Will Donald Trump Buy A Persian Carpet?
Can his leverage keep his bargaining partner(s) honest?
Donald Trump presents flamboyant deal-making as his true “art form”— an instinct-driven, theatrical performance that is focused on winning big rather than playing it safe. I have just summarized Art of the Deal, which is a book based on Trump’s ideas about business.
Trump seeks to make use of distressed properties (Gaza; Hormuz) through a zero-sum game of leverage and risk, optimized for persistence and cunning logic. He has been to the Middle East, so he knew about the Saudis and their pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea when a tiny number of Americans did. Able to anticipate the worst-case scenario, he did not gamble blindly.
The proof is that multiple elements of victory continue to fall into place where Trump had already maximized his options. What seems like a vague deal with sketchy partners is in fact a flexible deal, and also more easily broken, or revised through leverage, with the partners who have decided to make a deal.
Put another way, Trump did the market research. He had the connections and intelligence to know who stood where with Iran. Trump knew what Iran would do once the explosions started. Trump also knows what the regime needs, right now: money and access to global markets. He is willing to trade both for a new relationship on American terms.
Meanwhile, the United States Marine Corps has not even arrived in the theater yet. Trump continues to create and exert leverage while offering the transaction. He is fundamentally transactional. American presidents have pursued peace with the Islamic Republic without success, through back-channel and formal diplomatic means, only to get screwed every time.
Trump is not looking for the kind of transaction that Iran is used to extorting and haggling out of Americans who wanted a greater deal in the future, who bought the used rug in hopes of buying the better rug later. The Iran-Contra scandal derived from rug-buyers trying to win the release of hostages held by Islamist thugs. The JCPOA derived from Ben Rhodes buying a bad rug in hopes of buying more rugs later.
Trump is demanding the whole carpet bazaar.
This is a leveraged buyout. Real estate matters. Delivering on promises matters, so the promises are vague. Trump is unyielding and unrelenting in pursuit of deliverables. He has contained the costs by pre-empting Iranian conventional missile superiority and letting his highly lethal military alliance, Israel and the United States, change the regime by removing three whole layers of command.
“It is not for any Prophet to have prisoners until he make wide slaughter in the land” -Quran 8:67
There is reason to hope President Trump might not buy a used carpet in the transaction. The regime leadership he has destroyed were all used carpet salesmen, the same gang of thugs who took Oliver North and Barack Obama to the cleaners.
In this context, a reported demand to have J.D. Vance negotiate for the American side is not actually weird. They likely see him as the American most likely to buy a used carpet. I don’t think they are fans of Hillbilly Elegy who want his autograph.
Right now, everyone who said last week that Trump would never get the regime to make a deal is predicting that this deal will be terrible. Iran is not Venezuela, they say, to which the obvious retort now is that yes, leveraging a victory over Iran needed weeks instead of an hour.
Many people are absurdly claiming that Iran was no threat to the United States. What they mean is that they were afraid to act on the threat Iran represented to American interests for decades. They think of themselves as ‘good people’ and the smartest guys in the room. Some of them knew better before 28 February 2026. They are hypocrites, all of them.
They are madder than ever now, too, because the plan they said did not exist is working. “The possibility of Trump imposing his personal whims on another nation is even more frightening than U.S. failure”, Howard French wrote in a Foreign Policy subheadline. He is saying the quiet part out loud: westerners are only allowed to buy one carpet at a time, it’s the rule!
“They are negotiating, by the way, and they want to make a deal so badly, but they're afraid to say it because they figure they'll be killed by their own people”, Trump told the National Republican Congressional Committee yesterday. “They're also afraid they'll be killed by us!”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reportedly called US envoy Steve Witkoff to offer to negotiate a deal. Araghchi and Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the majlis, have reportedly been removed from the target list so they can participate in said negotiations. Ghalibaf’s name had floated on Monday. Seldom do bargaining positions begin from such a strong position as the one Trump enjoys, right now.
“There's never been a head of a country that wanted that job less than being the head of Iran,” Trump quipped. He acknowledged signal intercepts of Iranians offering the supreme leadership, only to be turned down. “No thank you, I don’t want it!” It is easy to believe him. The more subtle point is that Trump is telling his negotiating partners that they cannot keep secrets from him. Honesty will be their best policy for staying alive.
Over 200 Basij members were reportedly killed in a strike on Imam Sajjad Mosque in Mashhad. Apparently, the bombardment of Basij forces in the area had inspired them all to gather inside one convenient building. Trump is still reducing Iran’s missile capacity, still crushing its street forces, still creating leverage.
Murmurs of boots on ground grow stronger by the day. So does the probability that they will receive no incoming fire from a capitulating Iran. If anything, the sudden burst of insane regime claims about driving Americans from their bases, the sketchy videos of American planes apparently being attacked but not shot down, and the vows of revenge are evidence that the humiliation of defeat is at hand.
The identity of the carpet seller does matter. At the Jerusalem Post, Yosef Yair Collins writes that in the event of a deal, “waiving sanctions would augment the opposition by providing a vast war chest” to a civilian who must reckon with the remnants of the old regime.
At current prices, the sanctioned oil is worth $10-$14 billion. This would go a long way toward leveling the economic capabilities gap between the regime and the opposition, and can be used to support independent, large operations by the opposition, allowing it to be more effective in its internal campaign against the Islamic regime.
Crucially, this can solve the historical woe of the Iranian opposition – disunity. Providing this economic boost to a centralized body forces disparate ethnic and ideological groups to coordinate under a single, economically dominant entity.
By transferring the stewardship of Iran’s natural resources to a legitimate provisional body under Pahlavi, the West can do more than just lower gas prices; it can provide the Iranian people with the tools to reclaim their nation.
With more than 10,000 strikes already, it is easy to lose sight of key targets, for example the Caspian Sea port of Bandar Anzali. This site has not only become a key transshipment point for weapons going in and out of Iran, it is very likely the northern maritime nexus of Iran’s sanctions-evasion infrastructure. Destroying it, and the ships used to move weapons and other goods, is exactly what I have told premium subscribers to expect since January.
I do not think there will be a fight for Kharg Island. Instead, the Marines and the 82nd Airborne and 10th Mountain brigade elements are leverage in the transaction now being negotiated. Kharg Island will figure in the transaction — along with Hormuz, the missile program, the nuclear program, and all the other carpets that Trump intends to buy.
Bret Stephens writes that “if past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.” Chief among these is supreme command of the skies over Iran.
Donald Trump perceives his advantages and does not care whether we do, right now. Eventually, everyone will see the advantages he possesses. Even the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, currently in a state of denial, will have to acknowledge his advantages, eventually: this is the plan, which was not supposed to exist, and now is not supposed to work, but somehow seems to be working better than it has any right to.
Pay attention to things as they are, not as they are forecast to be. Trump’s domestic enemies are bracing themselves for success, right now. Watch as the #NoKings people turn on a dime to declare that Trump is trying to be the world-emperor. Which, fine. If there is an American embassy in Iran again, and the political prisoners are free, then fine. Let him be the emperor until 2028, if that happens. He will have earned it, as far as I’m concerned, as long as he succeeds in buying out the carpet salesmen.