ART OF THE DEAL : Redux

Negotiation Journal

Negotiation Journal

In his earlier career, Donald Trump was a successful builder who made, lost, and remade lots of money. Forbes puts his current fortune at more than three billion dollars, which is mostly in buildings in Manhattan. In a series of books, he has described and attempted to explain his achievements. In his first and most famous book, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), he presents guidelines for business negotiators including the following:

Negotiation Journal

This paper examines the negotiation tactics employed by Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign. Drawing on data from multiple sources (interviews, debates, articles, books), our analysis begins with a brief overview of Trump's personality and philosophy, which offers a basis for understanding his general negotiating approach. We then highlight six competitive tactics and four principles of persuasion that Trump employs, with specific examples of how he used them during the campaign with his primary negotiating counterparts-the other candidates, the Republican Party, the press corps, and the American electorate. Finally, we discuss some of the implications of his negotiating approach and preferred tactics in dealing with domestic and international issues as president of the United States.

Portuguese Journal of Political Science, 2018

The election of Donald Trump as America’s forty-fifth president took much of the world by surprise. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump assured the electorate that he would solve the nation’s problems and implement an “America First” strategy which emphasises nationalism and unilateral action. He consistently contrasted his managerial skills with the ineptitude of career politicians and promised to make the best deals for America. However, the initial year of the Trump presidency has not generated the much-anticipated foreign policy successes and confusion and uncertainty have surfaced regarding America’s global leadership. Many of the difficulties the administration has faced in implementing its foreign policy strategy stem from the President’s unique management style. The current paper analyses the challenges Trump has encountered in employing his corporate management style in the Presidency and the effects it has had on America’s ability to lead the liberal international order.

US President-elect Donald Trump's bluster about the Iran nuclear deal has created a lot of confusions and uncertainties about the fate of the deal. The anti-deal statements he made during and after the race to the White House election campaign ranged from direct threats to "tear up" the deal to renegotiate it, making it clear that he would not accept the nuclear deal with Iran, officially dubbed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as it is. In reactions, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said that the deal was not a bilateral agreement with one side being able to ditch it. He averred that Iran had options "if the USA unwisely decides to move away from its obligations under the agreement". Iran-US tensions over the JCPOA, not to speak of their brewing hostilities after the 1979 Islamic revolution, have remained high, since the deal was concluded in mid-July 2015. As I have argued elsewhere, the deal was more a marriage of convenience between Iran and the US, less a political and diplomatic accord to address the long standing strategic divergences between the two countries. Iranian leaders agreed to scale back their nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, while the thorny issues of Iran's claimed pre-eminence in the Persian Gulf neighborhood, America's unqualified support to Iran's Gulf adversaries or recognition of Tehran's strategic interests in Iraq, Syria and ties to Hezbollah remained unaddressed. Symptoms of adversarial relations, despite hope for "a reset the button", soon resurfaced. The imposition of new sanctions by the US in October last year over Iran's testing of suspected nuclear capable ballistic missiles, the US Supreme Court's order to seize Iranian assets in US banks, Iran's detention of ten American sailors who strayed into Iranian territorial waters last January etc., largely derailed the expected bonhomie in post-deal Iran-US relations.

Fast Capitalism, 2020

There was a tectonic shift in governance when Donald Trump assumed the office of the President of the United States. Countless journalists, politicians, and social scientists are writing on this rupture with the past and detailing the long list of 'not normal' actions routinely committed by the President who flagrantly flouts liberal democratic norms and values that past presidents at least appeared to uphold. What these comments amount to are diagnoses of "Trump's methodology," or what we call Trump's governing style, which defies just about every single expectation that citizens have of the President (Herbert, McCrisken, Wroe, 2019:3). What is not normal is that Trump's governing style "has been one of violating norms; the social expectations that guide appropriate behavior for actors in a given context" (Havercroft et al. 2018:3). In this case, these expectations are those citizens have of the President in the world's oldest purportedly democratic nation-state. Conventional interpretations characterize President Trump's 'not normal' governing style as one or a combination of the following traits-narcissistic, ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, and neoliberal. These governing styles are seen as means to achieve four distinct but overlapping ends-self-adulation, white supremacy, an authoritarian state, and a neoliberal utopia. For these commentators, while these goals do not necessarily deviate from the Republican political playbook, what is not normal is that Trump is so open and extreme in advancing these goals while holding no pretense to care about democratic decorum. From a different angle, however, these interpretations focus on the most ordinary aspects of Trump and neglect to consider what is truly novel about his governing style because their interpretations are based on traditional political theories of governance and power. These accounts position Trump's governing style as exceptional but tend to ignore that the aforementioned

2021

Negotiation Journal

INDEX: 1. The problem: where is the Trump administration's foreign policy going?-2. What a President of the United States will never do-3. American exceptionalism and the myth of splendid isolation-4. Limits or decline of American power?-5. Conceptual fetishism: multilateralism/unilateralism, unipolarity/multipolarity-6. The dangerous contradictions of the Trump administration's foreign policy During a speech on foreign policy in April 2016, US President Donald Trump thundered: "We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We're sending troops. We tell them. We're sending something else. We have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now." Uncertainty and variety of assessments about the course of the Trump administration's foreign policy continue to be significant. What unites critics and supporters of the administration's foreign policy is the fear or hope that, driven by nationalism, the United States may withdraw into what is called isolationism. Confusion is such that it is worth examining the elementary parameters of US foreign policy and some fundamental concepts, which are also useful for understanding the particular contradictions of the current administration. It should be recalled that among US foreign policy specialists during the presidential elections and in the aftermath of Trump's victory, there was an area of diehard critics who considered the billionaire candidate for the US presidency totally inadequate – because of lack of preparation and temperament – for performing the functions of head of the executive and commander in chief. There were even those who called him a sort of "Manchurian candidate", that is, an agent of Russian interests. Critics of candidate Trump included great part of the most important Republican Party intellectuals and neoconservative functionaries who were severe in their judgment. In Europe, on the other hand, Trump's success was greeted with enthusiasm by the xenophobic and nationalist right wing in favour of leaving the European Union and the eurozone. In this case, enthusiasm for Trump was instrumental and seasoned with a considerable dose of hypocrisy that glossed over the fact that in any negotiation their small homelands would count for nothing in the face of the North American giant. But Trump is (was?) also appreciated by the Putinian and Russophile left as "another blow to imperialism". This could be a combination of incompetence, ignorance, ingenuity and stupidity, but it is more a question of simple dissolution of the most basic criteria of understanding and evaluation of what imperialism is, be it North American or Russian or Chinese. For centrist allies and opinion leaders, the label of isolationism serves as an instrument for taking a position in diplomatic negotiations. These know very well that a US administration can raise its voice and beat its fists on the table, demand this and that (for example, a more adequate contribution to NATO costs), but never terminate the alliance itself. They understand well that it is precisely the limits of the great American power – and the global dimension of North American capitalism – that make the reproduction of alliances indispensable. A third position is thus outlined, in practice an obligation for those who have responsibility for government and must necessarily negotiate with the North American