The end of  the shoot­ing in Iran should have cleared  the con­fu­sion and skewed judge­ment of the “fog of war”. Instead, it’s been replaced by the fog of the catchall label “deal”.

That Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump applies it to any­thing and every­thing from a ran­dom mus­ing that pass­es for an idea in a social media post, to treaties, cease­fires and trade agree­ments, ought to demand that pun­dits and scribes con­sult a The­saurus every time they approach the Iran story.
Instead, it’s become a kind of ver­bal secu­ri­ty blanket.
In sim­ple terms, “a deal is not a deal until all essen­tial terms are agreed upon, legal for­mal­i­ties are sat­is­fied  and any con­di­tions prece­dent are met.”
The “deal” that is sup­pos­ed­ly the begin­ning of the end of the Iran fias­co, is offi­cial­ly mere­ly a “Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing” (MOU), a term which, just for starters, doesn’t seem to fit the per­sona or nego­ti­at­ing lex­i­con of the self-pro­fessed mas­ter of “the art of the deal.”
An MOU mere­ly  “…records what the par­ties intend to do with­out giv­ing either side a legal rem­e­dy if the oth­er walks away.”
That may seem like nit-pick­ing, but in this case, “the dev­il is in the details” isn’t a cliché, it’s a vital truism.
A deal is the result of a trans­ac­tion­al  process that has clear bound­aries, oblig­a­tions and recourse for infractions.
Trump’s idea-cum-def­i­n­i­tion of “recourse for infrac­tions” bears more than a strik­ing resem­blance to what this “deal” is sup­posed to end. If the Ira­ni­ans did not “behave prop­er­ly “ he said, “we’ll go right back to drop­ping bombs right smack in the mid­dle of their head.”
                              COME AGAIN?
 If that seems to make the sit­u­a­tion more cloudy than clear, imag­ine what it must have been like for the  oth­er lead­ers sit­ting along­side Trump at the recent  G7 sum­mit and try­ing to fig­ure out what was going on in his head so they could, with luck, make some plans for how to deal with it in a way that doesn’t set every­thing back to the wrong side of Square One.
The fact that Trump actu­al­ly stayed until the end of the sum­mit was seen as a mea­sure of success.
That’s like say­ing a kids play­date went well because the brat­ti­est one didn’t throw a tantrum and break every­thing in sight.
Charles A. Kupchan, a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al rela­tions at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, not­ed that Trump “…ruf­fled feath­ers”  by say­ing he might have to start bomb­ing Iran again, and added, “But ruf­fling feath­ers is what Trump does best.”
So much for the U.S.  pres­i­dent as the “leader of the free world.”

                SURPRISE! HE SOLD OUT
The angst, gnash­ing of teeth and right­eous indig­na­tion of Repub­li­can hawks, Democ­rats and lib­er­al pun­dits that Trump caved in, sold out, failed, or only end­ed the war so he’d have a bet­ter chance of his acolytes and toad­ies win­ning office in the Novem­ber mid-terms and save him from inves­ti­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion and poten­tial impeach­ment, is almost laughable.
Even sim­per­ing syco­phants who pass for anchors on FOX were left with cast­ing doubt on Trump’s vas­sals in cab­i­net to mask their hor­ror and confusion.
It takes a point­less war to shine enough light for you to see that self-inter­est, on both a polit­i­cal and per­son­al lev­el, is the only sem­blance of a core val­ue the man has?
Anoint­ing your­self history’s great­est “deal-mak­er” cer­tain­ly means you are the exact opposite.
How many reminders do you need that Trumpian pol­i­cy is stop-gap at best?
But then again, how many sto­ries on the Iran “deal” ever made the point that actu­al­ly achiev­ing  one requires time, com­mit­ment, vision and above all, pro­fes­sion­al nego­tia­tors,  who under­stand the dif­fer­ence between a “deal” that can be cal­cu­lat­ed like a dol­lar for goods trans­ac­tion, and treaties and agree­ments that involve nation­al pres­tige and inter­ests that   encom­pass trade rela­tions and alliances?You can’t expect to make an equi­table and mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial “deal” if  you send fam­i­ly and busi­ness cronies tasked with get­ting a flashy deal the boss can tout at a Press con­fer­ence, to go mano-a-mano with hard-nosed and expe­ri­enced nego­tia­tors look­ing to their own sur­vival, and coin­ci­den­tal­ly also hold the means to stran­gle the world’s econ­o­my and smite your allies, don’t have to wor­ry about domes­tic polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion or mid-term elec­tions and almost lit­er­al­ly laugh in the face at sanc­tions and inter­na­tion­al opprobrium.
If the offi­cial  theme song of the Trump­i­sphere is “YMCA’, an apt one for those who’d like noth­ing bet­ter than to nev­er hear it again might well be Joni Mitchell’s  “The Cir­cle Game”:
“We’re cap­tive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the cir­cle game.”
Psst…wanna make a deal?

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