Trump, in his regime’s serial dishonesty, has reshaped the conventions of American diplomacy in the Israeli fashion. He has turned the U.S. into the same sort of pariah — never to be trusted.
Special Envoy Steve Witkoff greeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, Sept. 29, 2025. (White House /Joyce N. Boghosian)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
How long did it take for the Israelis to sabotage the five-minutes-to-midnight ceasefire accord the Trump regime reached with the Islamic Republic Tuesday evening?
How long before the Trump regime endorsed the Zionists’ purposeful spoliation of this agreement?
We are counting in hours.
President Donald Trump announced his approval of the two-week agreement on Truth Social, his social-media platform, at 6:32 Tuesday evening U.S. East Coast time.
By the following morning — at the latest — the Zionist regime was carpet-bombing Lebanon.
A little tick-tock here, as we call this in the press. At 10:00 Wednesday morning Trump declared on social media that the ceasefire accord, as brokered by Pakistan, does not cover Lebanon.
At 10:10 a.m. Islamabad, asserting that the agreement indeed includes Lebanon, effectively accused the Trump regime of lying.
We have since been subjected to reporting all over mainstream Western media that the ceasefire agreement — and a hard copy of the actual text would be worth its weight in Iranian Light, but the accord appears to have been verbal — may or may not cover Israel’s savage aggressions in Lebanon.
It is all unknowable, we-said, they-said blur and “confusion” — the favored word in the mainstream press.
Supposedly.
Posing as the voice of reason, J.D. Vance asserted that this reflects “a legitimate misunderstanding” on the part of the Iranians.
Here is Trump’s veep Wednesday, during a visit to Budapest:
“I think the Iranians thought the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn’t. We never made that promise. We never indicated that was going to be the case. If Iran wants to let this negotiation fall apart in a conflict where they were getting hammered over Lebanon… that’s ultimately their choice. We think that would be dumb, but that’s their choice.”
“It just didn’t.” Does it get any flimsier?
Vance on right, at the White House, with, from left, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, Aug. 18, 2025. (White House / Daniel Torok)
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council released a statement Wednesday saying the just-agreed pact requires, among much else, “the cessation of war on all fronts, including against the heroic Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.”
Shehbaz Sharif had by then stated the same in clear, un-flimsy language. From a statement the Pakistani prime minister posted on “X” at 1:50 a.m. Wednesday morning:
“With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY….”
With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
I warmly welcome the…— Shehbaz Sharif (@CMShehbaz) April 7, 2026
Would the statesman who managed these (indirect) negotiations with evident diligence make up something as significant as this? Would the council responsible for the Islamic Republic’s national interests and foreign policy?
Unthinkable. Only Trump and the buffoons serving in his regime, in repeated displays of breathtaking insouciance, make up never-agreed agreements, never-achieved diplomatic victories, never-happened battlefield successes and, in this case, an accord missing a clause it is simply impossible to imagine did not feature in it.
By Wednesday evening all was clearer than the Trump regime seems to have intended it to be. As The New York Times reported, “The White House had already seen and signed off on the [Pakistani] statement before Mr. Sharif posted it, according to a person briefed on the communication…”
By the time the Times reported this, the Trumpster and his adjutants had their pants down well below their knees.
To finish our tick-tock, here is a thread of three brief posts on “X” from Bibi Netanyahu’s official “X” account:
“Prime Minister’s Office: Israel supports President Trump’s decision to suspend strikes against Iran for two weeks subject to Iran immediately opening the straits and stopping all attacks on the US, Israel and countries in the region.
Israel also supports the US effort to ensure that Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbors and the world.
The United States has told Israel that it is committed to achieving these goals, shares [sic] by the US, Israel and Israel’s regional allies, in the upcoming negotiations. The two-weeks ceasefire does not include Lebanon.”
These posts are time-stamped three hours and change after Sharif posted his statement. President Trump — essential not to miss this — denied the agreement covered Lebanon on Truth Social, contradicting his earlier commitment, not quite five hours later.
There is no “confusion” here as to what happened in the hours after Prime Minister Sharif announced the ceasefire accord — no “misunderstanding,” to quote Vance’s term.
We come to one of numerous new realities at this stage of the world-historical mess the Americans and Israelis have made since they began — or renewed, better put — their military aggressions against the Islamic Republic.
