The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Iran Diplomacy Has Yet to Begin || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

The administration’s centralized and personalized approach to foreign relations has collapsed U.S. diplomacy across multiple fronts, including stalled Iran talks, poor relations with allies, and uncertainty ahead of future negotiations with China. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/432Ubrs

Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Today we're taking a whole batch of questions from the Patreon page and kind of lumping them together and the general topic is diplomacy in the Iran war. Now, a lot of folks have been wanting me to comment on every Eben Flo and every Trump administration initiative or truth social post and, you know, number one, that would be exhausting. Number two, to the bigger point, most of these things don't matter. The way diplomacy normally works is you have a cadre of people in the State Department, in the CIA, in the Defense Department, in the National Security apparatus, whatever it happens to be. And they all have their own contacts that they maintain on behalf of the government on the other side. And you have back and forth communications

at all of these people at lower levels, medium levels, higher levels. And those people are used to shape the conversation so that when the president comes in, all the groundwork has done, been done already. The issue we have with the Trump administration is most of the those people have been fired and the ones that haven't have basically been barred from carrying out any sort of diplomats because Trump sees this as his personal purview. So for example, when you look at the Chinese summit that supposedly is about to happen, it wasn't until last Friday, and Thursday and Friday, when for the first time major CEOs were starting to get approach about whether they could join the president's delegation. All of the groundwork that is normally done to

make sure that the president isn't wasting his time, none of it is being done. And so the president will go. It will either be a completely pointless summit, or Chairman G will probably be able to convince Donald Trump to do things that the United States really, really, really, really, really would not want him to do. Basically, Trump has become the biggest dove in the administration in relationships with almost every other country because he sees himself as the only one who can make a decision, which is true, but he also sees himself as the only one who's even worthy to talk. talking of two, which is not. So you apply this to the Iran War. When the State Department is out of it, when the National Security Council is out of it, when the Defense Department is out of it,

you basically have what's left is just the president and whatever individuals he chooses to appoint. What we've seen so far are three people that have been appointed, JD Vance, the vice president, who was sent once and it was such a disaster. He was removed from the team completely. We have Steve Whitkoff, who is in competition for being the dumbest man. in America and has never come back to the White House with anything that is useful, except for the propaganda of the other side. And so, relations when Whitkoff is involved are generally stalled with everybody. And then Jared Kushner, who is the son-in-law of the president, who is not an idiot,

but always is coming at things from the point of view of, I want to walk away from this with a real estate deal. And so you get these New York Jewish real estate folks who are going to places like negotiations with Iran, and shockingly, not a lot of has happened. So what happened at the end of last week is probably the best example I can give you. There was a one-page memorandum that the United States sent the Iranians, which wasn't rejected out of hand, but has already been stretched onto a two-week process to evaluate one page, because that's about all the attention span Donald Trump has.

Like you could resolve everything in Israeli-Arab Persian relations in one page. So while that was going on, Donald Trump also pushed forward this other idea called Project Freedom, where the U.S. Navy would start escorting vessels in and out of the Persian Gulf. Now, there's a lot of tactical reasons that won't work. I think I've dealt with that already, but let's talk about the diplomatic reasons why it didn't work. With the whole Iran war, Donald Trump refused to consult with any of the allies in Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East, with the exception of Israel, of course, that was party to the war, which means that when the war did not resolve in the way Donald Trump wanted to,

none of these countries felt that they could or should get involved because they had no saying how it was carried out in the first place. That also carried forward with Project Freedom. After one day, the Saudi said, you can't use our air bases for this anymore because you're not taking negotiations seriously. So unless and until you cancel Project Freedom and start talking to the Pakistanis who are the interlocutors again, you can't use Saudi air bases to enforce Project Freedom. So the thing was canceled after two days after a grand total of two ships were escorted. Unless and until Donald Trump realizes that the U.S. doesn't have the military force to break open the Persian Gulf, until he realizes that only a political deal with Iran is going to end the situation,

we're just in this holding pattern where the entire region is offline. Now, I would argue that Trump aside, a lot of the stuff is never coming back anyway. But as long as Donald Trump is the president, until he changes his negotiating tactics, we haven't even begun meaningful negotiations at any level on this topic because he doesn't allow the lower level people to do their jobs. He thinks it has to be him. And so he's established himself as a single point of failure throughout the entire bureaucracy of diplomacy that we have with absolutely everyone on every topic.

And lo and behold, we don't have a meaningful trait. deal with anyone after a year and a half. Iran talks are stalled in relations with all of the allies are at the worst that they have been in decades. It's going to be really interesting to see how this China summit goes because the same lack of preparation and consultation that has happened with everything else with the administration applies to the second most powerful country in the world as well. So it's going to be some good watching, but don't expect anything to be a meaningful deal in the way that most people mean the term. Thank you.