The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Trump loses his bargaining power and has Mark Carney's “elbows up” promise delivered?

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Iranians appear to be enjoying maximum leverage over the Trump administration. The argument goes that Trump had to act as he did to avoid severe risks to the global economy—an outcome that raises questions about the limits of his “master dealmaker” image.Why is JD Vance positioning himself as the deal’s chief cheerleader, exposing himself to sustained political scrutiny? And how are figures like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin likely interpreting these developments? For some, it may signal a setback for American credibility and global leadership.In the second half of the show, Rudyard and Andrew turn to domestic politics. As the House of Commons prepares to break for the summer, they assess the Prime Minister’s performance over his first 14 months in office. Having set high expectations during the campaign—including an “elbows up” approach to Donald Trump—has Mark Carney's government delivered policies that meet the moment?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Some of the hawks in the United States want the U.S. to keep pushing on on this as if if they just blew harder the house would fall over. Well, it's pretty clear that's not the case in this situation. There's a reason why other presidents were shy about attempting a military solution to the Iranian problem. It wasn't because they were weak or stupid or cowardly. It's because it's a really difficult situation. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Roger Griffiths here, Chair of the Mug Debates, joined by our regular contributor, Andrew Coyne, journalist at the Globe of Mail.

Andrew, great to be in conversation with you today. Good to be with you. Let's kick around the last 72 hours or so of MOU-related back and forth between the President of the United States, the government of Iran, J.D. Vance, in Switzerland to open up the first, I guess, of a series of bilaterals, Andrew, on the terms of this. MOU. What, if anything, did you see coming out of the weekend? It seems like a complex dance here of positioning, especially on the part of the Iranians who seem to be enjoying this moment of kind of maximum leverage over the Trump administration. Well, exactly. I mean, first of all, the deal is not really a deal, as I think you alluded to, I don't just mean terminologically, it's a member of understanding, but so much of it was put off to future negotiations.

negotiations. So much of what was in, just to recap, was a complete capitulation by the United States. There's no other word for it. On issue after issue that they had claimed were their casas bellies, the reason why they were going to war, whether it was regime change, whether it was liberating the Iranian people, whether it was getting rid of Iran's ballistic missiles, getting control of its nuclear program. None of these things actually are in the agreement. And in fact, even on the thing they announced mid-war as being their new war aim, which was reopening the Strait of Ramos that had closed because of the war, it's not clear they've even achieved that. Whatever may be on paper, effectively Iran still controls the Strait of Homo's.

And they still control, and they still are likely to prevail in these negotiations for this very simple reason that Donald Trump has all but announced he has no bargaining position. I mean, he basically said, I had to do this because otherwise the world economy would go down in the tank. Well, if you're the Iranians and you hear that, you've just been told, I have no bargaining position. I have no leverage. And we've seen this with Trump again and again and again, not just because of the situation he blundered into here, which was entirely of his own making because they didn't think through the strategy. They didn't have a strategy. They misunder, I was going to say, misunderestimated the George Bush line.

They mis-undestimated their enemy in a thousand different ways. But he's also just eminently rollable. We've seen this when he negotiates, quote, unquote, with Putin, when he negotiates, quote, unquote, with Xi Jinping and China. And now with Iran, of course, part of that is he just really likes dictators and doesn't really want to stand up to them for the most part. But even so far as he does, he's a very weak negotiator. This whole business about, he supposedly he's the master dealmaker is such nonsense. Even in private life as a businessman, basically his main business technique was to stiff his suppliers. It wasn't even some great, masterful negotiator.

It's he would renege on agreements that he'd made with his suppliers and then basically dare them to take him to court. Well, you can get away with that with the local plumbing contractors. you really can't get away with that when you're the President of the United States and you're dealing with the adversaries who have all kinds of leverage over you. And we're certainly seeing that play out with this deal. What do you make, Andrew, of J.D. Vance's kind of seeming rush to talk up this deal, to not simply laud it, but seemingly over the last 24 hours of reports are to be believed,

