U.S. President Donald Trump’s art of the deal is, at best, usually little more than a preliminary sketch. Nowhere is this more evident than in Iran. Last week’s announcement of a U.S. and Israeli cease-fire in return for Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz left the world holding its breath. Doubts swelled over how many ships would be able to pass through the waterway and whether Israel would end its assault on Lebanon. Questions over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program—one of the reasons that Israel and Washington gave for launching the war in the first place—loomed large. Sure enough, the collapse of weekend talks in Islamabad and a newly announced U.S. blockade of Iranian ports suggest that the ballyhooed cease-fire may not survive its planned two-week duration.

In trumpeting last week’s agreement as a “big day for World Peace,” Trump followed his usual playbook for international dealmaking, using a splashy pronouncement to obscure a failure to reach a meeting of the minds on crucial terms. This approach can achieve limited gains—including quieting fighting for a time—but leaves fundamental tensions to fester. Indeed, slapdash efforts can set the stage for explosive eruptions down the road. While everyone welcomes a cessation of hostilities, Trump’s half-baked approach to peacemaking may well be a recipe for more war in the Middle East.

There are at least three glaring gaps in the Iran cease-fire deal. The first is the disagreement over whether it applies to Lebanon. When announcing the accord in early April, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who brokered the talks, said that it applies to “everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere.” But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly retorted that Lebanon was excluded from the deal, and Israel has continued to strike the country. Trump has supported Netanyahu’s account, while U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance called the contradiction “a legitimate misunderstanding.” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has since said that “the U.S. must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both.” Although Israel has now agreed to talks with Lebanon, it has sharply intensified shelling.

A second gap concerns the Strait of Hormuz. In his cease-fire announcement, Trump said on social media that the deal was subject to Iran agreeing to “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING” of the crucial shipping channel, which has been effectively closed since the war began. Yet Iran has stated that passage will require coordination with its armed forces and “due consideration of technical limitations.” Only a trickle of ships has passed through the waterway since, prompting Trump to order a blockade of Iranian ships in the strait starting on Monday.

A third rift was over the conditions for future negotiations. Trump claimed that the Islamic Republic accepted key elements of a prior U.S. 15-point blueprint for peace that a Tehran spokesperson had already dubbed “not acceptable to us in any way.” Trump also called an Iranian 10-point proposal a “workable basis” for talks. But a version of Iran’s 10-point plan released by the Wall Street Journal was a wish list that only a Tehran autocrat could love, clearly at odds with U.S. red lines on uranium enrichment, Hormuz control, and U.S. troop withdrawal from the region. U.S. officials then claimed that they had been referring to a different plan that aligned with their own, but no evidence of that alternative has surfaced publicly.

These discordances mirror prior Trump “deals” that glossed over thorny terms. While Trump’s Gaza accord last October heralded a breakthrough by securing a significant cessation of Israeli attacks in return for the release of remaining Israeli captives, mediators did not manage to achieve an agreement from Hamas to disarm or cement a clear plan for the enclave’s reconstruction. In the following six months, desultory efforts by Trump’s “Board of Peace” to advance future stages of the agreement have sputtered due to funding and security roadblocks.

The pattern dates back further. After a 2018 summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump posted online that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” Yet the dictator had committed only to “work toward” denuclearization with no timetable, inspection regime, or verification machinery. Follow-on diplomacy, including a 2019 Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, fizzled. Pyongyang then called off a moratorium on testing, and, in the ensuing years, its nuclear program only grew.

Then came the U.S.-Taliban agreement of February 2020, which had catastrophic results. The White House heralded it as a “historic step” to peace in Afghanistan, but the deal deferred the “date and modalities” of a comprehensive cease-fire, including implementation mechanisms and a political roadmap. The accord, which left out Afghanistan’s government in Kabul, committed Washington to a full troop withdrawal by May 2021 with limited constraints on the Taliban. Those terms left the incoming Biden administration with an impending withdrawal deadline, a troop presence too small to defend itself beyond that date, and paltry remaining leverage for a comprehensive peace. While the chaotic and deadly U.S. exit from Kabul in 2021 reflected lapses of intelligence and planning, Trump’s half-cocked peace effort had set the stage.

