Aletho News

Iran’s “Art of the Deal”

By Kevin Barrett | August 16, 2026

Trump wants to make a deal with Iran. That’s why he murdered the current Supreme Leader’s father, along with 168 schoolgirls at Minab and hundreds of other civilians.

Trump’s attempts to make a deal with Iran include: threats of total annihilation, claims that he has already won, obscene Easter outbursts (“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah!” ), unilaterally declaring possession of the “Strait of Trump,” and vacillating between outraged tirades about how Iran will never have a nuclear weapon and deprecations of the “nuclear dust” that is so far underground it isn’t very important, anyway.

Does Trump think his arrogant scorn for the men and women he’s sent off on a deadly fool’s errand will somehow enhance his negotiating position? Does he imagine that telling the crew members of the USS Abraham Lincoln that after eight months at sea with extremely poor logistical support, “they haven’t been out there nearly long enough” will somehow win concessions from Iran’s Supreme Leader?

Is there some method to Trump’s apparent madness—some multidimensional-chess-style negotiating strategy? To find out, we turn to Trump’s magnum opus, The Art of the Deal. According the real author, Tony Schwartz, Trump didn’t write a single word of that book, and probably didn’t even read much of it. Schwartz says Trump spent a couple of hours with his (Schwartz’s) book, made a few minor marks, and falsely claimed authorship.

Schwartz says Trump’s attention span is so microscopic that it was impossible to do meaningful interviews. So he shadowed Trump for 18 months, embellished and mythologized Trump’s activities and purported methods, and wound up “putting lipstick on a pig.”

AI is mostly a curse, but it’s useful for pulling up the main points of a book one would never dream of buying or reading. According to AI summaries The Art of the Deal advocates various dealmaking strategies that may or may not relate to Trump’s attempts to come to terms with Iran, including:

*“Think big.” Trump says he plans to steal all of Iran’s oil and unilaterally incorporate the Strait of Hormuz into the United States, renaming it “The Strait of Trump.” I guess that counts as thinking big—in the same way the asylum inmate who insists he’s Napoleon is thinking big.

*“Go with your gut feeling, don’t listen to the experts.” When Netanyahu and his Mossad chief visited Trump and advocated attacking Iran, and all of Trump’s advisors except Hegseth were against it, Trump went with his gut feeling… which was, we surmise, that if he didn’t do what Netanyahu ordered, video evidence of Trump raping underage girls might be made public.

*“Always deal from a position of strength.” Trump has been so hilariously unconvincing in his pretensions to be dealing from a position of strength— “we’ve wiped out their entire military,” “we have total control over the Strait,” “our regime change succeeded,” “we’ve completely obliterated their nuclear sites,” “their economy has completely collapsed”—that he has indeed developed a very strong position… as a comedian specializing in self-parody.

*“Maximize your options.” Trump’s supposed strategy of never getting locked into a single deal or path, but instead developing all sorts of fallback options, obviously isn’t working as intended: Trump has exactly ZERO options except surrender. So he parodies the “maximize your options” strategy by being wildly inconsistent and incoherent, saying one thing one minute and its opposite five minutes later. Today, we’re going to invade and occupy them and steal their oil; tomorrow, we’re going to nuke them back to the Stone Age; and the day after tomorrow, we’ll just walk away because, contrary to appearances, we’ve already won. In other words, “maximize your options” has become “maximize your bullshit.”

*“Get the word out.” AI summaries say The Art of the Deal advocates “using publicity and sensational storytelling strategically to capture attention and influence public perception.” Trump is certainly succeeding at grabbing public attention through publicity and sensational storytelling about his misbegotten war on Iran. Unfortunately for him, he is grabbing negative public attention by making a complete ass of himself. “Strategic” doesn’t describe his attention-grabbing incoherence, rage, and obscenity—nor his capturing the world’s imagination, and making it collapse in unbelieving laughter, by sneaking out of Air Force One in a food cart while sending staff and journalists into the sky as bait for purported Iranian missiles. A stunningly brilliant publicity stunt, that… for Iran.

*“Deliver the goods: Back up bold claims with real results.” This, of course, is where Trump most obviously falls flat. The gaping abyss between what comes out of Trump’s unhinged mouth and discernible reality is so vast that one can only marvel at the sheer chutzpah that enables him to emit such preposterously vacuous noises.

In reality, it is Iran’s leadership that is giving a master class in the art of the deal.

*Iran is thinking big. Iran is not just trying to win by surviving, as the North Koreans and North Vietnamese and Taliban did. Instead, it is envisaging a radically different future in which the US fully withdraws from West Asia, concedes Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, returns Iran’s stolen money that it has been holding for 47 years, ends all sanctions, concedes Iran’s full NPT-enshrined rights to civilian nuclear activity, and pressures “Israel” into permanently ending its genocidal war against its neighbors including Lebanon and Palestine.