US Rendered Null as Diplomatic Partner
Washington’s trustworthiness in affairs of state has been in decline for decades — at least since the Cold War’s end, if not earlier.
Trump, between his incessant lying, serial diplomatic deceptions and his shockingly savage threats to destroy entire peoples, entire nations and lately an entire civilization, has rendered the United States null as a diplomatic partner, interlocutor or negotiator at any of the world’s mahogany tables.
“America will never recover its authority: Trump has passed the point of no return” is the headline atop an interesting piece UnHerd published the other day. In it an American scholar named B. Duncan Moench began his case with this punch-in-the-face observation:
“Once your country goes from world policeman to the equivalent of the crazy person at the bar threatening to shoot anyone who looks at him funny, there’s really no going back.”
It is the finality Moench suggests in this passage than lands squarely with me. There is not a single case in contemporary geopolitics, none I can think of, wherein the United States (let’s say “Trump’s United States,” as mainstream media insist on “Putin’s Russia”) does not serve as a spoiler, an agent of chaos or both at once.
All while pretending tiresomely to continue on as the light of the world.
Let’s stay well clear of romanticizing. The Cold War decades are pockmarked with lies told to others who counted on America’s word, stories of deception, one or another kind of betrayal.
But I take the Soviet Union’s demise as the moment the United States began down the road to collapse as a credible, reliable diplomatic power.
Readers will have no trouble recalling the H.W. Bush regime’s betrayal of Mikhail Gorbachev when James Baker, Bush’s secretary of state, promised the Soviet reformist NATO would never advance eastward into the former Warsaw Pact nations.
“But it was never on paper” is the pitiful excuse offered by those forced to acknowledge this disgraceful perfidy but intent on papering over it.
That set the path for the next three decades of treachery in Washington’s dealings with the Russian Federation, all the way up to the Biden regime’s provocations prior to Russia’s military advance into Ukraine in February 2022. I still count this a regrettable, but necessary intervention — necessitated by yet more American duplicity.
Hasbara Mimicry
Trump on Dec. 29, 2025, receives the news he’ll be awarded the Israel Prize from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. (White House /Daniel Torok)
Steve Witkoff, the unmentionable body part serving as Trump’s “special envoy” in the Ukraine and Iran crises, asserted just prior to his second round of talks with the Iranians in February that the Islamic Republic was “probably a week away from having industrial bomb-making material.”
This was mere preview of the nonsense to come.
After the talks in Geneva, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad al–Busaidi, the Omani foreign minister who brokered those negotiations, came away saying on Face the Nation that “a deal is with reach.” Watch the segment: his careful account is perfectly credible.
Witkoff, speaking on Fox News March 3, five days after the U.S.–Israeli assault began, told Sean Hannity:
“I know this: They have 10,000, roughly, kilograms of fissionable material. That’s broken up into roughly 460 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium another 1,000 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium…. They have an endless supply of it. The 60 percent can be brought to 90 percent, that’s weapons-grade, in roughly one week…. They were proud of it. They were proud they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs… which told us they had no — no notion of doing anything other than retaining enrichment for the purpose of weaponizing.”
Nothing to do with reality — neither the reality of what was achieved in Geneva nor the reality of Iran’s position or intentions in the matter of nuclear armaments.
It is easy to dismiss Steve Witkoff as a punk because this is what he is. But he is emblematic of something important, a significant turn, in Washington’s decline into a distrusted, all-but-universally detested diplomatic interlocutor.
Read the above-quoted passage again for its larger implications. Witkoff’s gross distortion of a heavily freighted diplomatic negotiation reads straight out of the hasbara Bibi Netanyahu and his terrorist regime has been peddling for decades.
It would be hard to overstate the significance of this mimicry.
Israel’s diplomatic credibility has long been nonexistent for the simple reason the Zionist state has no interest either in the truth or in negotiating anything with anybody — certainly not with any of its West Asian neighbors.
Mendacity and betrayal of others have long been unmistakable features of the Zionists’ way at statecraft: We are liars. It is our way of rendering diplomacy beside the point. You can count on absolutely nothing we say: This is our power over you. Power is our only language.
This has rendered the Zionist regime a diplomatic nullity. The world always awaits the breach that will follow anything to which it commits.
