8 May 2018 — 1647 mdt

What’s next? Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran?

It’s a sunny day in Kalispell, and schools election day. I was going to enjoy the weather, plant some flowers, vote, and defer posting until tomorrow. Then President Trump announced he was scuttling the deal the U.S. and other western nations cut with Iran. In that agreement, admittedly imperfect but a good start and much better than the status quo, western nations agreed to lift their sanctions against Iran in exchange for Iran’s agreeing to abandon the development of nuclear energy and weapons.

Trump says that wasn’t good enough, that he can negotiate a better deal, a deal that replaces the existing Iranian government with one approved by the White House and forever forbids Iran from even thinking about thinking about casting an evil eye toward Israel.

An experienced, competent negotiator, one who understood the issues and his adversaries, would try to improve the existing agreement while leaving it in place, and would set reasonable, attainable, goals.

Trump, a bullyboy business tycoon accustomed to browbeating his trading partners into submission, prefers blowing up the existing agreement and replacing it with one of his liking. He negotiates at the point of an atomic bomb, and dictates the terms. With Trump, there’s no such thing as a win-win agreement. All of his agreements must be “I win, you lose, and everyone knows you’ve been humiliated by a superior man.”

That’s not an attitude calculated to bring Iran to the negotiating table. But it is an attitude that will bring John Bolton to the Situation Room, and maybe later to the bomb shelter.

Would Trump have torpedoed this agreement had it been negotiated during the presidency of George W. Bush? Probably not — but who the hell really knows? What we do know, however, is that Trump is obsessed with turning the clock back to 1100 EST on 20 January 2009, so that when the story of his presidency is written, historians will report he spared no effort to undo, sabotage, and obliterate, every act and policy bearing the fingerprints of Barack H. Obama.

Bomb, bomb, bomb … (tune)