The man has always been a real estate developer: he was born into it, and he knows no other way of interacting with the world. It’s all about deals, and the quickest way to win is to frighten the other side into submitting.
Mutually profitable "win-win" deals are theoretically also possible, but Trump prefers the thrill of a high-stakes showdown.
So Trump has subjected Iran to a month and a-half of massive air attacks, blood-curdling threats and civilisation-ending deadlines — to no avail. Not only is the Tehran regime still standing, but its ability to block the Strait of Hormuz gives it the upper hand strategically.
Trump’s instincts still function well enough for him to realise that his threats aren’t working. That’s why he imposed no new time limit after his most recent last-minute cancellation of a deadline.
No more "by Saturday night" or "within two weeks". Just "until such time as [Iran’s] leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal. I will therefore extend the ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or another".
How very reasonable of him — and the Iranians hadn’t even asked for a ceasefire.
Indeed, they also didn’t bother to show up for the meeting that Trump unilaterally scheduled for last Tuesday.
They’re not in a hurry, whereas his futile war has put the entire global economy — and more importantly for him, the US economy — at risk.
The longer the war lasts, the stronger Iran’s position becomes.
What Trump’s deal requires, paradoxically, is for the hectic pace of events to slow down quite a bit. Too much was happening, too fast, for any kind of durable ceasefire agreement to be drafted and agreed.
Another few weeks without bombing, on the other hand, would create a default assumption that the shooting is over, at least for this round.
That’s probably all that the major players could tolerate at the moment, especially given that one of them, Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, really wants the war to continue.
The US and Iran have both reached the point where they cannot gain any more by force, but it would be optimistic to assume that everyone in both governments understands that lesson.
As for the magical Iranian nuclear weapons that regenerate in months or even weeks, forcing that poor Mr Trump to re-obliterate them all over again, there will be no lasting agreement on them this side of the Last Judgement.
Ten years ago there was a sensible, well-policed agreement that allowed Iran to enrich uranium up to a level suitable for peaceful purposes but nowhere near weapons-grade, and all the major powers agreed that it was working well.
Trump tore it up as part of his vendetta against its sponsor, Barack Obama, in 2018, and it’s too late to revive it now.
While Iran’s nuclear weapons remain stubbornly non-existent, they have acquired existential importance in the eyes of both Israeli and Iranian patriots.
The former see them as a mortal threat because Iranians can’t be trusted with them, while the latter think they are an essential badge of nationhood. It’s a formula for perpetual conflict.
So what degree of repair and recovery can we expect at the end of this war, if it is actually ending?
It is now two and a-half years since the Hamas massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli counter-genocide. Half a year after the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip it is still a wilderness of shattered buildings and two million truly desperate people.
The Israeli deconstruction of Southern Lebanon was less than halfway complete when the US forced Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire, but thousands of houses have been destroyed already.
But Iran is still largely intact: 3000 people’s lives and a few thousand buildings have been destroyed, but the wholesale demolition of Iran’s civilian infrastructure (power plants, bridges, desalination facilities, etc) is on hold pending further developments.
Stopping the war before all that is also swept away is still a worthwhile goal, but it actually depends on the whim of one person whose views on the subject can change from one end of a sentence to the other.
No, that’s not quite right. It would also depend on several thousand other people accepting his order to destroy lives and property and carrying it out willingly.
Might there be something wrong with this system?
• Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
