From Kabul to Tehran: How US diplomacy turned transactional

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This article repeats earlier points about the transactional shift in US diplomacy from previous strategies of alliance-building to direct negotiations with adversaries, particularly highlighting Trump's administration and evolving foreign policy regarding Iran. Implications for international relations, especially concerning NATO and allies, are emphasized once more.

From Kabul to Tehran: How US diplomacy turned transactional Tam Hussein on Wed, 05/06/2026 - 11:36 Afghanistan showed America’s allies what transactional power looks like in retreat. Iran now shows what it looks like in escalation US President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticised Nato allies for failing to support the US-Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February, an escalation that led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - the world’s most critical energy artery - bringing misery to millions across the globe. Trump has gone so far as to threaten his allies, especially Spain, over their intransigence. In March, sitting in the White House, he warned that the US could “fly in” and use Spain’s military bases and cut off all trade. Last week, a leaked memo reported by Reuters suggested that Trump is considering expelling Spain from Nato. But what appears today as a rupture in US international relations under a pugnacious Trump administration is, in fact, the continuation of a policy forged during the Afghanistan withdrawal - when American diplomacy shifted from alliance-based coordination to transactional deal-making. On the face of it, pursuing high-stakes negotiations while bypassing allies - as we are seeing now in the US-Iran war following US Vice-President JD Vance's talks with Iranian negotiators in Islamabad last month - may appear novel, expressed in its most brazen form when Trump said at a press conference in March: “We don't need anybody. We’re the strongest nation in the world.” But in truth, American policy has been moving in this direction for some time. In researching my new book Shadows Over Kabul: An Insider Account of the Fall of the Afghan Republic, written with Hamdullah Mohib, a former Afghan ambassador in Washington and Afghan national security advisor, I found that the willingness of US foreign policy to sidestep allies and negotiate directly with adversaries it had fought for over a decade did not begin with Trump’s second presidency. Trump's blockade of Hormuz is another own goal in the war on Iran Read More » Rather, it was forged and normalised in Afghanistan, marking a pivotal moment when US foreign policy turned transactional. Aside from its many victims - and arguably contributing to the decline of American hegemony - this way of doing politics may prove to be the most enduring legacy of the US in Afghanistan. In the course of researching this book over four years, I interviewed former government insiders - from national security advisers and senior negotiators to spy chiefs and top generals within the Afghan government - and this is a view that is widely shared. One government minister even showed me the LinkedIn page of an American military contractor who suggested that it was time for President Ashraf Ghani to go. Top General Zia Yassin told me that “every president came with a new policy, and a new policy written by some scholars sitting in Washington”. But I am not sure whether Trump’s policies in Afghanistan were formed by such scholars. Fireside chats Perhaps under George W Bush that was the case. He took a multilateral approach - as Bob Woodward notes in Bush at War. Following the 9/11 attacks, his administration worked hard to bring its allies on board for the initial invasion. Bush was also known for his paternalistic fireside chats with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. By 2014, that approach was strained under Obama - not because multilateralism itself was under threat, but because Obama, alongside Vice President Joe Biden, was sceptical about US war aims in Afghanistan. Woodward notes in Obama’s Wars that he was just as meticulous; it was almost painful to read the handwringing when it came to Afghanistan. But the question Obama and Biden kept returning to was simple: what were the Americans doing there? US President George Bush hosts Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai at the White House in 2008 (AFP) Obama was also deeply conscious of the corruption in the country. And yet, despite the strained relationship between Obama and Karzai, the US still had over 50 nations contributing to the war in 2014. When Trump took office in 2017, the former Apprentice star presented himself as a dealmaker - and there was a shift towards bilateral negotiations with the Taliban at the expense of the Afghan government. Although the Afghan cabinet was divided by internal political conflict, the arrival of Ashraf Ghani as president in 2014 saw relations between Washington and Kabul begin to thaw. As my co-author Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan republic's national security advisor from 2018 to 2021, told me, the government in Kabul did not initially view the Trump administration in a negative light. 'The optics were clear: Afghanistan’s future was being negotiated without its own elected government at the table' - Hamdullah Mohib, former Afghan ambassador in Washington He believed that US National Security Advisor HR McMaster’s South Asia st