Julian Borger

These have been there for many years.

Of course, they were addressed in the 2015 deal done by Barack Obama that Trump famously walked out of.

And now they've become the center of the issue once again.

Well, he said it was a rubbish deal, didn't he?

Well, this is a real problem in terms of coming to agree on a deal this time because it'll be evident if the deal that Trump comes to is worse than Barack Obama's.

And this would be political, very difficult for Trump.

And so those parameters on the negotiations...

That will be hard.

But it's worth remembering that before this war started, two days before this war started, the two sides were fairly close to a deal by all accounts.

And it is hard to imagine that the deal they come to in Geneva, if they come to one, will be very different from that one that was on the table back in February.

Well, of course, you have an economic cost that is immediate and will last over months, if not years, in terms of inflation, petrol prices, agriculture, inputs to agriculture.

So there is an economic cost.

But also in terms of U.S.

standing in the world, I mean, they went wild.

to a war and achieved none of their aims so far and was seen to have been held at bay by really the use of drones and of asymmetrical warfare.

They've been shown not to be able to protect their allies in the region.

Their bases in the region have been shown to be vulnerable.

They were hit very hard or something that they tried to keep secret.

So the U.S.

emerges from this as a very much weakened player on the world stage.