Let’s Just Call It Bozo Diplomacy

 

“Peace talks” are usually plural — I can’t remember any war where there was just one, singular peace talk. Until now.

One peace talk, one failure. The Vance delegation — is that an oxymoron? — picked up its toys and went home. They came back with nothing. Which is no more than what we deserve.

I’m uncomfortable writing “we” in the context of some Trump-caused calamity, so please do not construe it as an endorsement of any word or deed being carried out in my country’s name. Take it to mean merely the “American side” of some international embarrassment. “We” is not me. I have no say in what “we” do. And the people who do have a say are idiots. At least I get to watch.

We’ve arrived at the bargaining stage of the stupidest war in the nation’s history. How we got here is disgraceful. Whatever we come away with, however humiliating, serves us right. But whatever happens, it’s clear that we’re negotiating from weakness.

We’re weak because we’ve been weakened from within, and Iran knows it. We’re weak because an ignorant electorate put a criminally insane person in charge and now can’t get rid of him. We’re weak because one political party values loyalty over competence, mediocrity over intelligence, greed over human life. Iran knows all about it — we’ve become just like them.

The difference is that the Iran regime is negotiating from strength, having proven itself a very tough nut to crack. They’ve shown, quite convincingly, that they’re willing to take anything we dish out. We can blow up their supreme leader and the top three rows of their org chart. We can level their buildings, damage their infrastructure, and wipe out their air force. But they’re not going away.

Granted, a huge part of their strength lies in their willingness to sacrifice their own people, most of whom have no choice in the matter. Iran is, in fact, the perfect test case for a totalitarian regime that can, without a single scruple, use its own population — 90 million humans — as human shields.

Their track record is gruesome. Their war with Iraq in the eighties was a meat grinder, and over a million people were killed. The ayatollahs had twice as much meat to grind, and no hesitation about grinding it. This made a significant dent in an entire generation of Iranian men. They didn’t win that war, but they didn’t lose it either. It certainly toughened them up.

Now they’ve called Trump’s bluff. Having pulled off a successful rope-a-dope strategy, Iran is now openly taunting him. They’re daring him to use up our missile stockpiles on their buildings, because they know how vulnerable that leaves the rest of the region. They’re daring him to keep hitting civilian targets, because nothing brings a population together like imminent extinction.

And ever since he postponed last Tuesday’s scheduled Armageddon, his threats have lost their meaning — nobody in the world believes a word he says. So they’re daring him to escalate, to take the entire global economy down. They’re sure they can endure it better than we can, and I’m sure they’re right.

So no matter how much we keep punching like a roped dope, they’ll continue to take whatever we throw at them and say “Strait of Hormuz, baby.” Conversation over.

Indeed, their handling of the Strait has given them enormous leverage, and they’ve come to the bargaining table with a long list of demands — lifting of sanctions, freeing of frozen assets, reparations, tolls in the Strait — some of which they might actually get, but it won’t be quick.

Meanwhile, Vance came to that same table with one thing in mind: open the Strait. For all the talk about nuclear materials, everything now comes down to the Strait. Every concession we’ve wrung from Iran over the last two decades now falls by the wayside. Everything Obama’s people did to historically bring Iran’s nuclear ambitions under control is now out the window. Everything now depends on re-opening the Strait, which never should have been closed to begin with. Iran has the whole world by the gonads, and everybody knows it. Our bargaining position couldn’t be worse.

Well, maybe it could. Because the guy representing us, the guy whose job was to sell that losing position was, of course, JD Vance, a man who couldn’t sell his own soul properly.

For some reason Iran was okay with Vance, even asked for him, though it’s not clear why. Maybe they know a dope when they rope one. Maybe they think he has some sway over his boss’s enfeebled mind.

Or maybe, since there are no real diplomats they can deal with — all the professionals they’ve dealt with over the years have been purged from the State Department — they settled on Vance as the least objectionable alternative.

Regardless, the delegation — if you can call it that — also included, at least for the first round, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, whom the Iranians are known to loathe, and whose presence at those talks might well have been taken as an insult.

Kushner has shady business dealings with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, which is to say he’s in bed with the very people — Netanyahu and MBS — who talked Trump into bombing the shit out of Iran. As for Witkoff, a New York real estate sleazeball posing as a “peacemaker,” he’s the guy who was “negotiating” with Iran when Trump launched the war, costing him whatever minimal credibility he may have had.

Kushner and Witkoff are not diplomats. Neither is Vance. They’re bozos. They’re children sent to do a grownup’s job, now that all the grownups have been fired. That Iran has trust issues with all of them is completely understandable.

Yet there they were, the three bozos, in Pakistan on an excellent adventure. Vance was fresh from his campaign stop for Viktor Orban in Hungary, where his appearance caused a dip in Orban’s polls. I doubt he cost Orban the election on Sunday, but he sure didn’t help. Trump is on the ballot everywhere in the world.

As for Vance, he continues to pretend the whole Iran thing is just a few Fox sound bites away from resolution, with Trump getting everything he wants. In the real world, however, the bozos had one job — open the damn Strait — and they failed. Predictably, they played a bad hand badly.

As creepy and murderous as the Iranian regime has been for half a century, it has always understood the value of diplomacy. Maybe it’s that their civilization is a few thousand years older than ours, but they get the need to engage, cultivate, and conduct business with both friends and enemies.

Which requires sending professional diplomats to engage with professional diplomats. Which means observing protocols, even when you hate the people across the table. It’s not a job for bozos, but bozo diplomacy is now our face to the world.

Until very recently we had an excellent diplomatic corps, 250 years in the making. But between the DOGE cuts and the purges, it’s now a shadow of its former self. Sort of like the country itself.

So it’s hardly a surprise that bozo diplomacy failed. But the next move will be up to Trump. Will he escalate? Will he fire off a nuke as a warning shot, or will he TACO again? As I finish this post, he has ordered a seemingly meaningless blockade of the Strait, because making things worse is what he does best.

Will peace talks become plural again? Will the three bozos go back in the game, or will Trump go to his bench for fresh legs?

I hear Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem are between gigs. Stay tuned.