Trump Wants a Final Deal With Iran. Here’s Six Times They’ve Fallen Apart Before.

Art of the deal (or lack thereof).

Feeling a little Iran deal whiplash? Us too.

As of this morning, shipping has stalled through the Strait of Hormuz; meanwhile, “constructive but tense” talks between the US and Iran were held in Switzerland. That came after a rollercoaster of a week:

• Eight days ago, President Trump announced “The Deal” with Iran was complete, with a 60-day deadline for a final agreement. Trump instructed ships to let the oil flow immediately.

• By Wednesday, we saw the substance: a memo outlining 14 vague areas of agreement.

• On Friday, that was on life support over what Iran described as ceasefire violations; Trump threatened retaliation.

• On Saturday, Iran said it had closed the strait.

Those 60 days loom large, and as the memo made clear, Trump has capitulated on just about everything compared to President Obama’s Iran deal: the stockpile, enrichment, sanctions, and beyond.

As you’ll see below, that’s the story of so many Trump “deals.” From the $10 billion investment in Wisconsin that wasn’t, to underwhelming trade, nuclear, and arms agreements, Trump’s negotiating skills just aren’t worth much to the American people.

Programming note: Every Wednesday at 12PM ET, Jessica and Aaron Parnas host Raging Perspective, a weekly livestream for all our Substack subscribers. Submit questions you’d like answered live on the show in the comments section below.

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Foxconn’s Wisconsin plant

Economists were always skeptical that Trump could revive American manufacturing, but in the summer of 2017, he’d seemed to prove them wrong. Flanked by Gov. Scott Walker and Speaker Paul Ryan, Trump announced the biggest economic “deal” of his first term: Foxconn would spend $10 billion to build a 20 million-square-foot plant in Wisconsin and add 13,000 new manufacturing jobs. In exchange, the iPhone manufacturer would receive $4 billion in state and local economic incentives. Trump called the plant, set to open by 2020, the “eighth wonder of the world.”

Less than three years after the groundbreaking ceremony, Foxconn had mostly abandoned its project. In April 2021, the Taiwanese tech giant reduced its investment down to $672 million, a 93% drop, and the number of new jobs to 1,454; an 89% drop from its original goal. Labor costs ran too high and suppliers the plant needed were nowhere near the Mount Pleasant campus. In 2024, President Biden announced a deal with Microsoft to convert it into an AI data center; that project is ahead of schedule.

“Phase One” trade deal with China

The COVID-19 outbreak made it a footnote in 2020, but Trump’s “Phase One” trade deal with China was another big bust. In January that year, the president announced a new trade deal with President Xi, broken up into phases, but beginning with a $200 billion purchase of additional US exports before the end of 2021. Trump called that number an understatement – “it’s much more” than that figure, he said – and called it a historic agreement.

The two-year deal called for China to buy that $200 billion on top of its existing 2017 baseline levels of purchasing, for about $502.4 billion total. In the end, China bought only 58% of the total commitment it offered, and therefore none of the additional $200 billion, according to a 2022 analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The think tank labeled it a historic failure.

The USMCA

Trump made NAFTA’s shortcomings central to his 2016 campaign. He called it “the worst trade deal ever signed in this country” and put the renegotiation or withdrawal from the deal in his 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again. Once in office, he chose the former. Negotiations got off to a contentious start (shocker!) between Trump, President Nieto of Mexico, and Prime Minister Trudeau. But by October 2018, they’d negotiated the USMCA; a new agreement that Trump said was the biggest trade deal in U.S. history.

The USMCA made several incremental changes: automotive parts sourcing, labor laws, dairy market access, and intellectual property all saw rewrites in the agreement. It won broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. But ultimately, the deal was “less an overhaul of NAFTA than a modest adjustment.” One trade expert said it was “really 90 percent NAFTA.”

Trump himself doesn’t even like what it accomplished. At last week’s G7 Summit, he said America would do better without it.

Afghanistan withdrawal agreement

President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal has gone down in the history books as a blunder. But for the Biden administration’s very poor execution of the plan, the plan itself was Trump’s fault.

In 2020, the Trump administration made a “peace deal” with the Taliban that saw the US withdraw from the country by May 2021, provided the Taliban entered into talks to form its own peace agreement with the Afghan government. Both Trump and Biden followed through on that agreement by gradually withdrawing troops (Biden altered the timeline by a few months).

That deal was “incredibly flawed,” per the Brookings Institution, which argued that it was poorly negotiated, gave the Taliban everything it wanted, and asked for “very little in return” beyond a few promises. By excluding Afghanistan from the deal, the deal “emboldened the Taliban and weakened the Afghan government.”

Nuclear deal with North Korea

In the summer of 2018, Trump decided to take on a North Korea nuclear deal. He actually went a step further than that, saying “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”

That declaration came after a meeting with the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, where the two countries agreed to “commit to establish” new bilateral relations and build a lasting peace. North Korea would “commit to work towards” denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, while the US would suspend US-South Korea military exercises that Trump dismissed as war games.

As the Wilson Center acknowledged, the deal was worth a try. The problem was that from the outset, the implementation was flawed. North Korea made no real concessions, the deal had little substance beyond that, and by 2020, Trump had “little more to show for his efforts than a drawer full of flattering letters.” Yikes.

Saudi Arabia arms deal

There’s failed deals, then there’s flat out lies. Our last entry belongs in the latter category. In June 2017, Trump announced a $110 billion arms sales deal with Saudi Arabia. At a signing, he called the deal “tremendous;” he also said it would bring in billions of investment and jobs to the US.

It simply wasn’t true. As Brookings reported just one month later, there was never any $110 billion figure. Instead, the White House had reached its number on a wish list of what the US would like to sell. Further reporting found that even “proposed” or “potential” sales only came out at $23.7 billion.

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Whatever agreement Trump reaches with Iran, it’ll be “historic” and “magnificent” in his eyes – it might not be worth much in anyone else’s. Keep an eye on the details over the next seven weeks. Capitulation is better than conflict, but it’s a long way short of what the American people deserve.