The Problem Is Not Only the Deal. It Is Also the Dealer.

David Horovitz is right to identify the visible danger. If Donald Trump seeks an agreement with different faces of the same Iranian regime, he risks preserving what the war was supposed to break. Horovitz’s core point is difficult to evade: political relabeling is not structural change. If regime personnel are merely repackaged as acceptable interlocutors, there is no breakthrough, only continuity under fresher branding. He also notes how carefully Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from Trump’s talk of indirect negotiations and a reported 15-point framework, signaling, in effect, that Israel cannot simply entrust its vital interests to someone else’s diplomatic theater.

But that argument still stops too early. The issue is not only strategic contradiction. It is responsibility. Not only responsibility for the consequences of a bad arrangement, but responsibility for placing the architecture of war termination in the hands of a man whose political method is improvisation, spectacle, and inflation of declaration. Trump’s own self-description is revealing. A leader who presents deal-making as his life’s defining grammar is not reassuring by default. In a regional war, that posture is not seriousness. It is a warning that statecraft may be reduced to transaction, and history to self-advertisement.

There is another omission, and it is no longer minor. One cannot seriously discuss whether Trump should be trusted with the closing sequence of a regional war without raising the issue of fitness in the full political sense: judgment, endurance, transparency, discipline, and competence under pressure.

The........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)