The War Trump Can’t End
Washington needs a deal, but Tehran needs an enemy.
Washington needs a deal, but Tehran needs an enemy.
For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been preparing for a war that Donald Trump expected would take days.
As virtually every American president since World W ar II has learned, a monopoly on focus can outlast a monopoly on power. America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department. The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity.
The deadlock is both ideological and structural. To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began. Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.
if Trump just gets a piece of paper from the Iranians with some vague promises about negotiating about nuclear programs and Strait of Hormuz.
Brainless dumb fuck thinks Trump would trust a piece of paper like Obama and Biden did. Moron. 