to exaggerate the initial, I'll put it in quotes, success of the first round of talks about the talks with the Iranians. A lot of J.D.E. Vance's claims now being denied in Iranian media. And yes, the Iranian regime has different factions, and no doubt it is not a coherent whole. But regardless, Andrew, it seems strange to me that J.D. Vance is putting himself in this role, both as ardent proponent of the deal and now as kind of slavish facilitator of all of its kind of bizarre points of commission and in humiliation in the 14 points. Yeah. Well, he's in a difficult position to be somewhat fair to him. He was very, a very, keen to have leaked ahead of time that he was against the war to begin with. Now he's being, either you've said he's chosen to this or he's being made to be the appointment on these things. Who knows exactly? The other thing I want to be fair to money is it's not the deal itself that's

the problem. It's the war that got you into this. You know, when you sell a losing stock, the mistake isn't selling the stock. It, you know, it fell. You've got to take your losses. The mistake was ever buying it in the first place. And that's sort of the situation here they're in here is they need to get out of this war. They never should have got into it. Right. They didn't get anything for it. They've been humiliated. That's true. But that's because they didn't have any bargaining position. And in a way, it's best to just acknowledge that fact and try to minimize your losses. So the mistake isn't the deal that some of the hawks in the United States want the U.S. to keep pushing on on this as if if they just,

you know, blew harder, the house would fall over. Well, it's pretty clear that's not the case in the situation. There's a reason why other presidents were shy about attempting a military solution to the Iranian problem. It wasn't because they were weak or stupid or cowardly. It's because it's a really difficult situation. And that's what I think, I hope some of the hawks are learning and some of them aren't. But as I say, the mistake was ever getting into it. So now, Chady Vance is trying to deploy his whatever skills he has as a communicator. to trying to make a silk purse over the sow is here, if you will, and I can understand that if you're now stuck in this situation

where you just have to eat this, if you have no other alternative, then as an administration, let alone JD Vance, then that's your only alternative is to try to make it seem as good as you can. You're going to look foolish, but you're going to look foolish just because of the situation you got yourself in. I'll repeat myself. The mistake was ever launching the war in the first place.

Agreed. I think you and I share a concern, though, about how, let's say, Vladimir Putin now looks at this, or Xi Jinping. There is, I don't know, Andrew, I would think a way to have a negotiation with the Iranians might retain some of your dignity in the process. What's your bargaining? You've given them control of the Strait of Pramos. They would never have done it before because they would have been afraid of the military consequences. but when the military consequences precede the decision as an Iranian leader, then you say, what have I got to lose?

There's no extra penalty now. I might as well do this. So in a way, they kind of weirdly liberated the Iranians to do what they did. So once they've got control of those trade of Hormuz, then you're in a very weak position, particularly if you've gone into this single-handedly and ticked off every potential ally that you might have counted upon for help either in keeping the straight open or reopening it once it had been closed or even enforcing the terms of the deal.

But, you know, yeah, the Europeans and our own prime minister said a lot of nice things at the G7 meeting about, oh, this is a great deal. It's only your leadership, Donald Trump, that could have gotten us here. But I think that was mostly they were just seizing the opportunity to flatter them at cost-free because they're not going to really have to pay for this. They would like to see the oil flowing again. So all of this, the cost of all this are going to be borne by the Americans, and to get to your point, in terms of lost credibility. By taking on Iran and failing, and failing not necessarily because it was impossible. to do, although, as I say, I think we're certainly learning how difficult it is to pull off a military solution to the Iranian problem.

But even if it were in theory a good idea and possible, certainly not under this gang and certainly not with the decisions they made and the assumptions they made that we can do this in three days. All we have to do is decapitate the leadership and the regime will fall. All these assumptions they made, one suspects because they were able to get away with it in Venice. Venezuela, where they took out the leader. They certainly didn't bring the regime down. The regime is still in place, but it was all very easy. It was a classic Trump maneuver where it was all easy and cost-free and could be done in the day, and he could boast about it on TV in the evening.

Well, Iran is a much more formidable adversary than Venezuela, as the United States administration has learned to its enormous cost, and its enormous cost is going to continue to compound from here on in in terms of, The United States being exposed as a paper tiger, of its security guarantees to its allies in the regions being exposed as being not worth the paper they're not on, of the broken relations with their other NATO allies where they insisted that they take part in a definitively non-NATO situation, having spent the past year either threatening or insulting them or preparing to invade the sovereign territory, but at least one of them. So, you know, again, all of this is adding up to a terrible blow to American leadership, and that's bad for everyone who had in the past relied on American leadership. But in again, in a sense, we're kind of just realizing our losses here that under Donald Trump, American leadership is either kaput or something to be dreaded. until and unless the Americans replace their current leadership and to take a very different course towards their erstwhile allies, then American leadership is over. Yeah.

