Is Trump really a master dealmaker? Here's how his 1st term's deals played out

US President-elect Donald Trump has pitched himself as a master dealmaker.

“Kamala broke it, Trump will fix it” has been one of the main slogans of Trump’s victorious campaign.

Trump believes that he would strike a deal to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours and the war in West Asia will also end by the time he takes office.

While Trump has not outlined how he would end these wars, he makes it sound like he would walk into a room where all parties would be sitting, command them to end the war, and everyone would follow his diktats and the wars would end. He attempted such in his first term as well.

Here is how the various deals that Trump made (and broke) turned out in his first term.

Paris Agreement — a blow to climate change efforts

In one of the first major deals that Trump broke during his term, he announced the United States would exit the Paris Accords, the landmark agreement reached by 196 nations in 2015 to tackle climate change.

Trump’s withdrawal was a blow to the international efforts at tackling climate change. In the absence of world’s largest economy’s participation, any plan to tackle climate would be both inadequate in terms of resources and coverage.

President Joe Biden rejoined the pact and Trump is expected to quit again when he takes office.

Exit from Iran nuclear deal — a disaster still unfolding

In 2018, Trump had undone another landmark diplomatic achievement: the Iran nuclear deal.

The Iran nuclear deal, formally known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed between Iran and the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, Russia, Germany, and the European Union. The deal eased sanctions on Iran in lieu of caps on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Trump quit the deal and implemented the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy by imposing maximalist sanctions on Iran to disastrous effects.

The result of Trump exiting the Iran nuclear deal has been that Iran is now at the threshold of developing a nuclear weapon. Top US officials have said that Iran can develop a bomb within weeks or months once the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei gives his approval.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal “failed spectacularly”, said Deepika Saraswat, a scholar of Iran and West Asia at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA).

“The maximum pressure strategy failed spectacularly. The Iran Nuclear Deal was not perfect. It was a compromise as it could not secure the dismantling of the Iranian nuclear programme the way the United States and Israel would have wanted. But it capped nuclear enrichment, allowed for monitoring of the nuclear programme, and prevented the development of the bomb. After Trump exited the deal, Iran ramped up the enrichment. Now, Iran retaliates to sanctions with more enrichment,” said Saraswat to Firstpost in June.

Exit from arms control treaties with Russia

Trump exited from two arms control deals with Russia, paving way for Russia to later withdraw from a third deal as well.

While fawning over Russian leader Vladimir Putin for several years, Trump cut channels between the two countries and reduced the scope of cooperation.

In 2018, Trump quit the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (IRNT), the 1987 treaty under which the United States and the-then Soviet Union (and its successor state Russia) agreed to eliminate their stocks of intermediate- and medium-range land-based nuclear missiles.

In 2020, Trump exited from Open Skies Treaty, which allowed the two countries to fly over each other’s. territories with sensor equipment to assure that none of them were preparing for conflict.

The rationale to quit IRNT was that as Russia was deemed to be violating the deal from at least 2014, there was no point of unilateral US commitment to the deal. Moreover, the deal held back the United States from arming itself while China continued to arm itself.

Even as Trump had set that he would look forward to new deals in place of the scrapped ones, no new deal was reached with either Russia or China.

Instead, in 2023, a year after invading Ukraine, Russia suspended the New START agreement, the final major arms control agreement with the United States.

The deal that never happened with North Korea

Trump also started talks with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un.

After tirade against him on Twitter (now X), Trump went on to meet Kim thrice. He also became the first President of the United States to set foot inside North Korea.

The talks, however, went nowhere and Kim has continued belligerence since then. Currently, North Korea is part of China-bled bloc of authoritarian regimes’ anti-West bloc. It has not just been supplying arms and ammunition to Russia since the beginning of the war on Ukraine in 2022, it has also contributed troops.

The spectacular failure of US-China trade deal

Trump started a trade war with China by imposing tariffs on Chinese goods. The purpose was to not get into a spiralling trade war but to force China into a deal that benefits the United States.

In 2020, the United States and China signed the Phase One Trade Agreement under which China was to buy $200 billion-worth of goods and services over the next two years. The deal was a spectacular failure as China gamed Trump.

An analysis by the Peterson Institute of International Economics (PIIE) found that China did not buy even $1-worth goods and services.

“In the end, China purchased only 58 percent of the total US goods and services exports over 2020-21 that it had committed to buy under the agreement. Put differently, China bought none of the additional $200 billion of US exports committed under the deal,” noted Chad P Bown, the then-Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at PIEE in the analysis.

US-Taliban deal that paved way for Afghanistan’s takeover

In 2020, the Trump administration struck a deal with the Taliban and paved way for the eventual takeover of Afghanistan by the fundamentalist group.

While the chaotic withdrawal is on the Joe Biden administration, the deal was struck by the Trump administration.

Under the deal, the two sides would reach a ceasefire in lieu of Taliban not letting Afghanistan become a safe haven, but that did not happen. Al Qaeda has found a safe haven in Afghanistan with Taliban’s patronage and so has the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The nation is also ravaged by an insurgency of Islamic State (ISIS) against the Taliban regime.

Biden’s failure to strike a deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government before the withdrawal resulted in a Taliban military victory and takeover of the nation. Since then, the Islamist regime has plunged the nation into medieval dark ages by ending women and girls’ personal freedoms, education rights, and public life.

The mixed success of Abraham Accords

Trump presided over the normalisation of relations between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. The peace process came to be known as Abraham Accords.

Of all Trump’s deals, the Abraham Accords are the only ones that have stood the test of time.

However, the success is bittersweet as while the agreements normalised Israel’s relationship with these countries, it did nothing to resolve the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel was not at conflict with these countries anyway. The real conflict was (and remains) with the Palestinians and Iran.

In fact, by excluding Palestinians from the process and by marginalising them in another ‘Middle East peace plan’ pitched separately, Trump told them that they did not have any diplomatic way forward with Israel.

After Trump egged on Iran towards the nuclear path by exiting the JCPOA, the marginalisation of Palestinians set them on a militant path.