Its just-announced plan to enter talks with the Lebanese government, apparently in response to European protests, is a ready-to-hand case in point: They will come to nothing; whatever is said or agreed, whatever others may insist, the bombing will continue.
And Trump, in his regime’s serial dishonesty these past weeks, has reshaped the conventions of American diplomacy in the Israeli fashion. He has turned the United States into the same sort of pariah — never to be trusted, fundamentally unserious in its dealings with others.
Following the Zionist state over the years, my mind sometimes goes to the old tale of the scorpion and the frog. Readers will know it, surely. After the frog consents warily to take the scorpion across the river, the latter breaks his word and stings the frog. “But you promised not to sting me,” the frog exclaims. And the scorpion gets the punch line: “But you knew it is in my nature to sting.”
This has long been Israel’s story. Now it is America’s. As Duncan Moench put it, there is no turning back from this.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
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Splendid! In this piece– I found the scorpion and the frog analogy to be as cogent and germane as Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage…”.
In American History, there is only really one war that the American people are taught the relative truth about how it began. The US Civil War did begin with the South succeeding from the Union, and then attacking Fort Sumter.
America believes myths about the American Revolution. The revolt began the summer before Lexington and Concorde, and Paul Revere got arrested on his ineffective ride. The Mexican War began with fake claims about a dispute over a poorly marked border. The battleship the Maine exploded on its own in Havana harbor. The passenger ship Lusitania was carrying weapons. Japan was under economic warfare from the USA which left them not many options besides attacking Pearl Harbor. The Navy commander at the Gulf of Tonkin wasn’t even sure there was an enemy in the dark his crew shooting. There were no mass graves in Serbia. And then there are the lies of the 21st century of endless war which I assume are better known.
The accurate phrase appears to be “lying capitalist pigs.”
America’s word wasn’t worth warm spit before Trump.
-Clinton and Bush both told Russia that NATO would not expand East.
-Clinton set up the Palestinians in that rigged “Peace” deal where Israel got what they wanted, and the Palestinians got increasingly violent occupation.
-Bush/Cheney/Powell/Clinton lied about WMD’s in Iraq.
-Obama’s nuke speech that got him the Nobel Peace Prize was in retrospect an obvious, blatant lie.
-Obama overthrew elected governments in the name of Democracy.
-Obama negotiated the two Minsk Agreements for the Ceasefire in Donbas. Later openly admitted to be a scam by Merkle and Hollande only to pump Ukraine full of weapons to start a war as a NATO proxy.
-Biden and Trump were both completely unreliable in the Gaza Genocide.
And that’s only recent history. Long before that, it was said in these lands that “The Great White Chief speaks with Forked Tongue”.
As Lawrence wrote in this piece, which everyone is overlooking as they pile on: “Washington’s trustworthiness in affairs of state has been in decline for decades — at least since the Cold War’s end, if not earlier.”
Hear! Hear! “Trump, in his regime’s serial dishonesty, has reshaped the conventions of American diplomacy in the Israeli fashion. He has turned the U.S. into the same sort of pariah — never to be trusted.” Patrick Lawrence
AND, imo, Patrick Lawrence’s “US Diplomacy’s Last Breath” is a “Master Class” in Iran rock’n Courage, Common Sense, & Caution. Three things worth having in this world; NOT the off the f/rails, “Lack of Trust,” Trump-Vance, Inc./Israel, rock so well. Hence, “The Gulf” yes, Sir,” the Middle East’s Statesmen, Diplomats will NOT bend to “Lucifer”. Straight fm the genius of the Editor-in Chief, Joe Lauria,“Gucifer 2, one day, will meet his maker, Lucifer.”
…. The World says, “Pray for Birdies!” AND, “give” the most prestigious” [Consortium News dot com, rock’n 30+ years of independent, investigative journalism, published, free of charge, online, in partnership, w/the Universe’s investigative journalists, academics, professors, lawyers, artists, writers, Scholars, etc.,] *“the Green Jacket. The most iconic piece of apparel in all of sports, [Golf], is a Masters Green Jacket.”
In investigative journalism, the Green Jacket would symbolize the Masters aka “our” teachers aka the “Super Nova” of Investigative Journalism’s “perseverance through one of the most challenging courses in the world,” “The Devil’s Pyramid” aka Trump’s-Vance’s, Inc.,/Israel’s International Golf Club.
