Last night at 1 am ET, President Donald Trump bragged that Iran “really wants to make a deal.” This morning, however, Iran announced that it is suspending talks over Israel’s ongoing bombing of Lebanon. This setback is the latest in a string of embarrassments as Trump desperately tries to extract the U.S. from the economically devastating war he started over three months ago.As the Daily Beast reports, in the early hours of the morning, Trump posted, “‘Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us.’ He went on to attack Democrats and ‘various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans’ for making it harder for him to negotiate an agreement with ‘negatively “chirping,” at levels never seen before.’”Trump ended with a word of advice: “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end — It always does!”Just hours later, an Iranian state news made a statement that didn’t bode well for the president’s assertion, declaring, “Given the continuation of the Israeli regime’s attacks in Lebanon, and considering that Lebanon had been one of the preconditions for a ceasefire — which has now been violated on all fronts, including Lebanon — the Iranian negotiating team is suspending ‘talks and exchanges of texts through mediators.’” Iran has consistently maintained that any peace deal would be contingent on the cessation of Israeli attacks on Lebanon. According to the Associated Press, however, Israeli forces have made their deepest incursion into Lebanon in over 25 years. While Israeli leadership says it is attacking Iranian-backed Hezbollah groups, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has accused Israel of “implementing a policy of total destruction of cities and towns.” So far, over 3,300 people, including many children, have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces, and about 1 million people have been displaced. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Iran have been exchanging strikes over the weekend and into Monday.Wrangling over the war’s aims and end has caused sharp fractures in the Republican Party between hawks who demand maximum concessions from Iran and those who are feeling the electoral backlash from the conflict’s disastrous economic impacts and want it to end as quickly as possible. As things stand now, many Republicans are beginning to admit the bad position into which the president has gotten himself.According to Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “The reporting on it suggests that it’s a terrible deal, that the president has gotten basically nothing that he said he was getting, and that his negotiators have embarrassed him.”Other experts have pointed out that the president now faces many of the same challenges former President Barack Obama grappled with while negotiating the Iran nuclear deal that Trump later tore up, and that at best, any new deal is going to look very similar to the old one. “Nearly a decade later, with oil prices sky-high,” wrote Anik Joshi in the American Conservative, “it is beyond parody that we are back to where this all began.”
