So how, exactly, does America’s war with Iran, the one that Donald Trump said would probably be over in a couple of days, or four to six weeks, nearly eight weeks ago, end?

Since Trump has thus far failed to achieve the peace deal that he—and the world’s financial markets—had anticipated by the end of his two-week ceasefire with the hard-line Iranian regime, the conflict has entered into a liminal state that Gideon Rachman, of the Financial Times, called “the fog of peace.” It’s a murkiness befitting a President who has conducted this conflict in the Middle East as a one-man smoke machine obscuring reality behind such a cloud of lies and disinformation that it’s difficult to imagine that even Trump himself could keep straight what is real and what is fiction. On Monday, he told the New York Post that Vice-President J. D. Vance was in the air, en route to Pakistan, to seal an agreement with Iran. But Vance had never left, and days later he still hadn’t. By Tuesday, after variously threatening to bomb all of Iran to smithereens and claiming that he was on the brink of a “FAR BETTER” deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program than any of his predecessors, Trump unilaterally announced an indefinite ceasefire.

As of Thursday morning, Trump was publicly demanding that the U.S. Navy “shoot and kill” any Iranian boat dropping mines in the Strait of Hormuz and then, half an hour later, insisting that “we have total control” over the “Sealed up Tight” strait. Also, the President wanted Iran’s leadership to know that he doesn’t need a deal; however, he might kill any Iranian negotiator who did not give him what he wanted. The bottom line appears to be that more negotiations may or may not take place in Pakistan soon and that there may or may not be an unofficial new Trump deadline of this weekend for Iran to come back to the table. Got that?

One safe conclusion amid the confusion is that it remains, a decade into the Trump era, extremely difficult to distinguish between Trump in dealmaking mode and Trump in meltdown mode. Was the President lying when he said that Vance was on a plane to Islamabad? Out of the loop? Playing some clever game of head-fakery with his adversaries? At one point earlier this week, Trump gave interviews to four different publications suggesting that he had a deal with Iran and listing specifics, including that the regime had agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program and to hand over all its enriched uranium. Not only was this not true but it was almost impossible to believe that it could ever be true with this Iranian government, as experts quickly pointed out. “They’re running into the same fundamental hurdle that shaped the long decade-plus of negotiations” that led to Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, Suzanne Maloney, of the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post, “which is that the Iranians are completely immovable on the question of enrichment.”

In foreign-policy circles, there tends to be a lot of learned discussion of just how one is meant to differentiate the signal from the noise at such fraught geopolitical moments. But the wise men, so far as I know, have historically been silent on what to do about a situation in which it’s the President himself who is responsible for so much of the noise while at the same time seeming oblivious to any of the signals.

Trump’s instability and inability to read his adversaries correctly aren’t the only reasons to wonder: Why would anyone make a deal with this man?

Top of mind for Iran’s negotiators, no doubt, is that Trump could hardly be counted on to keep his word even if they were to reach an agreement. There’s also the very real possibility that a future American President would reject Trump’s deal, just as Trump, in the course of his two terms in office, has rejected so many deals made by his predecessors. The long list includes Trump ordering the U.S. to pull out of the Paris climate agreement (twice), the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the World Health Organization, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and, of course, the original Iran nuclear deal negotiated under Obama. In January, he issued an executive order to exit sixty-six different organizations that the U.S. had agreed to participate in during past Administrations, including groups ranging from the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations to the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships in Asia.

The list raises many unanswered questions, not least of which is the possibility that the United States is now in favor of piracy on the high seas. But the general point is relevant not only to the Iranian government, which has plenty of credibility issues of its own after decades of pursuing a nuclear program while publicly disclaiming any interest in doing so, but more broadly to whether any U.S. guarantees—to anyone—will still be valid beyond the limited time horizon of Trump’s erratic Presidency.

Unfortunately, the events of the past few months have underscored an unpleasant reality of Trump’s character: he is constant only in his faithlessness, whether to his own supposed friends and partners or to the nation’s. Ask the women who have served in his Cabinet, three of whom have been ousted in recent weeks despite their collective self-abasement in Trump’s name, which included calling him “the greatest President in American history” (Pam Bondi) and “the greatest President of my lifetime” (Lori Chavez-DeRemer), as well as extolling Trumpian powers so vast that they apparently involved the ability to personally stop hurricanes (Kristi Noem). Ask the other thirty-one members of NATO, who are no longer certain that the alliance’s fundamental guarantee of mutual defense, enshrined in Article 5 of the treaty that was created in the aftermath of the Second World War, still applies to the Trump-led United States.

Just this week came the news that Trump, having already suspended the resettlement program for Afghans who had helped the United States over the course of its twenty-year war in their country, is now looking to send more than a thousand refugees—whose fates have been in limbo since they fled Kabul—to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are people who were forced to leave their homeland because of the work that they did for the United States. When the U.S. military’s withdrawal in 2021 precipitated the Taliban’s return to power, Joe Biden gave America’s word to those who had aided us. Trump has no problem breaking it. He is, after all, a President who has already suspended the entirety of America’s program to allow refugees into the United States—with the exception of a few thousand white Afrikaners who, he claims, are victims of a nonexistent genocide. It is only a measure of the extra cruelty that he and his Administration seem to reserve for the world’s neediest that they now propose to send these Afghans to Congo at a time when it is already suffering one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises.

Countries—like companies and like people—rely on credibility to get things done. Trump and his allies insist that he has gone to war because Iran “cannot be trusted” to have a nuclear weapon. Fair enough. But can anyone trust him, either? No wonder there’s an impasse. Expect high gas prices and more low, low, low Trump approval ratings. ♦