Iran Schools Trump in the Art of the Deal

Can you call it a ceasefire when we’re the only ones who have ceased firing?

What does an “open” Strait of Hormuz look like, in Iran’s telling? This morning, we got some clarity. Iran is claiming that vessels can sail through as they wish—but that because they have heavily mined the main shipping channel, shippers must only transit while hugging the Iranian shore and in coordination with the Iranian military. You know, for safety. “We have to be very careful for the safety and security of those tankers and vessels,” Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh told ITV News.

Is this true? Who knows! But shippers will be unlikely to risk the main channel until they get more clarity. This is the shakedown America appears prepared to permit under our “ceasefire.” Happy Thursday.

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(Photo by Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

The End of Madman Theory

by Andrew Egger

It’s a fundamental piece of MAGA mythology: None of the histrionic threats the president makes during his spasms of gangster negotiation should be taken seriously by Americans. If the president threatens a genocide against Iran, and that makes you worry that the president might order a genocide against Iran, you’re acting like an idiot or a rube. Somehow, Trump’s supporters insist, his threats are supposed to exist in some mythical space where we are permitted to discount them but they are expected to take them deadly seriously. This, in turn, is supposed to unlock for Trump devastating levels of negotiating pressure that only he can access.

But the last thirty-six hours have shown us the truth. Trump’s threats aren’t only a blot on America’s conscience and stain on our reputation, as the world now sees the United States as a country that might threaten the worst possible crimes to get what it wants. They’re also a total failure on their own terms. Far from maximizing America’s agency, Trump’s ultimatum and accompanying threats finally placed him in a negotiating straitjacket. He had to back down, and the Iranians knew it.

This backdown has landed America in a surreal place. For all intents and purposes, the ceasefire we announced with so much fanfare on Tuesday has already ceased to exist—indeed, never existed at all. All the belligerents, besides us, are still shooting. Yesterday, Israel conducted more extensive attacks against Lebanon, while the Gulf states reported that Iranian missile and drone attacks had not abated. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains, despite the president’s assurances to the contrary, functionally closed: Iran continues to warn ships to transit the strait only in coordination with the Iranian military, threatening to attack vessels that disobey.

According to the MAGA mythology of the Trump threat, none of this should be happening at all. Iran is supposed to be scared straight, too terrified that Trump might drop the gloves and bomb them back to the Stone Age to keep acting out.

But it isn’t just that we’re back to the pre-ceasefire status quo. The White House now has a strong interest in pretending that a ceasefire is in effect even if it isn’t—because otherwise Trump’s threats achieved nothing, and they would have to admit he just chickened out. And so the whole White House messaging apparatus spent yesterday twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why none of these obvious provocations were really, truly violations of the ceasefire.

That bloody fighting in Lebanon? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance insisted it had never been subject to the ceasefire in the first place.¹ The missiles and drones targeting the Gulf states? That, Leavitt suggested, was probably just because we’d bombed Iran’s military communications infrastructure too well: parts of Iran’s military maybe just hadn’t heard about the ceasefire yet. And Iran’s continued tolling of the Strait of Hormuz? Well, hey, that was a work in progress, and anyway the president was cooking up some ideas about how maybe America could get a kickback there, too, so why all the complaining?

Meanwhile, the White House was insisting—against all evidence—that the ten-point Iranian plan Trump had said Tuesday would serve as a basis for negotiation was not, in fact, the ten-point plan that had been publicly reported and which Iran was claiming Trump had agreed to consider. Leavitt insisted that that plan, which contained a host of ludicrous concessions that no American president would agree to, had been “literally thrown in the garbage” by Trump and his negotiating team. Leavitt further claimed that Iran had secretly communicated a different, far more acceptable ten-point plan, and that it was this plan that Trump had agreed to make the basis for further negotiations.²

“The president’s red lines, namely the end of uranium enrichment in Iran, have not changed,” Leavitt said (Trump contradicted this himself; more on that below), “and the idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd.”

This, apparently, was news to the Iranians. In an angry statement after Leavitt’s press conference, Iranian Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf accused America and Israel of already violating multiple clauses of the ceasefire, including by continuing to strike Lebanon and by denying Iran’s right to enrich uranium. “Now the very ‘workable basis on which to negotiate’ has been openly and clearly violated, even before the negotiations began,” Ghalibaf fumed. “In such a situation, a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable.”

I will repeat: Under the MAGA theory of Trump negotiation, all these roles should be reversed. It should be the Iranians who are desperate to maintain the ceasefire—because who knows what Trump would do?—and the Americans who are watching like hawks for any violation, warning Iran that the slightest deviation from the ceasefire terms would bring the wrath of Trump down on their heads.

Trump spent yesterday evening trying to reclaim that role: If a full agreement with Iran is not reached, he said, “then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.”

“In the meantime,” he added, “our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

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ICYMI: Andrew talks with Sal about shipping in the Strait.

Trump Says The Strait Is “Open.” So Why Isn’t Anyone Moving? (w/ Sal Mercogliano)

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Trump the Conquistador

by William Kristol

In his inaugural address fifteen months ago, President Trump proclaimed, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

We haven’t heard much talk recently from the president about wars we’re not getting into.

Will one consequence of his humiliating failure in Iran be a return to such a stance? Perhaps the difficulties of the last two weeks have diminished Trump’s interest in foreign excursions?

Appears not. A taste for foreign adventures seems to have lodged itself in Trump’s brain.

Just under two weeks ago, Trump said in Miami, “I built this great military. I said, ‘You’ll never have to use it.’ ​But sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba is ​next by the way.”

So Trump acknowledges a change of attitude from “You’ll never have to use” the military to “Sometimes you have to use it.” There’s no more boasting here about wars we’ll never get into. And “Cuba is next” seems to be a pretty straightforward promise that he’ll start yet another war.

