Negotiations in Switzerland, Threats from the White House: a President Who Belongs in Impeachment Proceedings

While his vice president speaks of a new beginning on Lake Lucerne, Trump threatens Iran overnight with annihilation. He attacks allies and casually declares the British prime minister finished, while claiming the right to do whatever he wants. The talk of diplomacy is a smokescreen, and behavior like this leaves only the remedy the Constitution reserves for the most extreme case.

At the Bürgenstock above Lake Lucerne, in a resort owned by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund, delegations sat together on Sunday, and everything revolved around the one word that appeared in every report: diplomacy. The Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, asked how much more could be achieved together, whether it was possible to turn a new page and permanently change conditions in the Middle East. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had traveled there, Qatar acted as mediator, and the Iranian foreign minister and his Swiss host shook hands in front of the cameras. It was the full gentle language of conferences, the discreet and reliable framework, the smiles above the lake.

And while those smiles still held, Donald Trump told Fox News that he had spoken overnight with Iranian representatives and warned them. If they closed the Strait of Hormuz, he said he had told them, they would have no country left, they would not even make it back to their damn country. Those are not the words of a negotiator. They are the words of a man threatening a nation with its end during the night while his deputy is shaking hands only a few flight hours away.

Trump told Fox News that he had spoken overnight with Iranian representatives and warned them that if they closed the Strait of Hormuz, “you won’t have a country anymore. You won’t even make it back to your damn country.” Quote: “You close the Strait, and you won’t have a country anymore. You won’t even make it back to your damn country.”

It did not stop with that one night. On his platform Truth Social, Trump demanded that Iran immediately stop its, in his words, highly paid proxies in Lebanon, or Iran would be hit again very hard, like the week before, only harder. Speaking to Fox News, he said that after the sixty days of the agreement, he could do whatever he wanted, and the Iranian president had better watch his mouth. He threatened to take control of the country. And in the event that no agreement was reached within sixty days, he announced fees on passage through the Strait, saying the money would be payment for the services he provided as guardian angel of the countries of the Middle East.

Tehran took offense. Iran’s chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said the United States would do well to be careful with its words. His country’s armed forces were ready to respond in other ways, and however much people talked, they were the ones acting. After eighty minutes, the Iranian delegation left the negotiating site. According to state media, the talks had entered a difficult phase after an insulting message from the American president had been published.

The Iranian negotiating delegation under the leadership of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf arrived under the designation “Minab 168” - a reference said to commemorate the 168 children killed in Minab and displayed visibly on the aircraft.

While threatening the adversary with destruction, he turned on friends as well. On the same platform, Trump declared that after trillions of dollars spent on NATO, on Italy and its Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, she was unwilling to confront the Iranian threat, saying America had defended them for decades and when it mattered, they were not there. Hours earlier, he had announced that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer would resign, that he had failed miserably on immigration and energy, and wished him all the best. So from the Oval Office, in a single day, came threats toward enemies and judgment upon allies - one was to be wiped out, the other declared finished - and all of it carried the same signature.

The remarkable part is that at the same moment his own vice president embodied the opposite. Vance spoke of major progress in recent days and said the ceasefire in Lebanon was holding, that things like this were always a little messy. He had announced he would stay only one or two days and left the details to negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law. Vance, who is widely viewed as considering a presidential campaign in 2028, worked hard to project the tone of a statesman while the man above him shattered every sentence from his platform. Even within their own ranks, criticism rained down on the agreement, with some hardliners comparing it to the deal once concluded between the Obama administration and Tehran, the same agreement Republicans condemned for years. It is the image of an administration not aligned with itself, where the vice president performs peace while the president threatens war.

Behind all the noise stands an agreement whose reality mocks the shadow of the threats. The agreement signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian immediately allows Tehran to sell its oil freely and opens the way to billions in frozen assets. In recent days already, according to the director of Iran’s state oil company, nearly half of monthly exports had been shipped abroad, and a draft had been reached on temporary exemptions for oil and petroleum products. But the hardest question, what happens to the highly enriched uranium believed to remain beneath facilities bombed during American strikes, was postponed. Pezeshkian declared that Iran would never give up its right to enrichment and the other side would ultimately have to accept it. So Iran gets its oil and its billions, and the bomb remains a matter for another day.

Before anyone even discussed the nuclear program, Tehran demanded an end to the war in Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the Iran backed Hezbollah. A ceasefire brokered Saturday appeared to hold, and the Israeli military announced it would lift movement restrictions Monday morning for residents near the border. But neither Israel nor Hezbollah signed the agreement, and Netanyahu insisted his troops would remain in southern Lebanon as long as necessary. Over all of this hung the dispute over the Strait of Hormuz, through which one fifth of the world’s oil passed before the war. Iran claimed Saturday it had closed it, the U.S. Central Command denied that claim and said Iran did not control the Strait and shipping continued. The truth remained unclear. The analytics firm Windward counted only twelve transits Sunday, significantly fewer than the day before, and the few ships moving switched off their transponders to avoid detection. Central Command had counted fifty five vessels Saturday, the highest since the war began, and sixty seven in the following twenty four hours, guided through a southern channel that Iran was said to have mined. Before the war, the average was one hundred thirty per day.

The Iranian delegation led by chief negotiator Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi met with Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis during the first official visit of a delegation of the Islamic Republic of Iran to Switzerland.

The administration worked to convince markets that the war was only a brief disruption for oil prices. But Brent crude rose above eighty one dollars a barrel, and at American gas stations, the average gallon cost three dollars and ninety four cents, roughly one third more than before the war, with diesel reaching five dollars and four cents, more than a third higher. While the president talked about guardian angels and fees, his own citizens paid the bill at the pump.

There is an old comfort in the word diplomacy, the belief that as long as people talk, they do not strike. But here the threat and the handshake came in the same night, from the same power, and that is the full danger - that the language of peace now serves only to dress up the will to destroy. That is how a man speaks and writes when restraint has left him. To tell a country it will cease to exist, to declare an ally removed from office from behind a desk, to claim the right to act at will, this is no longer politics but the language of a man no longer guided by reason while simultaneously commanding the most destructive power on earth. At that point, the word reserved by the Constitution for exactly such a case can no longer be avoided. Impeachment is not a coup and not revenge. It is the orderly remedy a republic gave itself to protect itself from someone who turns its power against its foundations. Whoever threatens a people with annihilation and declares an ally removed from office from behind a desk has already crossed the limits of the office. Whoever then says he can do whatever he wants raises the question himself of whether he should still hold it. It is Congress’s responsibility to ask it, and the duty of allies and European parliaments not to remain silent, because their silence would make them complicit.

There comes an hour when a country is no longer threatened from the outside but by the person at its head. That is the hour we are in. A president who denies a people the right to return home and denies loyalty to his own allies no longer holds the office, he merely carries it like a weapon. The republic has institutions designed for exactly such a case, and it depends on those who operate them whether they use them or simply watch. History forgives the powerful for lying. It does not forgive their guardians for looking away. Whoever still believes today that this man can be negotiated with as a statesman will wake one morning and realize that the threat spoken in the night was no longer only words.

Just after 3 a.m. Central European Summer Time, the talks in Switzerland came to an end. No breakthrough, no new agreement, only the decision to keep talking while threats and counterthreats once again moved into the public eye. While those at the table were still trying to keep the ceasefire alive beyond sixty days, Donald Trump was fantasizing about new strikes. The war is not over - for now, it has only been given another date.