Why should Iran believe anything the US threatens or promises?

Fewer than 100 days into his second term as president, Donald Trump can so far claim at least one kind of success: He's restarted negotiations between the US and some of its adversaries, first Russia and now Iran. On Saturday, Trump's "special envoy" for seemingly everything, Steve Witkoff, will meet high-level Iranians in Oman to discuss ways to constrain Tehran's nuclear program and avert war.

The problem — as hostage negotiators, relationship therapists and others can confirm — is that talking doesn't always solve a problem and can even make it worse, depending on the intentions, interests and mental states of the interlocutors. The Iranians (like the Russians) are notoriously shifty negotiators. But so are the Americans, now that they're led by Trump.

His fans keep reciting the canard that he intuits the Art of the Deal or plays multi-dimensional chess. In reality, the president has been contradicting himself and garbling his signals to an extent that now hampers negotiations with any rational actors, whether they're in Tehran, Beijing, Moscow or Pyongyang, or even (when the subject is tariffs) in Brussels, Ottawa or Mexico City. Not to mention irrational actors.

The confusion starts with his underlying shtick, sometimes called the Madman Theory. As MAGA stans gloat, Trump is so unpredictable that his opponents get scared, which allegedly makes them weak and him strong. As the scholar Roseanne McManus has shown, however, this strategy, or disposition, easily backfires. Adversaries may conclude that the madman is a wild card who cannot be trusted to abide by any agreement, so that yielding is at best pointless and at worst suicidal.

That is how Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, probably sees the American president. In his first term, Trump backed out of a multinational deal dating to his predecessor that limited Iran's nuclear program. That agreement wasn't perfect, but Iran was complying with it, by allowing monitors to observe its activities and restricting the technologies to civilian uses. Trump instead applied "maximum pressure" by tightening sanctions and ordering the assassination of an Iranian commander.

Now Trump is once again exerting maximum pressure, while simultaneously offering talks and threatening war, and neither of those convincingly. When hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, the president mused that "doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious" — a military strike, he meant — because "the obvious is not something I want to be involved with." On he went in this ambiguous way, hinting that "if the talks aren't successful … I think Iran is going to be in great danger."

Does that mean that Trump would accede to Netanyahu's preference and join Israel in attacking Iran? His promise to his MAGA base has been the exact opposite: to keep American out of foreign wars and be a "peacemaker." And what would satisfy Trump enough to call the talks "successful"? His advisers have said that the Iranians must "give up their entire" atomic program, even though the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty explicitly allows signatories, including Iran, to develop civilian nuclear infrastructure. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned that the US could "go further and perhaps even threaten the regime."

What Trump seems to demand, and what Netanyahu has explicitly called for, is the "Libya model." That refers to a decision in 2003 by that country's former dictator, Moammar al Qaddafi, to scrap weapons of mass destruction in return for sanctions relief. This is exactly the wrong precedent, as any decent negotiator should know. Having disarmed, Qaddafi soon felt betrayed by the US. In 2011, American and NATO forces backed Libyan insurgents, and Qaddafi met a gruesome end. Both North Korea and Iran concluded that the Libya model was a compelling reason not against, but for, their nuclear programs.

An approach with better odds of success, if it came across as credible, might be to ask Iran not to ditch nuclear technology altogether but only to forswear its weaponization and to accept rigorous international verification. That conforms with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (which also obliges the US and other nuclear powers to work toward their own disarmament, as it happens). If it lets the ayatollah think that he could again rev up a weapons program in future, that might be an advantage in getting him to sign on, just as Trump and Netanyahu need to believe they could return to a war footing at any point.

The contradictions in Trump's messaging don't end there. If keeping Iran from getting nukes is his priority, the president should also be lining up support from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and build a regional anti-Tehran coalition. Instead, by letting Netanyahu resume his campaign in the Gaza Strip unfettered, he's making Arab cooperation all but impossible.

And so the incongruities keep piling up: Trump can't be a credible negotiator while simultaneously impersonating a madman (let's keep assuming he's impersonating). He can't be a peacemaker if he also keeps threatening to bomb regimes out of existence. He can't permanently and verifiably keep Iran's nuclear program peaceful and limited while demanding that Tehran must stop all work with fission.

At a meeting with his inner circle, Khamenei apparently called the Trump administration "bullying" and opined that "talks for them are a pathway to have new demands, it is not only about Iran's nuclear issue." As theory predicts, he seems to fear that caving to "maximum pressure" will only invite even more pressure, that conceding anything to Trump will make him end like Qaddafi.

This problem now haunts Trump's Iran policy, his tariff campaign, his efforts to end the war in Ukraine and all his other diplomatic initiatives. Why should foreign leaders haggle with him when he changes his mind several times in one day? Why should they give assurances when they don't expect him to honor America's?

The madman shtick isn't working for Trump, in Iran or anywhere. Being whimsical, mercurial and unpredictable may sell when you're a star on reality television. But an American president needs to set realistic objectives and then send signals that are clear, credible and consistent.

Andreas Kluth. Sketch: TBS

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. 

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.