Trump appears indifferent to all the battles he’s losing. So what’s the deal?

May 31, 2026 — 11:30am

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If President Donald Trump succeeds in closing a “deal” with Iran, the more likely ultimate outcome in the months ahead is that it will fail – just as the “deal” he made to end the war in Gaza is failing. No Nobel likely.

Trump has made grand claims – that Iran will fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz and will send all its highly enriched uranium to the US and has pledged never to make a nuclear bomb – but Iran has not publicly accepted those terms. Iran demands the US unfreeze tens of billions of dollars in Iran’s assets, but Trump has rejected that. Will the deal also ensure that Israel’s expanded campaign in Lebanon is halted?

Trump has come close to sabotaging his Iran deal by demanding that Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia sign the Abraham Accords and recognise the state of Israel. The Saudis made it explicitly clear, when the Gaza deal was signed last year, that there was no way they could do this without progress on a Palestinian state. And there is no way Israel’s Netanyahu is moving towards a Palestinian state. His vision is for controlling all the land “from the river to the sea” – for Israel. What keeps the Arab states out of the Abraham Accords is not the Iran war but that there has been no progress on a Palestinian state.

In........

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