Let's switch Andrew to the G7 as a kind of segue. Again, we're catching up with you over a busy few days here. What was the accomplishment of this G7? What came out of it? As you said, there was a lot of kind of humoring and cajoling of Trump on Iran. I noted, it's somewhat alarming, that the G7 leaders took a meeting with the heads of the major AI companies, a kind of peer-to-peer, I believe it was a dinner. Nonetheless, a high-level meeting between the G7 leadership, not their ministers.

not their officials, but the respective heads of government meeting with the heads of the AI companies. So I wonder, you know, obviously we're spending a lot of time on Iran. It's top of mind for many of us. But are we missing some other big stories here? Like, I don't know, the seeming collapse, it's too strong a word, but the erosion of power and independence, maybe sovereign, of these G7 states in this era of technological change? Well, when you think about how disastrous recent meanings of the G7 have been,

where it was all they could do to keep Trump from leaving partway through and denouncing the proceedings, I think the main aim of this G7 was to get through it and survive it without some tobacco. And part of that was pretending to be excited about the Iran deal, in return for which Trump, tended to be more favorable to Ukraine's position in the Ukraine war, which is if it meant anything, if we actually thought he'd had anything like a change of heart, would be worth all the flattery

on the Iran file. But, of course, with Trump, you know, all he has to do is get on the phone with Vladimir Putin again. And an hour later, he'll be taking the Russian line on this thing for whatever combination of reasons. So, you know, that's, I don't want to be too cynical, but that, was, I think, the main aim and achievement of this G7 meeting. The G7 is already dwindling in importance in the world just because the seven countries are not as large a proportion of the economy as they were 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. That's inevitable, and no sense in bemoaning that to an a great degree. But to the extent that the G7 still matters as a body of advanced industrial democracies, it's the best you can hope for, I think.

again in the short to medium term is that it becomes the G6 that you develop ways of getting along without the U.S. President. And behind the scenes, that's a lot of what's going on. You look at on the military side of things, the Europeans are trying to prepare some kind of alternative to NATO because it's quite clear that the President of the United States has no intention of honoring his Article 5 obligations under the NATO Charter. So, You know, they're trying to build a new plane while flying the old one, as I think I've said before. And that's very difficult because no one wants to say goodbye to NATO, but it may be that NATO is no longer a useful organization in that way, but you've got to have something in place to replace it. And similarly with the G7, nobody wants to say goodbye to that idea.

It's had its uses in the past. But when you see these charades going on where they can't even issue a communicate at the end, because what's the point. I did think that Macron had a very good brainwave, though, inviting Trump to Versailles. And it's clear that Trump was tickled by this. He said as much. Anything to do with royalty or gold leaf

really tickles his fancy. And you can see that it worked. I think he even said, he knew my weakness. Yes. So it worked because he had to stick around for the whole meeting to go to it. So that's, you know, that's what we're dealing with is a guy who spends most of his waking hours as president of the United States in the middle of a war, spends most of his waking hours consumed with ballrooms, 250-foot tall arches, reflecting pools, getting his name on the side of the Kennedy's, Center and going to Versailles and all this stuff. Or the plane that he got from the Qataris that he's now posting about as if everybody

would really impress it is that it's the most luxurious plane anyone's ever seen because that's really what Americans are looking for in this time of strife is that the President of United States has a fabulous palatial plane to fly around in. And oh, by the way, gets to keep it after he leaves the presidency. Yes. So that's the uncertainty. The property of his foundation. Yeah. And the Qatari is unfortunately,

didn't end up getting a lot for that half a billion dollar plane, though, Andrew. I think a few drone attacks and ballistic missiles kind of ruined the, yeah. You do deal with Trump at your peril because he will renege. He reneged on his contractors. He's reneging on NATO.

He's going to renege on anything. that he pretends to agree to in the Cozbo negotiations, you have to factor this in is he will not actually live up to any agreement he makes if he doesn't feel like it. Yeah. Well, Andrew, let's say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. We're going to join Monk donors on a second bonus segment to today's conversation with Andrew. We're going to talk about the parliamentary session, which is just adjourned for the summer, what was accomplished and what might be on the decks for this government now that they have a majority come the resumption of Parliament in September and a consequential federal budget. So that conversation exclusive to

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