The genuine tension between two very different ways of understanding politics.
When Donald Trump talks about a “deal,” he is drawing from a business mindset: discrete parties, clear interests, measurable outcomes, and—crucially—a relatively short time horizon. In that world, a deal is something you close. Success is defined by terms agreed and value extracted.
But diplomacy and international relations operate in a very different register.
First, they are not finite transactions. They are ongoing relationships. A treaty, an agreement, even a ceasefire is not the end of something—it’s the beginning of a new phase. Think of the Treaty of Versailles: on paper, it was a “deal” ending World War I. In reality, it sowed grievances and instabilities that helped lead to another, even more destructive war. The “deal” was not wrong because it failed as a transaction—it failed because it misunderstood the deeper historical and psychological landscape.
Second, diplomacy involves layers that cannot be priced or quantified:
a) historical memory
b) identity and humiliation
c) domestic political pressures
d) long-term strategic positioning
These are not negotiable in the same way as money or assets. A state may accept material loss but reject symbolic defeat—or vice versa.
Third, there is the issue of time. Business deals often assume a relatively stable environment. International politics unfolds across decades, sometimes centuries. Consider something like the Cold War—there was no single “deal” that defined it. Instead, there were shifting understandings, tacit rules, crises, and recalibrations. Stability came not from one decisive agreement, but from a continuous process of interpretation and restraint.
Fourth, framing everything as a deal risks flattening moral and existential questions. Not everything can—or should—be reduced to exchange. Questions about war, sovereignty, or national survival aren’t just negotiations over “who gets what.” They are often about who we are, what we remember, and what we refuse to become. That’s why leaders like Henry Kissinger—for all their flaws—spoke less about “deals” and more about order, balance, and legitimacy.
Something is missing.
What’s missing is the recognition that diplomacy is not just about closing—it’s about sustaining. Not just about exchange, but about coexistence over time.
A deal ends a negotiation; diplomacy begins where the deal proves insufficient.
Or even more sharply:
In business, you close the deal and walk away. In politics, you live inside the consequences.
This is not just a critique of style—it’s a critique of ontology, of what politics is. A purely transactional frame does not just simplify reality, it misdescribes it.
When Donald Trump speaks of a “deal” with Iran, the language suggests closure, symmetry, and control. It implies that the situation can be bounded, negotiated, and resolved in a way analogous to a contract. But crises like this are not bounded—they are historically sedimented. They carry within them decades of mistrust, humiliation, intervention, ideology, and memory.
Even to speak of “the crisis” risks flattening it. One could trace a line back through the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, the long shadow of external interference, and more recent ruptures such as the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Each moment leaves a residue. None of it disappears when a “deal” is signed.
The intangible—even the spiritual—becomes essential rather than ornamental.
Because what is at stake in such relationships is not only:
a) centrifuge counts
b) sanctions relief
c) inspection regime
but also:
a) dignity
b) recognition
c) historical injury
d) narratives of betrayal and survival
These are not abstractions. They are lived realities that shape how agreements are interpreted, honoured, or quietly undermined.
A transactional mindset tends to assume that once interests are aligned on paper, behaviour will follow. But history suggests something closer to the opposite: if the deeper, less tangible dimensions are ignored, the agreement may become a shell—form without trust, structure without legitimacy.
I find it useful not to contrast this just as business vs politics, but as two different experiences of time:
Transactional time: immediate, outcome-driven, focused on closure (“the deal is done”).
Historical time: layered, recursive, shaped by memory and anticipation (“nothing is ever fully done”).
In that sense, the danger is not only that a “deal” might fail. It is that it may create the illusion of resolution, allowing one party to disengage while the underlying tensions continue to evolve—often in more dangerous forms.
“Walking away”
A deal, in the business sense, permits exit. But in geopolitics, there is no true exit. Even withdrawal is a form of presence; it reshapes the field for others. The vacuum left behind becomes part of the story.
Impoverishment of imagination:
To reduce diplomacy to the language of deals is to imagine that nations meet as traders across a table, rather than as histories encountering one another.
Or, extending a more spiritual intuition:
What is absent in the language of the deal is not merely nuance, but depth—the recognition that human beings, and the nations they form, do not act only out of interest, but out of memory, pride, fear, and the longing to be seen on their own terms.
I connect this back to my Father’s story.
His life, shaped by forces far beyond any “deal,” stands as a quiet refutation of the idea that history can be managed through neat transactions. The categories imposed on him—enemy, ally, displaced person—were themselves bureaucratic “settlements” that failed to capture the human reality beneath them.
In that sense, my essay becomes more than commentary. It becomes a kind of resistance to reduction—to the idea that the world can be adequately understood, or governed, through the logic of exchange alone.
What we are seeing has the shape of tragedy precisely because it isn’t just a disagreement over policies—it’s a divergence over how reality itself is read.
It can feel almost like two different languages. But perhaps even more starkly: two different grammars of action.
In one grammar—the one I’m critiquing, often associated with figures like Donald Trump—the world is composed of actors with interests, and interaction is a sequence of moves aimed at advantage. Clarity comes from simplification: Who wins? Who loses? What are the terms? It is a language of immediacy, leverage, and closure.
In the other grammar—the one I am reaching toward—the world is not reducible to interests. It is composed of histories, identities, wounds, inheritances. Action is not just strategic, but interpretive. One does not simply act; one responds to what has been, and anticipates how that response will be remembered.
These two grammars don’t easily translate into one another.
An image comes to mind where one is not just using the wrong tool, but not recognising that the tool is wrong. A screwdriver used as a hammer doesn’t merely fail—it damages what it touches, often without the user understanding why.
And here is where the danger deepens. It is not only that such a mindset is “one-dimensional,” but that it can be closed to correction. If everything is interpreted through the same transactional lens, then:
a) gestures of goodwill are seen as weakness
b) historical grievances are dismissed as excuses
c) symbolic acts are undervalued or misread
d) long-term consequences are discounted in favour of immediate gain
This creates a kind of epistemic isolation: others see meanings that the actor does not even register as existing.
This makes response extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. Because how does one negotiate with a framework that does not acknowledge the dimensions you consider essential? If one side is speaking in terms of memory, legitimacy, and historical continuity, and the other in terms of leverage and closure, then even apparent agreement may conceal profound misunderstanding.
There is a concept—without naming it too formally—that one might articulate in this context: incommensurability. Not total incomprehensibility, but a lack of a shared measure. The same event, the same agreement, is not the same thing to each side.
And this is where the tragic element enters.
Because tragedy, in its classical sense, is not simply catastrophe—it is collision without resolution. Two logics, each internally coherent, meet in a way that cannot be harmonised. The result is not synthesis, but fracture.
It is not that one side is entirely blind and the other fully sees, but that they are looking at different orders of reality. One sees terms; the other sees time. One seeks closure; the other knows that nothing, once lived, is ever fully closed.
Or, developing my metaphor:
It is not merely that the wrong tool is being used, but that the craftsman does not believe any other tools exist.
And perhaps the most unsettling part of what I’m sensing is this: such a mindset does not necessarily appear irrational to itself. It can even appear effective in the short term. That is what allows it to persist—and what makes its longer-term consequences so hard to avert.
The deeper danger is not that the world will be mismanaged in the moment, but that it will be misunderstood across time. And what is misunderstood in time has a way of returning—often with greater force, and always at a cost.