The Problem Is Not Only the Deal. It Is the Dealer.
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 official record says what it says. Reuters reported in April 2025 that Trump underwent his first physical of his second term and that the White House later released a physician’s memorandum stating he was in excellent cognitive and physical health and fully fit for office. That is the official claim. But responsibility does not begin and end with quoting a memo. It also requires asking whether a leader’s method of decision-making inspires confidence when the stakes involve war, regime survival, regional escalation, and the possible remaking of the Middle East.
The issue goes deeper still because Trump is not simply another president. He is a figure formed by the culture of the developer: leverage, image, bluff, demolition, and the announcement of success before structural completion. That mentality may work in branding towers. It is disastrous when transferred into war. A developer can leave behind a glossy rendering and an unfinished skeleton. A statesman cannot leave behind a half-dismantled regime, a surviving missile structure, resilient proxy networks, and then call it peace because the press conference sounded triumphant. This is where much commentary remains too polite. It asks whether the deal will be bad, but not whether the dealer is himself part of the danger structure.
And now we have a nearly allegorical example of the problem. On March 29, 2026, while returning on Air Force One, Trump showed reporters renderings of his planned White House ballroom, boasted that it was ahead of schedule and under budget, and described security features such as bulletproof glass and a drone-proof roof. Reuters reported those remarks the same day. The timing is what matters. At a moment when the region is shaped by war, deterrence, escalation, and the question of what kind of settlement could possibly count as real, the presidential scene drifts toward self-display through architecture. It is hard not to see the symbolism. The man who may help define the endgame speaks not first as strategist, but as impresario. Not as steward of consequence, but as curator of spectacle.
This is where the literary image almost writes itself. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is remembered, among other things, for Satan’s grand ball: an extravagant scene in which magnificence, seduction, and infernal theater become inseparable. The point of the comparison is not melodrama. It is proportion. When political reality turns into a performance of dazzling surfaces while darker structures remain intact, one begins to suspect that the ballroom is no longer decoration. It is diagnosis. Bulgakov’s novel, as Britannica notes, is both witty and philosophical, preoccupied with good and evil; and the famous ball scene is precisely one of excessive splendor joined to moral distortion. That image is uncomfortably close to a politics in which rendering overtakes reality.
There is also the matter of hubris. Not in the cheap moralizing sense, but as political loss of measure. Hubris almost always walks ahead of collapse. In Israel’s case, that collapse need not come as one single dramatic fall. It can arrive as an accumulating sequence of strategic, symbolic, and reputational injuries. Every Israeli failure, including a reputational one, travels far beyond the normal cost paid by states.
Every gesture of arrogance, every display of force detached from political and ethical discipline, every spectacle of certainty without proportion, enlarges the field of delegitimization. It feeds a global circulation of resentment in which too many people still refuse to distinguish between a government and a people, a military decision and a civilizational inheritance, a state and Jews as such. In that sense, hubris is not a private flaw of leaders. It is a multiplier of damage. Every act of irresponsibility at the top can be absorbed by public opinion worldwide and reissued as another wave of hostility not only against Israel, but against Jews far beyond Israel. That is precisely why the standard of responsibility here must be higher, not lower.
That is why the stake is larger than Iran alone. A state does not lose strategic coherence only when it loses a war. It also loses it when it begins borrowing from outside the meaning of its own victory. Once the purpose of force becomes suspended in the rhythm of someone else’s declarations, someone else’s electoral calculations, and someone else’s psychological theater, military superiority starts operating in a vacuum. The bombs may still fall. The direction has already thinned out. What remains is force without horizon. Horovitz sees the danger of legitimizing the regime under a new face. One must go further. The danger is also the legitimization of irresponsibility itself as a method of politics.
A serious country therefore has to ask four questions at once. Not only what terms are being negotiated. Also: by whom, in what condition, with what discipline, and under what burden of accountability. Anything below that threshold is not realism.
It is strategic adolescence.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