The Kosovo-Serbia deal of September 2020 followed the same model. Trump proclaimed it was an achievement that everybody said “couldn’t be done,” but it sidestepped the central issue of Serbia’s refusal to recognize Kosovo and amounted to a modest set of economic openings. In addition, the agreement was only made up of separate declarations that both sides submitted to Washington. The parties never achieved fuller reconciliation, and the conflict has continued to flare up at various points.

In each case, the missing pieces were not decorative flourishes but rather essential components of the full picture. Once the fanfare over Trump’s so-called deals subsided, what remained was often just a press release, a few orphaned provisions, and a later resurgence of the underlying conflict.

Trump is not unique in announcing a victory before the hardest terms of an agreement are settled. The Clinton administration held a ceremony at the White House to celebrate the Oslo Accords in 1993, even though the talks deliberately postponed dealing with issues that ultimately proved fatal to a lasting resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. U.S. President Richard Nixon announced the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 as an agreement to end the Vietnam War, but the deal failed to address the future political status of South Vietnam, setting the stage for the violent fall of Saigon two years later.

Despite this, Trump stands alone in his self-congratulatory excess, penchant for overstatement, and consistent lack of diligent effort to follow through on details. Unsurprisingly, there is no Trump equivalent to the Dayton Accords or Good Friday agreement, nothing that marks a comprehensive, painstakingly negotiated, and lasting peace to a long-standing conflict.

Trump might say that his improvisational style can be an art form in itself, marshaling the power of gesture and hyperbole for momentum to push beyond a stand-off. This isn’t unheard of: U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 Camp David Accords did not yield a formal peace deal between Israel and Egypt, but it spurred the parties to agree to a treaty six months later. Trump’s defenders might argue that constructive ambiguity—or, more crudely, a “fake it until you make it” approach—is credible when a conflict seems intractable. On Gaza, the hostages might not have been freed nor Israel’s guns stilled without implying that Hamas would disarm and generating an agreement that was, by all accounts, better than continued bloodshed.

But claims of a breakthrough over Iran were less a noble effort to force momentum than an excuse for Trump to backtrack from outlandish and widely condemned threats to destroy Iranian civilization. The next week and a half will tell whether the gambit will incite progress or, as seems more likely, leave Trump caught between the Scylla of having to concede to Iran’s maximalist demands and the Charybdis of having to resume a highly unpopular, costly, and risky war effort.

While Trump covets a Nobel Peace Prize, his decision to launch an unprovoked war is not the only reason that he does not deserve one. Trump’s notion of “peace” does not match the definition of the term. His deals often amount to flashes in the pan, satisfying—above all—his craving for personal glory. Trump lives in the moment, valuing the short-term gratification of a headline and paying little mind to the risk that his purported triumph will soon be judged empty. On April 11, Trump said the fate of the Iran talks “doesn’t matter” because, regardless, “from the standpoint of America, we win.”

Trump lacks the discipline and expertise for what successful deals really entail: the painstaking work of negotiating elaborate safeguards and creative terms that help reconcile differences. Just consider the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran nuclear deal, which was comprised of 159 pages crafted by experts over 20 intensive months.

Trump not only scrapped the JCPOA in 2018, but he has also excluded seasoned lawyers and negotiators from his inner circle of advisors and diplomatic delegations. With his real estate buddy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner ostensibly entrusted to juggle talks on Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran, the prospect of any of those negotiations leading to lasting truces seems remote. While it’s heartening that the recent U.S. delegation to Pakistan for peace talks with Iran included technical advisors, the negotiations failed, and the exclusion of regional expertise from the planning that led up to the current war may make their job impossible if talks resume.

While Trump’s prior hasty deals failed to fully douse fires that later flared, this one could pour fuel on the flames. Both Iran and the United States’ mutual frustration with each other’s perceived failure to fulfill the terms of their supposed deal is now heightening hostilities. A tense and disruptive conflict now runs the risk of becoming explosive and even more costly to the global economy. Some analysts believe that Trump’s prior deals, no matter how unfinished, were often better than no deal at all. But the rising tensions over Iran may end up proving that sometimes a partial deal can be more dangerous than no deal at all.