Yesterday evening, in the context of attacking NATO, Trump reminded us of his interest in taking Greenland:

NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!! President DJT

So both Cuba and Greenland seem to be in Trump’s sights.

And later last night, Trump posted the threat Andrew mentioned above:

All U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with. If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the “Shootin’ Starts,” bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before. It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary - NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE. In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!

With respect to Iran, and despite the bluster about starting the shooting again, what’s noteworthy is Trump’s description of the goals of an agreement. “No nuclear weapons” is a far cry from no enriched uranium or no missiles or no nuclear program at all. In fact, the Iranian regime has always claimed they don’t seek nuclear weapons, so they can agree to that. As for the Strait of Hormuz being “open and safe,” that could be consistent with Iranian supervision of the strait, tolls for ships, and other elements of a new status quo the Iranian regime would be pleased with.

So the bulk of Trump’s post is consistent with retreat from Iran.

But the penultimate sentence is also striking. “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.”

It’s unusual for an American president to proclaim “Conquest” as his goal. In his June 6, 1944 D-Day prayer, President Roosevelt said that American soldiers “fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.”

Not so of American soldiers under the command of Trump. Like many wannabe authoritarians, he’s interested in “Conquest.” Indeed, the dream of foreign conquest seems to have become a more central part of Trump’s personal sense of grandiosity, not to say megalomania, than it was earlier in his career.

The prospect of more unauthorized and unjustified foreign adventures is evidently very much on Trump’s mind. He’s even adopted a name for it: the ‘Donroe Doctrine.’ It’s all the more reason for Congress to check him preemptively as much as possible, and to remove him from office as soon as possible.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Has a War Crimes Problem. It’s His Mouth… He can’t stop freestyling about plunder and atrocities, observes WILL SALETAN.

• Donald Trump’s Unfreedom of the Seas… GISELLE DONNELLY writes that Trump’s capitulation in the Strait of Hormuz could be the beginning of the end of America’s superpower era.

• Technology and Its Terrors… ‘Exit 8’ and ‘Undertone’ reviewed by SONNY BUNCH.

• Trump Went to War Without a Plan. Now He’s Scrambling to Get Out… TOM NICHOLS joins MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER on Command Post to discuss the bleak reality of Trump’s Iran war.

• The Superpower Folded in Front of the Whole World… DAVID FRENCH and REP. SUHAS SUBRAMANYAM join TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break down Trump’s erratic war leadership, rising global risks, and questions about his motives. Plus: Orbán, Virginia redistricting, and Dem oversight.

Programming note: Our next Bulwark Founders Town Hall will be April 13. Upgrade to a Founders Membership today to join JVL and Sarah for this exclusive virtual town hall. And don’t forget to tell us what’s on your mind or what you’d like to know more about in the comments.

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Quick Hits

OIL OUTRAGE: It might be good enough for MAGA—for now—for Trump simply to slap an “OPEN” sign on the still-closed Strait of Hormuz. But the oil industry is a little more concerned about that “solution.” Politico reports:

Oil company executives are reaching out to the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance to protest allowing Iran to charge tolls through the strategic Strait of Hormuz as a condition of peace talks, said one industry consultant granted anonymity to discuss relations with the administration.

“Hell yes,” this person said when asked if executives were contacting the White House to protest a toll on Hormuz. ”We didn’t have to do that before—and I thought we won the war. Any place you have access to the administration, you ask, what are you guys thinking?”

The response [administration] officials were giving industry representatives “is not a cold shoulder,” this person added. “It’s more like, ‘Yeah, ok, we’ll take note.’”

Read the whole thing.

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CLAUDE POWERS UP: Even in its current state, AI is already poised to become the defining technology and political issue of our time—and it just keeps getting stronger, faster. This week, Anthropic made an eye-popping announcement about its next forthcoming model, Mythos: The company would delay its public release over fears that it was too good at finding and exploiting cybersecurity flaws—both in the safeguards built by Anthropic to contain it and in unrelated software. Instead, the company would for now deploy Mythos only to a consortium of top tech companies, to enable them to use it to strengthen their own cybersecurity defenses, an initiative the company is calling “Project Glasswing.”

Anthropic’s claims here are startling:

Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe.

Oversold hype from a company talking up its own product? Maybe. But AI skeptics have been striking that pose toward AI companies’ claims for years, even as model after model keeps smashing through expectations of what large-language model technology can do. And a quick reminder: One major entity that has walled itself off from Anthropic—and thus from the ostensible benefits of participating in Project Glasswing—is the U.S. government.

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BALLROOM BENEFITS: He’s the anti-mail-voting president who votes by mail! He’s the anti-foreign-steel president who builds his ballroom with foreign steel! The New York Times reports:

The White House has secured tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel for Mr. Trump’s $400 million ballroom project, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and private conversations.

ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based firm that is the world’s second-largest steel maker, is providing steel for the structure of the ballroom project, the people said. They said the steel was produced in Europe, where the bulk of ArcelorMittal’s production is concentrated.

The White House has not disclosed details of the donation, but Mr. Trump said last October that he had been offered a donation of steel for the ballroom valued at $37 million.

What a nice, patriotic donation from ArcelorMittal! See, the Europeans aren’t all bad. The Times notes that, two days after Trump first mentioned that a steel company had approached him offering to donate the steel, the White House relaxed tariffs on imports of Canadian automotive steel—a provision that just so happened to benefit ArcelorMittal. Read the whole thing.

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Cheap Shots

1. When Pakistan’s prime minister, who supposedly brokered the ceasefire, first announced the agreement, the fact that Lebanon was included was literally the first thing he said about it.

2. Can anyone produce formal paper on the plan? Don’t bother asking.