US President Donald Trump does not appreciate the fact that Iran will not succumb to pressure and his approach lacks a detailed policy necessary to hammer out international agreements.
“President Trump’s diplomatic style is to thump adversaries over the head with threats, and then after beating them up offer to sit down to talk and try and seal a deal,” Wendy Sherman, former undersecretary of state for political affairs, who led the negotiations that produced the Iran nuclear accord, told Yahoo News in an interview published on Saturday.
“What he doesn’t understand is that Iran has a culture of resistance that equates giving in to those kinds of public threats as surrender, and they won’t surrender,” Sherman added.
The greater shortcoming of the Trump approach, she says, is that it lacks the detailed policy preparation and follow-through necessary to turn verbal agreements into binding international accords.
“Trump likes to make headlines with his tweets, and he favors the pomp and circumstance of summits, but with both Iran and North Korea, there is no sign that he has put in the advance work, or that his team has shown the persistence and precision that these complex deals demand.”
She added, “Trump just reverts to the same transactional approach he used in real estate, which led him into multiple bankruptcies. I worry that he will be similarly taken in on some of these geopolitical deals, and that is extremely dangerous.”
Much to the dismay of close European allies, Trump tore up the Iran nuclear accord in May without an obvious replacement, and then in a familiar pattern, recently took to Twitter to issue an all-caps threat of military destruction against Iran.
In a speech two days later, Trump invited Iran back to the negotiating table to reach a “real deal.”
