Bret Devereaux

This is a really baffling misunderstanding of both how countries make decisions and how high level negotiations work. Important agreements are not hammered out, line by line, by world leaders sitting in conference rooms. They have state departments for that. https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1420364981967720452 …

Normally, leaders meet, have 'productive dialogues' where they set priorities and see if they have common ground. Then diplomatic staff spend months hammering out the details into a workable agreement. Then the leaders show up again to sign the thing and smile for the cameras.

Actual high-stakes negotiations directly between leaders are rare (not non-existent mind you, but rare). Which is part of why the former President's efforts to leverage his supposed brilliant one-on-one negotiation flopped so hard. The business simply isn't done that way.

That said, I'd much rather have a leader who recognizes their limits in times of extreme stress and maintains their mental health than the normal authoritarian model where the unstable leader has repeated mental breakdowns which are then converted into policy by their underlings.