OPINION:
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s—- out of them,” President Trump said on Monday morning.
To the guy who penned “The Art of the Deal,” that rhetoric is what he takes for diplomacy. He tried it with Iran after starting a forever war in the Middle East; it didn’t work, and he lost the war (make no mistake, the war is over and Iran won).
Mr. Trump needs to see “Brink of War” quickly, maybe set up a room in the White House where it plays 24/7 and walk in regularly to take notes about a master negotiator who changed the course of history.
When President Ronald Reagan sat across from Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, the stakes could not have been higher. Two superpowers, each armed with enough nuclear warheads to end civilization, were inching toward an agreement that could change the world.
As depicted in the documentary “Brink of War,” Reagan entered those talks not with ultimatums or inflammatory rhetoric, but with a quiet, steely resolve — and a genuine belief that dialogue, however difficult, was the only path forward.
Reagan’s summit at Reykjavik is widely regarded as one of the most consequential diplomatic moments of the 20th century. Though the talks ultimately broke down over Reagan’s refusal to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative, they laid the groundwork for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in 1987 — the first agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.
“Brink of War” captures the tension and nuance of those negotiations, illustrating how Reagan’s team prepared exhaustively, engaged seriously, and treated diplomacy as both an art and a responsibility.
Mr. Trump’s Iran policy has been defined by a very different instinct: pressure, isolation, and the implicit threat of force.
In May 2018, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the multilateral nuclear deal negotiated under the Obama administration. He replaced it with what his administration called a “maximum pressure” campaign: a sweeping package of economic sanctions designed to force Iran back to the table on American terms.
“We will make them come to us,” Mr. Trump declared, confident that economic pain alone would compel Tehran to capitulate.
It didn’t work that way. Iran responded by steadily increasing its uranium enrichment, pulling back from the deal’s restrictions, and accelerating its regional proxy activities. Rather than producing a new and better agreement, maximum pressure produced a more dangerous Iran — one with a nuclear program considerably more advanced than it was before Trump took office.
“Brink of War” makes one thing unmistakably clear: Reagan understood that diplomacy requires physical and political presence. He flew to Reykjavik. He sat in the room. He negotiated directly with his counterpart, hour after hour, even when talks grew tense, and the outcome seemed uncertain.
“We can agree to a world without nuclear weapons,” Reagan told Gorbachev during those sessions, shocking even members of his own delegation. That level of aspiration — however unrealized — signaled a genuine engagement with the possibility of peace.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, largely conducted Iran policy through executive orders, tweets, and press conferences. The January 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani brought the two countries to the edge of open conflict, with Iran retaliating by striking U.S. military bases in Iraq. There was no back-channel diplomacy to de-escalate.
No Reykjavik moment. Just brinkmanship without a net.
Another striking contrast is the role of alliances. Reagan worked within a framework of Western solidarity. His negotiations at Reykjavik, as shown in “Brink of War,” were informed by close consultation with NATO allies who shared a common interest in arms reduction.
Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran alienated precisely those allies. European powers — Germany, France, and the United Kingdom — had co-signed the JCPOA and urged the U.S. to remain in the deal. Mr. Trump ignored them. The result was a fractured Western front and a diminished American capacity to build the kind of multilateral pressure that might actually have brought Iran to meaningful negotiations.
“The United States has a proud tradition of working with our allies,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted in a 2018 op-ed criticizing the JCPOA withdrawal. “Unilateralism may feel powerful. It rarely produces lasting results.”
“Brink of War” is ultimately a film about what happens when leaders choose engagement over avoidance. Reagan and Gorbachev didn’t walk away with everything they wanted. But they walked away having built a foundation of trust and dialogue that reshaped the Cold War’s final chapter.
The lesson for Iran policy is not complicated: Sanctions and threats can create conditions for negotiation, but they cannot replace it.
Reagan knew that you had to be willing to sit at the table, make concessions and treat your adversary as a rational actor with legitimate interests — even if you fundamentally disagreed with their worldview.
Mr. Trump never quite got there. And the world is less stable for it.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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