He Did This Before: Trump Is Blowing the Iran Deal Just Like He Blew Afghanistan
And the people who believed in us are paying the price — again.
Video discussion for paid subscribers follows article:
There’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from never having been held accountable. You’ve seen it. The kid in sixth grade who was bigger than everyone else — loud, full of threats, always talking about what he was going to do. But underneath all of it, you could tell: no real self-esteem. No follow-through. Just noise, and the desperate hope that the noise would be enough.
That’s what I watch every time Donald Trump posts another Truth Social ultimatum about Iran.
On March 6, he posted: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” The very next day — the very next day — he posted that Iran had “apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors.” Neither of those things was true. Both of them were issued with the same blustering certainty. And the Iranians, watching from Tehran, drew the obvious conclusion: this man does not know what he wants, and he will flinch.
They were right. And now, as of this week, Trump is telling us a deal is “largely negotiated” — a deal that Iran’s own news agency is already describing as “incomplete and inconsistent with reality.” A deal in which we apparently agreed to lift sanctions and allow Iran to sell oil freely in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire, while Iran quietly reserves the right to manage the Strait of Hormuz on its own terms. A deal with no resolution on nuclear enrichment. A deal that neither side seems to agree actually exists.
I’ve seen this movie before. We all have.
The Doha Deal, and What It Actually Cost
In February 2020, the Trump administration signed the Doha Agreement with the Taliban. It was hailed as a triumph of dealmaking. And in a narrow, technical sense, you could call it a deal — there were signatures on paper, a press conference, a handshake.
What it actually was, was a capitulation dressed in diplomatic language. The Afghan government — the sovereign government the United States had spent two decades building — was not even invited to the table. We negotiated with the Taliban over the heads of the people we had pledged to support. We set a hard withdrawal date. We released 5,000 Taliban prisoners. And we asked for very little in return that was verifiable or enforceable.
General McKenzie later said the signing of the Doha Agreement had a “really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military — psychological more than anything else.” When you tell your allies that you’ve agreed to leave, that you’ve set the date, that you’ve shaken hands with their enemies — you have already, in some fundamental sense, abandoned them. The military collapse that followed wasn’t just logistics. It was a rout of the spirit.
Now, I want to be honest here, because I’ve always believed honesty matters more than scoring points: Joe Biden owns the execution of that withdrawal. The chaos at the airport, the speed of the collapse, the failures of intelligence and planning — those happened on his watch, and he bears responsibility for them. The criticism is warranted.
But the deal — the underlying agreement that made the collapse nearly inevitable — that belongs to Trump. You cannot set a fixed withdrawal date, exclude the Afghan government from negotiations, signal to the Taliban that their patience would be rewarded, and then act surprised when the country falls in eleven days.
We Built a Real Military. Then We Pulled the Floor Out.
Here’s something that rarely gets acknowledged in the breathless post-mortems: the Afghan National Army was not a failure of the Afghan people. At its peak, it was a genuine fighting force. Years of training, mentorship, and sacrifice — American and Afghan both — had produced units that could and did hold territory, conduct complex operations, and fight.
The problem was structural, and it was our fault.
We built the Afghan military to look like ours. That sounds fine until you realize what it actually meant: we built a force that depended on American contractors for equipment maintenance, on American logistics systems for supply chains, on American air support for offensive operations. We didn’t build a self-sufficient army — we built a sophisticated appendage of our own military, and then we announced we were removing the body it was attached to.
When the contractors left, the aircraft stopped flying. When the logistics support ended, the ammunition and food stopped moving. When the air cover disappeared, units in the field lost the one decisive advantage they had over the Taliban. We didn’t just withdraw troops. We pulled out the entire operating system.
That’s not the Afghans failing. That’s us designing a dependency and then abandoning it.
And Now, Iran
The parallels aren’t perfect — they never are. But the pattern is unmistakable.
Trump wants out. He wanted out of Afghanistan, and he negotiated a deal that gave him the political cover to leave while papering over the structural catastrophe he was creating. He wants out of the Iran conflict, and he’s doing the same thing: announcing victories that haven’t been achieved, setting terms that the other side hasn’t agreed to, and declaring the deal “largely negotiated” while Iran tells its own press that American claims are fiction.
The Iranians are not naive. They have watched this president operate for years. They saw what happened to the JCPOA when Trump pulled out of it in 2018, killing a working nuclear agreement for no strategic gain and with no alternative plan. They watched him oscillate between “maximum pressure” and desperate outreach throughout his first term. They know that his red lines are negotiating positions, that his deadlines evaporate, and that his Truth Social posts are a map of his anxieties, not his resolve.
So when Trump says the deal is “largely negotiated,” Iran says: prove it. And they wait. Because they know he needs this more than they do. Energy prices are crushing the American economy. The political pressure is building. And Trump, for all his noise, has shown them exactly how he behaves when he’s cornered — he bluster, he retreats, he claims victory, and he moves on.
They’re taking him to the woodshed. Quietly, methodically, without a single meme.
What No One Is Talking About
When Kabul fell, I was in Congress, and I can tell you that for weeks, my office was running on almost no sleep. Constituents calling about interpreters. Veterans calling about the Afghan soldiers they’d fought alongside for years. People sending us names, photos, passport numbers — desperate pleas to get somebody out before the Taliban found them.
We did what we could. It wasn’t enough. And I still carry that.
But I want to say something that I don’t hear being said: what about the Iranians?
There are people inside Iran — ordinary citizens, dissidents, those who dared to hope that American pressure might mean something, that the world had not forgotten them — who are caught in the middle of this. And in all the coverage of ceasefire terms and oil prices and Strait of Hormuz logistics, their lives are a footnote.
The same dynamic is playing out: a desperate American administration trying to find an exit, with little apparent thought given to what happens to the people who believed that American engagement meant something. The people who tied their hopes to our presence. The people who will be left to deal with whatever emerges from this “largely negotiated” deal.
We failed those people in Afghanistan. We shouldn’t pretend we’re not at serious risk of doing it again.
What Actually Good Dealmaking Looks Like
Strong dealmaking isn’t about loudness. It isn’t about memes or midnight posts or threats that expire before the ink dries. It’s about knowing what you want, knowing what the other side needs, understanding the leverage on both sides clearly, and building something durable — even if it’s slower, even if it’s quiet.
It requires patience. It requires consistency. It requires the ability to sit in an uncomfortable negotiation without flinching publicly and then calling the flinch a strategy.
Trump doesn’t do that. He never has. He mistakes volume for leverage, and he mistakes the announcement of a deal for the deal itself. The Taliban figured that out. The Iranians figured it out faster.
The sixth-grade bully always gets found out eventually. The question is who pays the price when he does.
And it’s never him.
Video discussion for paid subscribers:
