Worst. Negotiators. Ever.

The Trump administration continues to overplay its hand and agree to shitty deals.

The Trump administration looks at this picture and believes it has a royal flush. Photo by aceofnet on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made little secret of its skepticism towards the Trump administration’s claim that the president is a great dealmaker and is negotiating great deals left and right. To put it gently, I’m… let’s say “unpersuaded” that any post-Liberation Day trade deals will amount to all that much. Trump is stuck in an unpopular war with Iran because he is unable to negotiate a peace that he can stomach. Trump’s recent summit with Xi Jinping produced at best a whole lot of nothing and at worst opened Trump up to some unanticipated pressure.

Indeed, Politico’s Phelim Kine and Ari Hawkins report that China is slow-walking the purchase of soybeans and Boeing aircraft because, as one analyst explains, “ Chinese officials believe that Trump wants and needs to maintain a strong rapport with Xi more than the other way around, especially with an eye to avoiding a fresh economic rupture ahead of the U.S. midterms.” That does not sound like other countries view the United States as playing a strong hand.

I mean, for f**k’s sake, not even the Canadians are ruffled by escalating trade threats from Trump.

None of this sounds like an administration that possesses any understanding of bargaining leverage and what to do with it.

This brings us to the bilateral U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal that was announced on Wednesday. The Washington Post’s Evan Halper provides some of the details and why this particular 123 agreement stands out:

The people familiar with the new agreement say it is designed with safeguards to keep the Saudis from enriching nuclear fuel to weapons-grade level. But they also acknowledge it includes a waiver that exempts the Saudis from the aggressive international inspections required in nuclear reactor deals with other countries, including the United Arab Emirates. Instead, sensitive inspections would be executed by American teams under terms spelled out in the agreement, which was initially worked out when the crown prince visited Washington in November….

Because the deal does not include conventional international inspections, President Donald Trump had to sign a separate national security waiver for it to go forward, according to the individuals familiar with it. Now that the agreement has been signed, the details will be sent to Congress, which has 90 days to act on it.

Even if Congress votes against implementing the deal, the president could veto that disapproval, and it is unlikely that opponents would have enough votes to block the deal from going forward….

Nonproliferation experts have long warned against such a deal, starting back when the Biden administration raised this possibility as part of efforts to establish diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. They continued to speak out as the Trump administration signaled it was heading down the same road, arguing that any safeguards the U.S. establishes will not hold.

“A bad U.S. nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia is coming for congressional review — inexplicably, carried over from the Biden administration,” wrote Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank, in a post on X. “Congress should block it. If it does not, one hopes the policy will be reversed by a subsequent administration before too much damage is done in terms of watering down safeguards, setting negative precedents for other states, and failing to contain the spread of enrichment and reprocessing — which we just put back in the box in Iran via force.”….

Richard Nephew, who advised Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama on the Middle East, said in an interview that the sidelining of international inspectors would set a worrisome precedent. He said that while U.S. inspectors are capable of robust review of nuclear activities, adversaries of the U.S. are unlikely to trust their findings and may choose to abandon inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The point is not that Americans can’t do a great job at inspections,” he said. “The point is if you were Iran, how much confidence would you have in American inspections of Saudi operations? How would we feel if the Iranians said, ‘Don’t worry. Russians will inspect us.’ We would not accept that.”

“What if the Russians told us not to worry about nuclear facilities in Cuba because they were inspecting them?” he said. “All of this just doesn’t work in a geopolitical environment with as much mistrust and uncertainty as ours.”

Who wins from this deal? Well, certainly Saudi Arabia, which is the rare ally the Trump administration has not alienated. As the U.S. firm that will provide a lot of nuclear technology, Westinghouse is also a big winner.

And… that’s pretty much it. Israel does not like the deal one little bit. The Emiratis are likely pissed; their 2009 deal does not allow them to reprocess nuclear fuel, unlike Saudi Arabia’s sweetheart deal. This could further exacerbate tensions between those two Gulf states. Other possible nuclear states in the region, like Egypt and Türkiye, are also gonna feel left out. Anyone interested in expanding the Abraham Accords will be disappointed, as a nuclear agreement was one of the carrots that the United States could offer the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel. Nonproliferation experts are also exasperated.

Even the United States Senate seems less than pleased about the deal — which matters given that they have a vote to take on it. Politico’s Felicia Schwartz, Jerry Wu, and Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing take the Senate’s temperature and finds it pretty damn chilly:

Some lawmakers in both parties are warning that the newly inked U.S. nuclear agreement deal with Saudi Arabia could ignite a Middle East arms race at a particularly dangerous moment — when the Iran war is already provoking conflict across the region.

While the deal is the culmination of a process that started before the war with Iran, announcing it now has an immediate effect on the fighting, argued Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has been critical of Saudi Arabia.

“Everything that happens in Riyadh has a reaction in Tehran,” he said. “Part of the reason the United States has been reluctant to give this agreement to Saudi Arabia is because we knew it would end up pushing Iran closer to a nuclear weapon, and that remains true today.”

Even the potential of future nuclear enrichment by Saudi Arabia could swiftly shift the balance in the region and beyond, said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

“I worry about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, Japan, South Korea,” Kennedy said….

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed concern that it could further derail the U.S.’ push to get Iran to commit to zero enrichment of uranium.

“I’m very concerned about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East that potentially might have the effect of causing that,” he said….

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he was surprised that the administration reached a deal that could allow Riyadh to enrich, unlike past nuclear cooperation pacts.

“The thing that concerns me is about the potential for Iran to enrich or for Saudi Arabia to enrich. But I could envision that being totally under control, though, as well,” Johnson said.

Needless to say, folks like Kennedy, Barrasso, and Johnson are not exactly GOP moderates. If even they are voicing qualms about this deal, it’s a sign that maybe the Trump administration has not negotiated the best available terms.

Now is normally the moment in this newsletter when I try to get inside the headspace of someone who would be more supportive of these Trump deals. In this case, however, I confess I have nothing. This is the Jaylen Brown trade equivalent for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

UPDATE: LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL:

A day after the United States signed a landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, President Trump added a new condition to the sale of nuclear reactors to the kingdom, declaring that the entire arrangement now depends on the Saudi willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

The deal “is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his social media site…

There was no mention of any such condition in the administration’s announcement that the deal had been signed on Wednesday, and the text of the deal has not been released. But Mr. Trump’s social media post put the agreement’s immediate future in doubt. The Saudi government has made clear it has no intention of recognizing Israel without creating a pathway toward the creation of a Palestinian state….

In linking the deal to diplomatic recognition of Israel, Mr. Trump is veering back to the plan that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. attempted in the first years of his administration, making nuclear cooperation part of a larger diplomatic understanding that changes the dynamics of the Middle East. But the plan fell apart after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas, and Mr. Trump later divorced the nuclear agreement from the diplomatic effort.

He has now reversed himself, but only after his energy secretary, Chris Wright, signed the deal with Saudi Arabia’s energy minister.

My hot take is that Trump absorbed the news cycle criticizing the deal and decided to backfill with a social media post that either scuttles the deal or traps the Saudis into an agreement. Since there is no way that the Saudis will agree to these terms, Riyadh can return to the long list of allies that the U.S. is alienating.

Negotiating a piss-poor deal is bad; negotiating a piss-poor deal and then weaseling out of it is… also pretty bad.