Playing bluff poker on a knife’s edge

It’s going to take more than a knife-edge game of bluff poker to get US-Iranian talks back on track. To successfully pull back from the brink, both the United States and Iran would have to fundamentally alter the assumptions underlying their negotiation strategy and what they hope to achieve in talks. That may be a tall order, particularly for President Donald Trump, who clings to the fiction of already having achieved total victory in Iran, an inflated perception of his negotiating skills and ability to dictate terms, and an overestimation of the powers of his office and country, and of what military superiority can achieve. Mr. Trump’s belief that the US-Israeli air campaign has rendered Iran militarily impotent, inflicted incalculable infrastructural damage, and that Iran is a one-man dictatorship rather than a multi-layered governance system reinforces his flawed perception of reality. On the bright side, Mr. Trump, like Iran, would prefer a negotiated resolution rather than escalation of hostilities once the current ceasefire expires on April 22. The problem is that neither the president nor Iran, both convinced that they have the upper hand, wants a resolution at any price.