The art of the deal, it turns out, has a sequel: the art of not doing the deal you announced you were doing, at a pace slow enough to satisfy people who didn’t want you doing it in the first place. Critics will call this contradiction. I call it process.
President Trump confirmed this week that nuclear negotiations with Iran are moving forward in what he described as an “orderly and constructive” manner. He has, he added, told his officials “not to rush into a deal.” Read that sentence again. He has instructed the people doing the thing to do the thing more slowly. This is management theory so advanced it doubles back on itself. Most executives tell their teams what to do. This one has discovered you can also tell them what pace at which to do the thing you haven’t decided to do yet.
The instruction came, apparently, following pointed criticism from conservative Republican senators, who object to a deal on the grounds that a deal would exist. This is a philosophically coherent position. The solution to a bad agreement is no agreement, and the solution to no agreement is also no agreement, so really everyone is converging on the same answer from different directions. Unity at last.
Now, the officials being told not to rush are, by all available evidence, the same officials who were sent to negotiate — which is a job that implies, at minimum, an intention to eventually finish. Telling a negotiator not to rush is like appointing a committee chair and instructing the chair not to sit. The chair is already there. That’s the whole problem with chairs.
Still, one must admire the elegance. The talks are orderly. They are constructive. They are proceeding. They are simply not, under any circumstances, proceeding toward anything in particular, at any speed that might alarm anyone, in any direction that could be called a deal. Which is, when you think about it, the most stable possible outcome for a negotiation nobody involved actually asked for.
Progress. Measured, deliberate, directionless progress.