🌍 Geopolitics & Grand Delusions
How to simultaneously declare total victory, admit partial defeat, threaten a country into talks, threaten it out of talks, and still somehow call it a strategy — all before lunch.
There is an old Persian proverb — and given that this article is about Iran, it seems appropriate to start with one — that loosely translates to: “He who shouts the loudest in the bazaar sells the least.” It is unclear whether this proverb actually exists, or if we just invented it. But that, dear reader, is precisely the spirit in which American foreign policy toward Iran has been conducted lately, so we’re already in the right frame of mind.
Welcome to The Art of the Deal: Iran Edition — a masterclass in diplomatic chaos that proves, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it is entirely possible to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere on the world stage, as long as you tweet confidently enough while doing it.
Let us walk, together, through the hallowed ten steps of this remarkable geopolitical framework — a framework so bold, so unprecedented, so entirely untethered from anything resembling consistency, that historians will one day argue about whether it was genius or whether the Wi-Fi was simply down when the strategy was being formulated.
The 10-Step Cycle of Diplomatic Grandeur
Step 1
Make the Most Extreme Demand Imaginable
Begin by demanding something so maximalist, so breathtakingly ambitious, that even your own advisors quietly Google “is this legal?” Start with “total, complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of everything — nuclear program, ballistic missiles, regional ambitions, probably the mustaches too. Aim for the moon. Aim, in fact, for a moon that doesn’t exist yet.
The genius of Step One is that it sets expectations at a level so lofty that literally any outcome can later be rebranded as a win. Did Iran agree to dismantle nothing? Call it “preliminary progress.” Did they agree to a photo opportunity? Declare it historic. Did a diplomat nod vaguely in a hallway? That’s a deal, baby.
Step 2
Issue Threats of “Overwhelming Force”
Having established your opening position, it is now time to threaten Iran with consequences so severe, so catastrophic, that the Ayatollah himself will reportedly need to lie down. Aircraft carriers must be repositioned. Sanctions must be “maxed.” The phrase “all options are on the table” must be uttered at least eleven times, ideally before breakfast.
Crucially, the threats must be escalating and, above all, vague. Specific threats can be held accountable. Vague threats, however, exist in a beautiful quantum state — both terrifying and deniable at the same time. Schrödinger’s Ultimatum, if you will.
“If Iran attacks Israel, we will hold Iran responsible. Also, we are not going to war with Iran. Also, our military is fully prepared. Also, nobody wants peace more than me.”
Step 3
Announce That Talks Are Happening (That Weren’t Happening)
This step requires particular dexterity. Announce — ideally on a platform with a character limit — that direct negotiations are underway, that progress is “tremendous,” and that the other side is “very much wanting a deal.” Do this before the other side has confirmed any such thing. Bonus points if Iran immediately issues a statement saying the opposite is true.
⚠ Reality Check The Iranian Foreign Ministry has, on multiple occasions, stated publicly that there are no direct negotiations with the United States, while Washington simultaneously described “very productive” conversations. Both cannot be true. Only one of them involves a government that controls the room where the talks allegedly took place.
Step 4
Declare the Strait of Hormuz Closed / Open / Closed Again
No cycle of Iran diplomacy is complete without a detour through the Strait of Hormuz — that narrow, supremely consequential waterway through which approximately 20% of the world’s oil flows on any given Tuesday. The move here is to definitively state its status, wait for Iran (and the global oil market) to react, and then issue a clarification that contradicts the original statement entirely. Repeat as needed.
Global oil markets, for their part, have responded to this cycle by doing what global oil markets always do when existential uncertainty meets bold proclamations: they panic, recover, panic again, and then issue politely worded reports about “elevated volatility.” OPEC members, watching from a distance, quietly refill their coffee and say nothing.
Step 5
Declare Total Victory
At some point — and this step can arrive as early as Step 2, or as late as Step 9, timing is fluid — it is necessary to declare total, absolute, unprecedented victory. Iran has capitulated. The deal is done. America wins. This declaration must arrive before the deal is signed, before terms are agreed, and ideally before Iran has been informed that there is a deal.
The victory declaration serves two functions: it boosts domestic approval ratings, and it gives Iran a convenient reason to walk away from any subsequent negotiation, citing the embarrassment of being publicly declared the loser. Everyone loses, but only one side tweets about winning.
Step 6
Undercut Your Own Negotiators
While diplomats are quietly doing the actual, painstaking work of exchanging position papers in whatever neutral location has been deemed sufficiently photogenic, the ideal move is to publicly contradict their work. Announce a red line that your negotiators had agreed to remove. Threaten military action the day before a scheduled session. Hint at a “secret better deal” that exists nowhere in writing.
