Iran is beating Trump at the art of the deal

The war could end with Tehran more confident, more hardline and with new resources to rebuild its nuclear programme

James Ferguson/FT

Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, 25 May 2026
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“The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have.” That was the principle Donald Trump (or his ghostwriter) set out in The Art of the Deal, published in 1987.

Perhaps Trump should have re-read his own book before posting on April 5: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” To the untrained eye, that demand sounded just a touch desperate — particularly when Trump failed to follow through on his threats to unleash hellish violence on Iran.

The grim reality is that, in the talks to end the war, it is Tehran that has had the leverage. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz put intense pressure on the global economy. As petrol prices have risen in America, so Trump’s opinion poll ratings have plummeted. The result is that, at the time of writing, the US seemed poised to agree to a deal that — over the long term — threatens to leave Iran in a stronger position than before this war began.

The essence of the emerging deal is that Iran agrees to open the strait without charging a toll. In return, it gets phased relief from sanctions — including the unfreezing of billions of dollars of assets. Iran will make promises to restrict its nuclear programme. But the details will be the subject of future negotiations — so that issue is essentially unresolved.

Trump has insisted that he is in no hurry and would never accept a bad agreement. But the reaction of hawkish Republicans to the emerging deal was telling. Senator Ted Cruz suggested that it could be a “disastrous mistake” because it would leave Iran “able to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz”. Senator Roger Wicker, head of the Senate armed services committee, warned that the emerging deal “would not be worth the paper it is written on”.

The Israeli government, which played a crucial role in persuading Trump to go to war in the first place, will be polite about any deal in public — not least because Benjamin Netanyahu must soon face the electorate. But the reality is that the Israeli leader sold the war as a unique opportunity to secure regime change in Iran. He is now looking at the conflict ending with the Iranian regime still in place — more confident, more hardline and with new financial resources to rebuild its nuclear programme and its proxy network throughout the Middle East.

Eli Groner, a former director-general of Netanyahu’s office, argues that the knowledge that Iran can now close the Strait of Hormuz at any point in the future “is a victory far deeper and more strategic than any point-scoring military achievement”. His one-word summary was: “Disaster.”

As well as potentially alleviating the Islamic republic’s dire financial and economic position, the agreement is likely to tilt the regional balance of power in Iran’s direction. As Dan Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel, observed on X: “Iran has gained significant leverage for the future by demonstrating it can control the strait, by attacking its neighbours and US bases in the region and causing significant damage, and by taking the United States’ and Israel’s best punch and surviving.”

Shapiro believes that, nonetheless, Trump is so boxed in that accepting a bad deal that opens the strait would be a better option than continuing the war. Given the mounting risks of a global energy crunch and a worldwide recession, that is an understandable calculation. America also has recent memories of wars — including Vietnam and Afghanistan — that went on for far too long, as the US struggled in vain to improve a losing position.

If and when Trump accepts a bad deal, it will be because he has no viable alternative. Senator Wicker’s proposal was “to allow America’s skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and then reopen the strait”. But an effort to secure the strait by military means would probably have required the deployment of ground troops and the acceptance of heavy American casualties. Even then, the Iranians would have been able to threaten shipping with drones or missiles.

Trump’s occasional threats to unleash “Hell” on the Iranian regime lacked credibility — because of his obvious reluctance to get involved in a ground war and because of the danger of Iranian retaliation against the Gulf states and their energy infrastructure. In the jargon of military analysts the vulnerability of the Gulf gave Iran “escalation dominance”.

The US president — who compares himself obsessively with former president Barack Obama — liked to deride the nuclear deal that the Obama administration reached with Iran in 2015. Trump has called it “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into” and claimed: “Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran.”

But Trump himself is now negotiating an agreement that looks, in many respects, worse than the one Obama negotiated — partly because of the lurking knowledge that Iran can still close the Strait of Hormuz, any time it wants. That is some achievement from the master of the art of the deal.

Gideon Rachman has been chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times since July 2006.