TY, Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News dot com. “Keep It Lit!”
hxxps://www.sportingnews.com/us/golf/news/masters-green-jacket-explained-golfs-most-coveted-prize/008735465bbcd9369d8058c1
“Fool me once, shame on thee; fool me twice, shame on me.”
It simply does not make any sense to negotiate with notorious thieves, liars and mass murderers.
The only one thing there is to do, is to hold the corresponding individuals(!) accountable; including those from behind the scenes pulling the puppet strings.
And to find mechanisms to absolutely prevent such maniacs to get even close to any kind of power position; small or big.
good article; but there’s one mistake:
it wasn’t George H.W. Bush who betrayed Russia.
during his term NATO did indeed not move one inch to the east, after the Unification of Germany
it was Bill Clinton who did that.
in 1999; during Clinton’s second term; NATO moved to the east by adding the Czech republic, Hungary and Poland
Yes but George H W Bush was angry at James Baker for making the not one inch east promise.
. Accounts describe Bush reacting strongly—reportedly exclaiming something to the effect of “To hell with that!” in reference to overly accommodating Soviet concerns, emphasizing that “We prevailed and they [the Soviets] did not. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” He made clear he did not want formal or implied limitations on NATO’s future options.
hxxps://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/jcws_c_01233.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_One_Inch
As previously, this ‘ceasefire’ is for US /Israel rearmament. There is no intention to ‘negotiate’ anything. They would kill the Iranian diplomatic team if they could. Neoliberal monetisation of conflict makes war war not jaw jaw the imperative.
Iran holds all the cards. Trump lacks a trump. Iran could give him one. An off ramp. To allow the US to walk away: forego uranium enrichment. On condition that all the other 9 Iranian ceasefire conditions are accepted. In writing . Undersigned by POTUS before the Oval Room press and world, in black marker pen. VICTORY.
Excellent again – your analysis of Trumpian US and US perfidy – as attested to by both comments following. Anything from the US is now blatantly untrustworthy and properly distrusted. That the US maintains its hold on Australia (Pine Gap and other military bases being further developed) highlights the complicity on both sides of thre major political divide in Australia’s national Parliament – shocking to us all in Australia.
Palantir Vance just asked for the moon and the stars and the entire sky and was rightfully rebuffed by the Iranians.
So more war.
Trump wants control of the Strait of Hormuz come hell or high water and the Jewish supremacists want to kill thousands of civilians in Beirut, so here we are.
Sadly, what more to expect from a people so insane they think they can own the earth and the sea and that letters on paper can grant them magic power over it? The Native Americans understood and understand this was insanity.
US politics and law is nothing more than modern day witchcraft. Literally:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229833720_The_Truth_of_Sorcery
As one author succinctly cited Siegel (2003): “Yet the information contained in bureaucratic documents is often more akin to magical belief than scientific fact: it cannot be tested and refined; it can only be confirmed. This is because institutional documents are designed to affirm what a community of believers already knows to be true[.]”
Or as I’d quote: ‘The capacity of language to say something without regard to the actual state of the world to which it nonetheless refers is essential to magic. The “prejudice” of believers makes it impossible to contradict the statements made by magical articulation. In magic, language “says,” and no reference to fact invalidates what it says. Prejudice here is not a disability. On the contrary, it is essential to the power of language to overcome reference. Without prejudice, there is no magic, only disputable fact. Without this prejudice, this refusal to look hard at the world, magic would not disappear; it would be transformed into fiction. One might revise this to say that magic is fiction with power superior to that which language has in places where the institution of literature exists.’ (Siegel, 2003, pp. 149)
Sound familiar? I think Trump is nothing more than the kind of sorcerer who appears in a post-literate society to bring ‘order’ and affirm ‘truth’ that only makes sense to his community of believers; to confirm the ‘truth’ they already know and need the sorcerer’s magic to articulate.
Excellent analogy ab Trump being a kind of sorcerer in a post literate society! Excellent
Once the European bankers got their tentacles firmly attached to the US through the central banking system, we were destined to be an aggressor nation. As long as that system remains in place, the American people will not be sovereign and will be used to attempt global hegemony.