This keeps everyone on their toes. It also keeps allied governments permanently in a state of bewildered conference calls, trying to determine what American foreign policy actually is today, as opposed to what it was yesterday, and what it might be tomorrow morning, pending social media activity.
Step 7
Blame the Previous Administration for Everything
When the situation becomes complicated — and it will; Iran has been a complicated geopolitical actor since before the United States existed as a country — the essential move is to pivot blame entirely to whoever came before. The previous deal was “the worst deal ever made.” The previous approach was “weak, disgraceful, and frankly embarrassing.” What we have now, by contrast, is “tough, smart, and very beautiful diplomacy.”
The beauty of Step Seven is its infinite recyclability. Any problem in the present is traceable to the past. Any failure in the future will have been caused by what happened before you arrived. You exist, perpetually, at Year Zero of American foreign policy, blameless and heroic, staring down a horizon of your own making and calling it someone else’s mess.
Step 8
Sanction Something. Anything. Everything.
When in doubt, sanction. Sanction the oil sector. Then the banking sector. Then the shipping sector. Then, upon reflection, sanction the oil sector again, in case it recovered. Sanctions are the diplomatic equivalent of turning something off and on again — an instinctive response to a problem one does not fully understand, applied with great confidence and announced with great fanfare.
⚠ Reality Check Maximum pressure campaigns, when applied without a clear endgame or off-ramp, have a documented tendency to harden the positions of the sanctioned party rather than soften them. Iran’s nuclear program has, by most independent assessments, advanced during periods of maximum pressure, not retreated. The cure, in other words, appears to be accelerating the disease.
Step 9
Threaten to Walk Away (And Then Don’t. And Then Do.)
No deal — real or imaginary — is complete without the theatrical walkout. Announce that the United States will leave negotiations if Iran does not meet impossible conditions by an impossible deadline. Let the deadline pass. Extend it quietly. Then announce that America is absolutely, definitely leaving if Iran doesn’t comply within a new, equally impossible deadline. Repeat this approximately four times before anyone notices the pattern.
Step 10
Return to Step 1
Having exhausted all nine previous steps, and having achieved a situation that is objectively more unstable, more expensive, more dangerous, and more diplomatically isolated than the one you inherited — declare a fresh start. A new approach. A better deal is coming. Nobody has ever negotiated like this before. Go back to Step 1. Do not collect $200. Do not pass Go. The bazaar awaits.
The Real Cost of Running in Circles
Now, before we get entirely carried away with the satire — and we are admittedly quite carried away — it is worth stepping back to acknowledge that this is not, actually, funny.
Global instability has a price. Oil market volatility, driven by the weekly theatre of Strait of Hormuz proclamations and contradictions, translates into real costs for real families filling real petrol tanks in countries nowhere near the Persian Gulf. American allies — the Europeans who must coordinate sanctions regimes, the Gulf states who must hedge their security arrangements — are operating in a permanent state of strategic whiplash, trying to plan around a partner whose positions can change between the morning briefing and the afternoon tweet.
And then there is Iran itself. The Islamic Republic is not, by any measure, a sympathetic actor. Its government suppresses its own people, funds destabilising proxies, and has pursued a nuclear program with maximum opacity. These are real problems demanding real strategy. But impulsive cycles of maximum pressure, theatrical summitry, and public contradiction do not produce real strategy. They produce the appearance of strategy — which is, in the diplomatic world, considerably worse than having no strategy at all, because the appearance of strategy forecloses the honest conversation about what you’re actually trying to achieve.
If the goal is a deal, then publicly humiliating Iran before the ink is dry ensures there will be no deal. If the goal is regime change, then the strategy is too incoherent to achieve it. If the goal is simply to look strong on television while the actual situation quietly deteriorates — well, then, congratulations. We have found the one metric by which this approach succeeds.
Outrunning the Darkness
There is a certain kind of leader who governs not by building toward something, but by moving fast enough that the consequences of yesterday’s decisions cannot catch up with today’s headlines. Announce enough victories and the defeats get buried. Create enough noise and the silence of actual progress goes unnoticed.
This is what we might charitably call “outrunning the darkness” — the art of staying perpetually in the blinding headlights of one’s own rhetoric, so that the long shadow cast behind you never quite catches the public eye. It is exhausting to watch. It must be even more exhausting to perform.
Iran, for its part, has been practicing statecraft — imperfect, cynical, often brutal statecraft — for several thousand years. They have outlasted empires. They are, at this moment, almost certainly outlasting the news cycle. The question is not whether Iran will still be there when the chaos settles. The question is what shape the relationship will be in — and whether the world will be more or less safe — when somebody finally, mercifully, decides to read a history book before sending the next threatening letter.
The art of the deal, as practiced here, is less a negotiating strategy than a magic trick: a lot of smoke, a dramatic flourish, and then — when you check the box — nothing is actually in it.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 