Michael Kruse writes: Donald Trump is a self-help apostle. He always has tried to create his own reality by saying what he wants to be true. Where many see failure, Trump sees only success, and expresses it out loud, again and again.

“We have the votes” to pass a new health care bill, he said last month even though he and Republicans didn’t then and still don’t.

“We get an A-plus,” he said last week of his and his administration’s response to the devastating recent hurricanes as others doled out withering reviews.

“I’ve had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month period, that’s ever served,” he said this week in an interview with Forbes, contradicting objective metrics and repeating his frequent and dubious assertion of unprecedented success throughout the first year of his first term as president.

The reality is that Trump is in a rut. His legislative agenda is floundering. His approval ratings are historically low. He’s raging privately while engaging in noisy, internecine squabbles. He’s increasingly isolated. And yet his fact-flouting declarations of positivity continue unabated. For Trump, though, these statements are not issues of right or wrong or true or false. They are something much more elemental. They are a direct result of the closest thing the stubborn, ideologically malleable celebrity businessman turned most powerful person on the planet has ever had to a devout religious faith. This is not his mother’s flinty Scottish Presbyterianism but Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking,” the utterly American belief in self above all else and the conviction that thoughts can be causative, that basic assertion can lead to actual achievement.

Trump and his father were Peale acolytes—the minister officiated at at the first of Donald Trump’s weddings—and Peale’s overarching philosophy has been a lodestar for Trump over the course of his decades of triumphs as well as the crises and chaos. “Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” Peale urged his millions of followers. “Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.” It was a mindset perfectly tailored for an ambitious builder determined to change the skyline of one of the globe’s great cities. Trump, who used this self-confidence to blow right past a series of seemingly fatal gaffes and controversies to win an election last fall that polls said he couldn’t and wouldn’t, in this respect has been a prize Peale pupil—arguably the most successful Peale disciple ever.

“I don’t even think it’s an argument,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me recently. “It’s a fact.” The power of positive thinking? “He weaponized it.”

But now, in the political realm, where the space between spin and truth is parsed constantly—and with consequences—it is Trump’s very success that has opened him up to questions that simply didn’t matter as much when he was a television star, or opening golf courses, or licensing his last name to steaks, bottled water or far-flung condominium projects. Is Trump’s relentlessly optimistic insistence on his own version of reality an asset, a sign of admirable grit for a politician desperate to score some legislative victories? Or is it a sort of self-delusion that risks embarrassment, or worse, in the highest-stakes geopolitical arena?

Science, it turns out, has something to say about this.

Self-help is a multibillion-dollar business. Airport shelves groan under the weight of how-to and pick-me-up books churned out by writers who all are essentially Peale progeny. The industry is prevalent in American culture to the point that it has spawned its own sub-group of critics who dismiss it as silly at best and dangerous at worst. “If you are simple enough to buy a self-help book, you may be congenitally programmed to fail,” Tom Tiede wrote in 2001 in his own book, Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation’s Soul. “Positive thinking” has garnered such social currency that it also has become a subject of academic inquiry. And though it certainly was not conceived with this in mind, the science of self-help—of happiness and well-being, of specific phenomena called “unrealistic optimism” and “positive illusions”—is now in some respects the study of the way Trump thinks and what it could mean for the country and beyond. [Continue reading…]

Amir Handjani writes: The U.S. and Europe brought Iran to the negotiating table after 10 years of coordinated and painstaking sanctions that targeted all aspects of Iran’s economy, including banking, energy and trade. Over two administrations (those of George W. Bush and Obama), Washington, in close cooperation with the EU effectively cut Tehran off from the global economy.

This was a remarkable act by the Europeans. Tehran, despite the 1979 Islamic Revolution, had robust commercial relationships with Europe. Iranians could travel with relative ease to Europe and, despite being isolated from the U.S., were getting essential goods and services such as medicine and technology from the EU.

With Brussels and Washington united, a good cop-bad cop routine was successful in extracting meaningful concessions from Iran which led to the nuclear deal.

In the two years since the deal was signed, Europe has slowly regained its access to the Iranian market. Iran’s economy is rebounding. EU foreign policy chief Frederica Mogherini has called the nuclear deal vital to international peace and security. French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May have gone on record saying the deal is doing what it was intended to do, prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. While neither are opposed to starting discussions on other troubling aspects of Iran’s behavior, so long as IAEA maintains that Iran is living up to its obligations, the EU does not want the nuclear pact abrogated.

Trump’s actions, and any new sanctions from Congress, will drive a wedge between Washington and Europe on Iran. It would be virtually impossible to reconstitute that sanctions regime that was in place before the nuclear deal came into effect. Trump’s decision will be viewed as callous disregard for multilateral negotiations and norms. It will reinforce the image that Iran often portrays the U.S. as being a bully on the world stage that does what it wants with reckless abandon — alliances and commitments notwithstanding. It’s an image that Trump embraces in both style and substance.

The implications for Europe go well beyond the Iran deal. With Trump’s precedent of shunning the global security architecture that the U.S. has led for 75 years now in question, Europeans will be left wondering if the U.S. would really live up to its security commitments if, say, Russia became more aggressive in the Baltic states or Eastern Europe.

On top of that, as if one nuclear crisis wasn’t enough, the message Trump is sending to North Korea couldn’t be worse. [Continue reading…]