When does Iran figure out it is being played by Trump?
Trump will never sign anything Iran would accept. That’s settled. See my pieces beginning with Iran: The Midterms Are Not on Trump’s Calendar, and earlier ones going back to the beginning of the war.
The open question is: when does Iran realize it’s been played?
Around the first of October, or perhaps a little sooner. Not election day.
Tehran is watching November like a countdown, certain he panics into a deal before the vote.
Iran’s whole theory of leverage was the strait: close Hormuz, choke a fifth of the world’s oil, make him pay to reopen it. He isn’t buying it back. He’s clearing it himself — Navy in the water, mines coming up — calling it a favor to the world.
They cling anyway, because they’ve got the wrong man in their heads — Obama, who wanted his deal and could be bled toward it across two years. They keep waiting for that president to walk in. The ghost of Obama past.
It will start to dawn on them as November gets closer.
A negotiation that’s permanently “almost done” gives a newsroom nothing to run. Same three words every week — deal is close — no motion, no winner, nothing to photograph. The readers stop clicking. The thing gets filed under weather. And once the clicks dry up, editors do the only thing editors do: move the story off the front, then off the page, then out of the morning meeting.
The “deal is coming soon” story becomes the invisible man from the Monty Python sketch — the one who is so tedious and boring that after a while, he becomes invisible.
You don’t think Trump is being boring and repetitive on purpose, to kill the story?
The next two years after that, if the regime survives, will be the same.
Other drama from a desperate Iran could reopen the kinetic phase.
A negotiated settlement is not a likely outcome on any timeline.