taken actions to put Vance in the crosshairs and shield Rubio. That appears to have happened.

While Vance became the inevitable face of failed negotiations, Rubio was by Trump’s side watching two man viciously attack each other in a cage like animals, blissfully insulated from any blame. Indeed, Trump said he didn’t care what happened in Islamabad because the USA had already defeated Iran.

Indeed, a White House official told the US news outlet, MSNOW, “Realistically, Vance has lost clout within the White House because of his dissent”.

Mediators from Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey will reportedly push for fresh negotiations in the coming days to bridge the gaps between the two sides, according to Axios but Trump has shown indifference to resuming talks. “The ceasefire is holding well,” he said, as though that stopgap could be claimed as a victory.

Meanwhile, speaking to a Chinese media outlet, Marandi gave ominous warnings of what is to come. “The United States is going to intensify the global economic crisis and the price of energy will go up. The shortage of energy, LNG, oil, fertilizers, petrochemicals will increase. and those limited number of ships that have been passing through the Strait of Hormuz will no longer be doing so,” he said.

The Strait of Hormuz devoid of maritime traffic – is this a sign of things to come – source: Gemini

Marandi added: “Iran unlike the Arab family regimes in the Persian Gulf which only have oil or gas and there are deserts. Iran is almost self-sufficient in agricultural products. There are many things that the Iranians could do. Iran is much less vulnerable than US proxies in the region and the global economy is going to get much worse.”

Scrambling to respond to the consequences of his own making Trump has threatened to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. This would only serve to worsen the global economic crisis and stoke tensions with China and India – countries which Iran had been allowing shipments of oil, LNG, and other goods to reach.

Together India and China make up 36% of the world’s population. By putting such a large number of people at risk, Trump is demonstrating that he not only is indifferent to peace talks but also to roughly 3 billion human lives. Has there ever been a demagogue so sociopathic in his outlook? Donald J. Trump has a constituency of just one – himself. As long as his life and interests are protected, he will let the world burn. It’s hardly the portrait of the dealmaker that the book that made him famous painted back in the 1980s.

These are policies representing the art of blunder, the harbinger of despair, the instrument of death and destruction.