What kind of negotiator gives the other side everything that it wants with the hope of eventually getting something in return?
It’s a question that even some of President Trump’s own allies are asking after his administration signed a landmark deal to develop a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia using American technology.
Every Iraqi prime minister since the fall of Saddam Hussein has inherited the same impossible job: Convince Washington that Iraq is not slipping entirely into Iran’s orbit while convincing Tehran that it is not becoming an American outpost.
Iraq’s new prime minister now faces that challenge under the most trying of circumstances. The United States and Iran are at war—and Iraq sits between them. When I met with Ali al-Zaidi during his visit to Washington, D.C.
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Days before the United States launched its war on Iran in late February, a senior official from an Arab nation was being escorted through the West Wing when the Oval Office door swung open to present three familiar faces: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
“What are you doing here?” the official asked Graham, half in jest.
In early 2025, J. D. Vance paid a visit to Les Invalides, in Paris, where he was invited to clutch the sword of the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution. In a speech the next day, Vance drew a parallel between that sword and artificial intelligence, calling them both “weapons that are dangerous in the wrong hands but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands.”
Whether the rollout of AI in the U.S.
If it feels as though Washington and Tehran have been on the verge of a deal before, it’s because they have. At least 38 times during the months of negotiations to end the war in Iran, President Trump has suggested that an agreement was within reach, only for new disputes, military escalations, or competing narratives to push the finish line further away.
In 1960, Washington watched aghast as Fidel Castro’s post-Revolution government seized companies and assets it viewed as the spoils of vanquished U.S. imperialism. Among the biggest prizes were two plants that sat above some of the largest nickel and cobalt deposits in the world. The United States had acquired one of them to secure a strategic supply of nickel for armor plating and aircraft engines during World War II.
In July, on the manicured grounds of President Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with the European Union. The agreement—centered on a 15 percent tariff on most European exports—was an uneasy compromise designed to avoid a bigger clash.
By early fall, the deal was headed into the rough.
In the chaotic swirl of events after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, doctors feared that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had suffered a heart attack upon arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. The signs were ominous: Johnson’s face was ashen, and he was clutching his chest. “There was the real possibility that the No. 3 in the line of succession would become president,” the historian Michael Beschloss told me.
Early this morning, with Asian markets sharply down and oil tankers idling in the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump offered Iranian leaders a familiar mix of threats but also a reprieve. What had been, only days earlier, a 48-hour ultimatum—reopen the strait or face the destruction of energy infrastructure —softened into something more elastic: a five-day extension for what he described as “very good and productive” talks with Tehran.
A Russian oil tanker is creeping west across the Atlantic, quite possibly toward a confrontation with the United States Navy.
The Anatoly Kolodkin is carrying tens of thousands of tons of crude oil apparently meant for Cuba, which is battling a fuel shortage. But it may not reach its destination: The U.S. Navy is policing the Caribbean to choke off Havana’s oil supply.
In 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to topple Iran’s elected prime minister, the American public was told a familiar story: Communism was creeping in, the Cold War demanded vigilance, and the United States could not afford another Moscow ally. But beneath the neat narrative of containment was a more tangible obsession—oil. Iran’s enormous reserves were not merely a strategic asset; they were a prize.
In the basement Situation Room at the White House and a gilded secure room at Mar-a-Lago are whispers of a Trumpian grand plan that many in Washington and in capitals around the world once considered unthinkable: the toppling of not one, not two, but three autocracies that have tormented generations of American presidents. As U.S.
By mid-afternoon, the gray, windowless corridors of the Harry S. Truman Building, the headquarters of the State Department, feel less like the nerve center of the world’s most consequential foreign-policy institution and more like the catacombs for diplomacy. A disorienting and disheartening quiet has settled in, following last year’s sweeping cuts at State and its sister agency USAID.
The coffee corner at Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich is so mobbed with diplomats and executives exchanging business cards and guzzling caffeine that it’s easy to miss even the most recognizable faces. And Jens-Frederik Nielsen is not one of those.
In November 1999, Havana’s Latinoamericano stadium sold out for a baseball game that was billed as a friendly rivalry between Latin America’s oldest and newest revolutionary leaders. Hugo Chávez had been Venezuela’s president for fewer than nine months when he took the field opposite Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who had led his country’s revolution 40 years earlier, when Chávez was just 4 years old.
American forces’ surgical capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, carried out in a daring raid shortly after 1 a.m. local time today, had been planned and rehearsed for months. Informants monitored the first couple’s movements, more than 150 aircraft provided cover starting late last night, missile strikes on military installations knocked out air defenses, and low-flying helicopters landed Delta Force soldiers in the center of Caracas. U.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on CNBC this fall to promote a deal so great that he deemed it “off the rails.” The government of Japan, he explained, had brought down its tariff rate by giving President Donald Trump $550 billion to spend on whatever he wants. “They are going to give America money when we ask for it to build the projects,” he said with a grin.
Volodymyr Zelensky clearly learned some lessons from his calamitous Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump back in February. That much was apparent today just from the Ukrainian leader’s outfit. Back then, Zelensky took heat from Trump allies who felt that a suit—and not his trademark wartime ensemble—would have been more appropriate attire for an audience with the American president.
Vladimir Putin is coming to America, despite the international warrant for the Russian president’s arrest, despite his years of hostile threats against NATO, and despite him showing no remorse for his invasion of a sovereign nation.
None of that matters to President Donald Trump, who announced Friday night that he would meet the globally shunned leader this Friday in Alaska.