On 23 March 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on a social media platform, Truth Social, that Washington and Tehran were engaged in productive negotiations. Within an hour, oil prices fell by nearly 11 percent. Iran’s Foreign Ministry immediately denied the claim, but the denial proved ineffective as the prices did not recover at the same pace. This instance shows how disinformation has evolved from a tool of domestic political management into a fully operational instrument of international statecraft, actively functional in the policy loop.
Disinformation is not the same as propaganda, which is based on ideology or selective facts. In the words of Calir Wardle, disinformation is false information, knowingly created to cause harm or achieve a purpose. State-sponsored spread of false claims is not a new phenomenon, but it has been revived anew in interstate relations by populist leaders like President Trump. Earlier, the local population was the target audience for disinformation. For instance, Bismarck edited the Ems Dispatch in 1870, which enraged the French and Prussian public and triggered the Franco-Prussian War. In Northern Europe, the British fabricated the Zinoviev Letter in 1924 to destroy the Labour government’s electoral prospects.
President Trump has extrapolated this local strategy on a wider scale and has redefined this political tool by bringing it into the diplomatic arena. In 2025, during the US-China tariff war, President Trump used the same strategy to calm down markets. He claimed that Washington and Beijing were in active negotiations, but before the false claim produced any effect, China’s Foreign Ministry categorically denied it.
This brings us to the most troubling practice of the US president, which, according to various analysts, is his frequent incorporation of regular claims of false information in state-to-state dealings. It is telling that disinformation is now understood as a commodity by the US and is employed as a strategy. This time, as earlier, the targeted audience of the US policy were markets. Iranian academic Seyed Mohammad Marandi observed that every week, when markets open, President Trump makes such statements to drive down oil prices. The move also serves President Trump’s political motive. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed since late February and the petrol prices in the US climbing, nearly 80 percent of President Trump’s voters want a quick end to the conflict in Iran. Manufacturing the appearance of de-escalation delivers a political dividend as well.
This sets a dangerous precedent in interstate relations, with long-term damage to the infrastructure of interstate communication. Diplomacy depends on a state’s credible communication, insulated from political rhetoric and a genuine will to come to a resolution. When a state begins to deploy false announcements to manage commodity prices and domestic approval ratings, in this case, the US, the tool of diplomacy comes under threat. First, every genuine diplomatic signal becomes harder to read. Second, it establishes a precedent that the state can use disinformation to replace it entirely, deforming the definition of diplomacy. Such that diplomacy, as an appreciable art of negotiation, is now being replaced by coercion and disinformation campaigns.
For states like Pakistan, involved in shuttle diplomacy and having facilitated a historic direct diplomatic engagement between Washington and Tehran, the changing shape of diplomacy is acutely felt. The collapse of the Islamabad talks has exposed the consequences of Trump’s diplomatic truth-telling. When it is observed that the US president is manufacturing the appearance of diplomacy through false claims to manage domestic and global reputation, the already-narrow space for actual diplomacy contracts further. Every fictional announcement makes the next genuine opening harder to distinguish from performance. Days before direct US-Iran negotiations, Trump made another false announcement, yet again, that Iran was asking for a ceasefire, a claim Iranians denied. The repeated trend of false claims by the negotiating side makes diplomatic trust harder to win.
Enough harm is already done to the practice of diplomacy by the US-Israel duo. With international norms derailed, it becomes even more pertinent for the states now to condemn this practice and ensure that diplomatic channels remain insulated from the political maneuvering of the state heads in reference to diplomacy. The use of false claims by President Trump in interstate dealings should be seriously heeded by the states worldwide to prevent it from becoming a practice.
To conclude, in a post-truth condition, truth remains relevant but is contested, but President Trump has demonstrated that in an information ecosystem structurally biased toward amplifying claims and muffling corrections, a powerful actor can use it to its advantage. The state policies have evolved in parallel with the needs of time; the adoption of disinformation as a policy at the state level for international dealings narrows down the space for real-world diplomacy.