*Iran is not listening to the Western establishment “experts.” Instead, Iran relies on its own expertise and know-how. That’s why the Western experts, who thought the US 100-to-1 military spending advantage was insurmountable, got a rude awakening. Iranian leaders have long understood that an impregnable missile-and-drone force could beat a much larger traditional army and navy, and they’ve been planning for that contingency for decades. What’s more, instead of the “gut feelings” that Trump advocates, Iran listens to the inner voice of faith, cultivating and seeking Divine guidance and inspiration.

*Iran is dealing from a position of strength. As John Mearsheimer and other experts noted, Iran essentially won the war within the first 72 hours. That victory has gotten more crushing with every passing day. The US has exhausted its munitions, while Iran just keeps manufacturing more new rockets and drones than it fires. Iran’s assets are protected, buried deep underground, often beneath mountains, while US assets are vulnerable. Iran’s long range rockets and drones would enable it to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed even if the US somehow managed to occupy the whole Iranian shoreline of the Persian Gulf, a feat that might require as many as a million troops and casualties in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Iran can match any attack on its civilian infrastructure with equal or greater attacks on the infrastructure of US allies. And Iran’s population is united behind its leadership and demands an even more militant stance than the leadership is pursuing, whereas the American people never supported “Trump’s Excellent Iran Adventure” even before its calamitous failure was obvious.

*Iran has all kinds of options. Iran can tighten the squeeze on the global economy to whatever degree it chooses, by calibrating the amount of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz (and, through its AnsarUllah allies, the Bab al-Mandab) and deciding who passes and who doesn’t. It can offer carrots and sticks to regional and global powers. It can get help from Russia and China to whatever degree necessary. It can use land routes, Pakistan-shore routes, and Caspian Sea routes to evade Trump’s highly permeable “wall of steel” blockade. It doesn’t need nukes since it’s got Hormuz, and can therefore use its nuclear capability as leverage, relinquishing any prospective nuclear weapons program in return for concessions. But barring such a deal, thanks to its highly-enriched uranium, it could, if attacked with a nuclear weapon, rapidly build its own nuclear weapons and retaliate (or buy some from North Korea or Pakistan, as Pépé Escobar says they already have).

*Iran is getting the word out with sensational storytelling. Iran can’t take credit for Trump’s catering truck escapade, but they are taking advantage of it with their trademarked LEGO videos that have captured the imagination of the world. Iran has successfully (and accurately) cast itself as the “lovable underdog” handing an obnoxious bully (Trump) his just desserts.

*“Iran is delivering the goods, backing up its bold claims with real results. Unlike Trump, Iran hypes its real accomplishments: Trump claims the Strait is under his control and open for business; Iran slams a drone into one of the very few ships dumb enough to take Trump’s word. Trump claims Iran’s military is “totally obliterated”; Iran points to satellite photos showing that it is the US bases in the region that have been totally obliterated. Trump claims a downed airman has been heroically rescued; Iran releases photos and eyewitness reports showing that what really happened was a botched US attempt to snatch Iran’s uranium that left shot-up US aircraft carcasses strewn across the desert landscape.

Has Mojtaba Khamenei been reading The Art of the Deal? I doubt it. Tony Schwartz’s ideas, which he temporarily credited to Trump, are all-too-obvious distillations of conventional wisdom…tired old bromides, really, that anyone with some time on their hands could easily come up with, even if they weren’t shadowing Donald Trump. We all know it’s best to deal from strength. We all know that “thinking big” (within reason) can sometimes work. We all know that listening to our gut intuition (or better yet, flashes of Divine guidance) is a good idea, and that the experts are sometimes wrong. We all know it’s better to have options than no options. We all know, if we’ve taken any good literature classes, that storytelling rules the world. And we all know that people who back up their bold claims with real results tend to be more successful than those who endlessly bullshit… people like Donald Trump, America’s Bullshitter-in-Chief.

Iran is led by people who have undergone the most rigorous academic training—in philosophy and theology—on Earth. They read and write serious books. And when they are forced to wage defensive war, they bring that brainpower to bear.

The USA is led by an airheaded narcissist who once pretended to write a book, but probably has never actually read a serious book in his life. If Trump really did keep a book of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, as his ex-wife Ivanka claims, it probably served as a talisman rather than material for serious reading.

Mojtaba Khamenei is driving a hard bargain. He knows he has Trump, his father’s murderer, over a barrel.

It seems that Iran is teaching some hard lessons to the purported author of The Art of the Deal.

August 16, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Militarism | Iran, United States