History will record that the great dealmaker came to Islamabad, saw, and somehow still managed to tweet about it as a tremendous success. Donald Trump’s much-vaunted diplomatic foray into brokering peace between America and Iran has ended, as so many of his grand projects do, in a cloud of recrimination, bruised egos, and a fresh set of tariffs.
The setting was promising enough. Pakistan, playing unlikely honest broker, had rolled out the red carpet, complete with banners proclaiming “Islamabad Talks” and carefully staged photographs of flags fluttering in harmonious unison. For a few hopeful hours it appeared that even the Islamic Republic and the Great Satan might manage a polite conversation. Then reality, that persistent spoilsport, intruded.
Mr Trump reportedly demanded the immediate and total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear programme, the expulsion of all proxies from the region, and — in a flourish only he could devise — naming rights to any future Iranian oilfields. Tehran, unsurprisingly, declined this generous offer. Within hours the talks collapsed in a flurry of walkouts, veiled threats, and the now-familiar Trumpian social-media barrage blaming everyone from the Pakistanis to “sleepy” diplomats who failed to recognise his genius.
The episode carries a certain tragicomic symmetry. The man who once boasted he could solve the Middle East’s problems “in two weeks” has now added another failed negotiation to a crowded résumé. Iran returns to enriching uranium at leisure. Israel continues its shadow war. The Strait of Hormuz remains a floating powder keg. And Mr Trump, never one to dwell on setbacks, has already moved on to declaring the entire affair “the greatest waste of beautiful carpet I’ve ever seen.”
In Washington the recriminations are predictably partisan. Democrats call it another display of amateurism; Republicans insist the Iranians were never serious. Both, as usual, miss the larger truth: in Mr Trump’s world, the deal was never really about Iran. It was about the optics of the strongman striding onto the global stage and bending history to his will. That the history in question proved stubbornly unbending is, in his telling, someone else’s fault.
The mullahs, for their part, return to Tehran strengthened. Nothing rallies the revolutionary guard quite like being able to portray America as both weak and unreasonable. Pakistan, the would-be peacemaker, has learned once again that hosting great-power talks is rather like inviting two quarrelsome uncles to dinner: the food is wasted and the crockery seldom survives.
And so the wheel turns. Mr Trump will no doubt soon announce a “brand new, much better” approach. The Iranians will continue their patient march toward threshold status. The world will watch with the weary familiarity of an audience that has seen this particular show before. As one seasoned European diplomat observed privately: “Donald Trump did not fail to make a deal with Iran. He succeeded, magnificently, in reminding everyone why it was never going to happen.”
