Iran turns to Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal book for negotiations | World | News
The US President has swung from praise of the regime to threats of violence (Image: Getty)
Confused Iranian diplomats engaged in peace talks with the United States have resorted to reading Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal to make sense of his erratic negotiation style. According to The Wall Street Journal, Iranian diplomats have been reading Trump’s 1987 book, co-authored with journalist Tony Schwartz, to gain insight into how the president approaches decisions.
Throughout the war and especially since negotiations to bring it to a close started, the US president has hopped between praise for the Iranian regime and destructive threats. This weekend, as talks between delegations from the two countries continued the US president is said to have threatened Iranian officials over any attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil shipping routes. Regarding the strategic waterway, Mr Trump warned during discussions: “You won’t even make it back to your fu*king country,” according to accounts of the exchange.
The book spent 48 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list (Image: Getty)
In early June, about a week before both nations signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that aims to sow the seeds of peace, Trump threatened to ‘bomb the s*** out of’ Iran if it did not sign an agreement with the US.
In April, as Trump pressed for Iran to “make a deal”, he wrote on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” a threat widely condemned across the world.
After Trump’s latest threat this weekend as talks continued in Switzerland, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf – Iran’s chief negotiator – told his US counterpart, JD Vance, that the threats were a breach of the MoU’s opening paragraph which had just been signed a few days prior.
He told Iranian state tv: “I told Vance, ‘Today your president has issued threats. Understand that we never negotiate under threats or pressure’.
“The American side sought another meeting through the mediators, but we refused.”
Ghalibaf later boasted that the deal struck between the United States and Iran was effectively an admittance of defeat by Washington.
Trump’s threats saw peace talks briefly stall this weekend (Image: Getty)
Many within Trump’s Republican party have been critical of the deal, as legislators attempt to stop the war through the senate.
The US senate has for the first time approved a war powers resolution amid growing concerns from a number of Republican legislators in both the house and senate over both the war and the deal Mr Trump struck with Iran to end it. The house of representatives approved the resolution earlier this month.
“Time after time, the vast majority of senate Republicans sided with Trump and his war instead of the American people,” said senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
Mr Schumer said Americans have paid the price for “Trump’s historic blunder in Iran. It’ll go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made”.
In the past, as many as four Republican senators have voted for the war powers resolutions, and they did so on Tuesday – Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
