In a previous article, I commented on Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal and the way in which the book explained his success in managing negotiations, often with bitter or determined rivals. There, I summarized the ten rules of bargaining, transaction, and settlement that Trump applies when engaged in making a deal and establishing a contract. Chief among these are thinking big, maximizing one’s options, raising leverage, and delivering the goods. Tough but fair.
It should be recognized that it is never easy to deal with any Islamic regime for whom legitimate lying, or Koran-approved taqiyya, is a central rule of the game, a gambit by which Western governments have almost eagerly allowed themselves to be deceived. Sunni Islam may often turn out to be a theocratic nightmare, but its cadet version, Shia Islam, is a belligerent and imperious messianic cult that takes no prisoners.
The Shi’ite branch of Islam, which has flourished as the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the various ayatollahs for the last half century, is dominated by the doctrinal conviction that Allah’s kingdom is bound to be brought upon earth, with the assistance of a legendary savior known as the Twelfth Imam, by armed revolt, blood and fire. The main targets are Israel and the United States of America, although eventually the liberal West will succumb as well. I have argued that these people, aka Twelvers, are not rational actors. They are those for whom the concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) does not govern their geopolitical thinking. They are fully willing to destroy the planet should they believe circumstances require it. It is in their creed and dogma. These are the people with whom Trump is proposing to deal.
Where compromise is possible, an agreement can be worked out. Where not, the art of the deal, as Trump understands it, is contraindicated and surely dangerous. As Sun Tzu advised in The Art of War (to which The Art of the Deal is a counterpart), “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” The real question is whether Trump is abiding by his fourth criterion: know your market.
Let us examine the market.
One has to understand the Shia legend of the last battle of Hussein ibn Ali, the third Imam in Shia Islam and the son of the fourth Rashidun (rightly guided) Caliph Ali Ibn Abi Talib. Hussein was slaughtered at the battle of Karbala, where he and his 72 men fell before the 4,000-man army dispatched by Yazid I, the second ruler of the Umayyad Caliphate, regarded by the Shia as criminally illicit. The fateful date, the tenth day of the month of Muharram in 680, is fervently remembered by Shia votaries every year in the Ashura ceremony and procession commemorating Hussein’s bloody martyrdom.
The image of Hussein, the last man left alive in the battle, charging on his white stallion Lahik into the thick of enemy combatants, was iconic and became the pivotal paradigm of Shia Islam, the example of a hero who went willingly and nobly to his death rather than accept an ignominious surrender. This is the core of the faith. The portrait of the martyr with only a sword as a weapon against insurmountable odds has never been forgotten.
In the current situation, a millennium and a half later, the spectacle of a decimated IRGC facing the massive military might of America is how the Republican Guard sees its objectively hopeless dilemma, as the scene of a glorious martyrdom—in other words, a victory. They see it as the People of the Cloak, the Ahl al-Bayt (the Family of Mohammed), and the Prophet’s grandson and Ali’s son Hussein against a barbaric foe who may win the day but will lose the eternal war. “Shia” means follower, and the ones being followed are Ali and Hussein. And for the Shi’ites, of course, Trump is Yazid.
Shia Islam will never capitulate. There is no art of the deal in the Shia sensibility. There is only resistance and refusal — or, primarily in the modern era, deception, taquiyya, which is refusal by another name or method. And I am afraid that Trump, a man who understands business, who knows how to win at commerce and trade, who is practiced in market polemics and hand-to-hand entrepreneurial combat, may not realize what he is up against. He is not dealing with a business rival. He is not even facing a political aggressor. He is confronting a collective mindset that is not afraid to die, that cannot parry the resolute call of martyrdom, that is willing to kill rather than come to an understanding, and, in short, that has no conception of the “art of the deal.”
The Iranian regime has used the ceasefire “negotiations” to prepare for renewed war, digging out its collapsed missile tunnels and replenishing its armaments with help from Communist China and Russia via Iraq and the Caspian Sea. Iran has no intention of bowing to clear American military superiority and to acknowledging the rightness of America’s claims to deprive it of nuclear capability, to open the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping, and to render its terrorist proxies null and void. This does not meet the definition of Trump’s sense of the deal; it is not dealing fair.
What is more, many observers have noted that an arrangement with the Islamic Republic is unlikely, if not impossible, since there is no longer a unified and responsible authority with which to engage. Administrative power, such as it may be, is distributed along too many fracture nodes to permit a reliable commitment. But this assessment fails to account for the prior reality, namely, the Shia “market” is not one that is amenable to a “deal” in the first place. Shia does not deal. It imposes its will and follows its destiny, as did Hussein, regardless of empirical consequences. Islam is fundamentalist. Shia Islam is super-fundamentalist.
If Trump cannot understand this and does not go for, or encourage, regime change, he will, in the long term, lose. This is war against an implacable foe. This is not business.
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