In my capacity as guy who talks on television (a capacity that’s left me with slightly less time for being guy who writes on Substack), I’m often called upon to explain why negotiations between Washington and Tehran are stuck. To get there, we’re going to talk about how time is a resource and a weapon, and how Ottawa and Tehran have incentives to use similar strategies at the moment.
First, time.
In one sense, time is universal: seconds tick forward for everyone at the same rate. In another sense, time is experienced differently depending on how you’re spending it. To people who live playing roles as employees, friends, and other ordinary roles (laudatory), time is something to be spent well by doing things. Annoying things should be minimized; diverting things should be maximized; important things should be handled expeditiously. We define a poor use of time as getting these wrong: spending more time tinkering with syllabi than meeting with students, for instance, or watching reruns on TNT instead of spending time with loved ones. Even the metaphor of spending time reveals that idea of time as currency, as a way to purchase specific increments of value.
Yet time in a negotiation works very differently. Have you ever noticed that there’s a tempo of negotiations? At first, there’s bold statements, followed by periods of boring recitations, punctuated by occasional crises, and then brought together in the last few ticks of the clock with exciting movements yielding a denouement. Every negotiation that matters follows this pathway, to the point that I’ve come to regard knowing this implicit schedule as a key delineator between an executive or negotiator and someone who insists that time must be linear. (The other great tell is that once you’ve decided to undertake a project, it’s almost always a good idea to complete it—but in negotiations failure must be an option.)
After all, if you compare the process of a negotiation with the process of, say, building a house, you’d drive yourself mad. If you built an agreement the way you build a house, you’d start with grand plans and architectural renderings, spend eight or ten months putting in flooring in the kitchen, argue loudly about the color of the paint in the guest bedroom for a week or two, and then do little for another month—until on the last day you somehow put up the walls, installed the plumbing, and materialized a roof from somewhere. Or it might be the opposite: you could work steadily and patiently to put in foundations, carefully build the frame, install the wiring and fit out the rooms, and then stall for a couple of years over whether the exterior should be painted yellow or gold while the entire structure sat without a roof.
The point of the analogy is to drive home the point that you can’t judge progress in a negotiation as you would in other projects because time can be a resource used to express power. We can grasp this intuitively: if I walk into a car dealer declaring that I need an automobile right now, it’s clear I’ll get a worse deal than if I stroll in, spend a few hours looking at everything in the showroom models, and say I’ll be back in a few weeks. Negotiations, after all, are intrinsically about finding how to reach the best bargain for each side on the points they care most about. Relative time pressures—if I need a deal faster than you—influence bargaining power (the ability to shape the outcomes) simply because one side will be hearing that clock tick louder and will be under greater pressure to concede to get a deal done.
This analysis explains why I think the likeliest outcome as of now for the U.S.-Iran conflict is continued stalemate. Those blowups and flare-ups that punctuate lengthy negotiations are tests of wills and resolve, but so too are the long periods where nothing seems to happen. As we’ll see, the general logic yields pretty clear predictions in this instance—and in others. (Usefully, it’s also the sort of insight you can communicate in a TV hit.)
Doing nothing for a long time can be a rational strategy. By demonstrating that both sides are under no eagerness to make a deal, both sides can demonstrate that they are willing to last as long as it takes to get the best deal for them. This works a bit better when the delay is a little costly—when it is clear that waiting is not just because of inattention or disinterest, for instance—because then you can show that you’re willing to tolerate pain. If you didn’t care at all about delay, of course, then there would be no reason to enter into negotiations, and past a certain point of seriousness everyone knows that both sides want a deal, but you want to avoid advertising you’re so keen on doing a deal fast that you’ll accept any terms.
But you also want to downplay the costs while bearing them. This is why Trump (who has been in lots of negotiations in his life, albeit with a mixed record) will say things that make little sense otherwise, such as declaring that he doesn’t care about the midterms (in May, in July, and more recently). Of course he does—he just can’t say that, because to admit it would be to concede weakness and to concede that others have direct power over him—not only in the present conflict but in any other.
Delay can be rational but it carries costs. These costs come in many forms (profits not realized, inefficiencies not addressed, and so on), but delay especially implies risk and uncertainty. The longer it takes to reach a deal, the more external factors beyond someone’s control can remove the conditions that made a deal possible or attractive. And this is where Trump’s strategy leaves him vulnerable to pressure, because he does not control the calendar.
The date of U.S. elections are fixed, and the outcomes of U.S. elections are determined in part by the conditions attaining when those elections are held. That’s not the only way to handle elections: in the United Kingdom or Canada, for instance, governments can decide to call elections when conditions are favorable or postpone them when they are not (subject to some broad deadlines). This offers obvious home-field advantages. Fixed-term calendars avoid this form of abuse but they invite others, such as letting short-term—and even manipulable—conditions be changed to influence elections. And to the extent that election outcomes can influence power, this can change the outcome of negotiations. (Maybe our patient car-buyer is replaced by a panicky one, for instance.)
So let’s say you’re setting policy in Tehran. You have some incentives to conclude a deal (like the economy, which really is bad and really would benefit from the restoration of external trade). But the deal you can reach in September is probably worse than the deal you could reach in December if Democrats win and Trump expects more domestic headaches and thus expects more pressure to give in later. (That’s aside from the fact that the Iranian hardliners care much less about short term economic pain than they do about long-term strategic gains for the same reason the Kim regime was willing to let famine run wild in the 1990s: it doesn’t threaten them.) Even knowing just this, what would you anticipate? No deal before the midterms, and probably some actions to humiliate Trump before then—forcing him to accept humiliation or escalate in an unpopular war. 1
Can Trump influence this calculation? Not in any way that matters on this time scale. Air power won’t do it; land power is unlikely and sanctions work on longer time frames and may not even have the juice to attain the desired U.S. outcomes at all. (Ask the Cubans and the North Koreans if decades of U.S. sanctions necessitate greater policy alignment with the United States.) Withdrawal would carry its own costs—even the guy who walked away from a bankrupt casino can sustain reputational damage—and would in any event make certain the midterm costs that Iran’s delay only threatens.
The funny thing is that Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada has much the same incentives, despite the obvious differences between Canada and Iran.
Carney is elected, but has years left to run on his mandate, so there’s little time pressure on him compared to Trump’s own foolish self-imposed deadlines. And although the U.S. aggression against Iran has been bloody and that against Canada “merely” economic (although with threats of much worse!), Carney has seen, just as Tehran has, that Trump is mercurial and difficult to sustain an agreement with. Put those together, as Democratic operative Dana Houle conjectured on Twitter, and you have a strikingly similar strategic situation in which Carney also has incentives to suspend talks until after the midterms. A more favorable balance on Capitol Hill could not only work to Ottawa’s long-term advantage but it could also help deliver a stinging blow to Trump personally.
The other similarity is that both Trump’s frustrated diplomacy with Iran and his floundering approach to Canada were wars of Trump’s choice. In neither case is it clear that Trump ever embarked on an analysis even as superficial as this one. In both cases, Trump seems to have assumed that U.S. military and economic resources would allow him to prevail without any need to take into account reactions of others. What will be the costs of these decisions? Time will tell.
You could, I suppose, read this as my saying that Tehran wants Democrats to win, but this has nothing to do with any similarity in goals—the IRGC isn’t woke—and more to do with wanting to hurt Trump by denying him elbow room and a victory, while secondarily boosting critics of U.S. posture in the region.
Extended duration in a negotiation is only superficial evidence of resolve. It may instead indicate that Trump is incapable of enforcing terms of surrender acceptable to Washington, an incapacity that progressively strips him of political dignity ahead of the midterms.