Trump has certainly pulled the mask off the veneer of respectability that was used to deflect the true nature of this regime. That would have eventually happened anyway as it became more difficult to maintain the image of benevolent imperialism. The people of the global south have no doubt been wise to the ruse for a long time. Now the truth is in everyone’s face. I’m glad the world knows the US is not to be trusted. They can plan accordingly.
Loss of diplomatic gravitas? The horror! That’s what I’ve been losing sleep over, not the merciless cruelty & demolition of means of survival & threats to jack that up exponentially.
But now, what ho, a wink of hope? At last, negotiations in that airy realm – billionaire to billionaire. A combo to unlock deals like no one has ever seen before! Primarily for the benefit of the class that foments catastrophic destruction & profits either way, breaking shit or cleaning it up.
Remains to be seen whose ox will be gored & by how much as business opportunities expand as far as the eye can see.
Is an analogy using rodney king fitting anywhere in this scenario ?
Who would , in the “talks”, fit each character’s role ?
Take a deep swallow of air with a gasping word or two, to share .
Then rest.
Trump “has turned the United States into the same sort of pariah — never to be trusted, fundamentally unserious in its dealings with others.”
Sorry Patrick, for anyone with an historical understanding of US diplomacy, even those who are deemed to be allies, let alone those in the ‘third world,’ US hegemony has always been the bedrock of US diplomacy.
Always untrustworthy.
It’s just that Trump has dropped the facade, and the public pretense.
We nonAmericans have been aware of the reality of US diplomacy for decades.
Last year, here in Australia, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of what is known as ‘The Dismissal.’
A democratically elected government was controversially ousted by dubious decree and circumstances.
One of the key players was the US government of the time, fearful that the Labor government was going to pull-the-pin or curtail the operations of the Pine Gap US spybase.
(Mind when Trump stated that Australia had failed to provide sufficient help in his war on Iran, if it were not for Pine Gap his military operations would have lacked the level of intelligence which ensured this atrocity).
And Australia was an ally.
No, we nonAmericans know all too well.
Nevertheless, thanks for another insightful article Patrick.
I agree with your assessment. Ever since 1945, this has been the case and we have Allen Dulles to blame for most of it. I’m an “American” (that catch-all word for a citizen of the United States) and I have watched this shit go down since I was a teenager in the 1960s. Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, Syria–the list is long. I recommend the book “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” by David Talbot (2015) to learn how the Dulles brothers backed most of the evil acts of the U.S. empire after WWII.
Carolyn – further to your reply, and thanks for recommendation.
US governments imposed their will on others from the get-go.
The (ongoing) usurpation of the traditional owners.
February 2, 1848: the Mexican Cession,
Hawaii, illegally annexed in 1898.
Philippines and Cuba: also during the 1890s.
Yes, a very good book although the author clearly misses the fact that Lyndon Johnson was very much involved in the JFK assassination.
Witnesses claimed, and photographs clearly show, that he ignored the crowds and looked ahead as if thinking about something else. And then the Altgens photograph shows that he ducked before the first shot was fired. Lady Bird Johnson and Senator Yarborough are still acknowledging the crowds clearly not yet aware of the situation.
Agreed. Lawrence ought read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown. In fact, I must also strongly disagree with the other commenter leading by writing “ever since 1945…” where this started much earlier. The word of an American has, frankly, never been worth a damn. American history is a history of traitorous deals made in bad faith; of betrayal and empty words; of broken promises never intended to be kept in the first place.
In the words of Red Cloud: “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”
As Lawrence wrote in this piece, which everyone is overlooking as they pile on: “Washington’s trustworthiness in affairs of state has been in decline for decades — at least since the Cold War’s end, if not earlier.”
U.S. word meaning nothing hardly began with the Trump clown car.
Remember “White man speak with forked tongue?” Those cowboy-and-Indian movies were set in 18th- and 19th-century “America.”
U.S. 20th-century treaty abrogations include blocking the election to reunify promised Vietnam by the 1954 Geneva Agreement (because Ho Chi Minh would have won), as well as numerous treaties signed but never ratified by the U.S. Senate.
In the 21st century, G.W. Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty before Trump-the-Dope withdrew from the INF treaty and others.
As with so much of Trump’s odious behaviour, the substance of what he does is not new to U.S. statecraft; it is just done brazenly and with no effort to conceal it and/or his motives.