The morning after launching military operations in Iran, Donald Trump spoke on the phone with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer and said the new leadership in Tehran was ready to renew diplomatic negotiations.

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” the president said. “They should have done it sooner. … They waited too long.”

It wasn’t altogether clear what that meant. After all, Iranian officials had been engaged in talks with White House envoys for several weeks. They didn’t “wait too long” to come to the negotiating table; they were already at the negotiating table.

In the same interview with Scherer, the president acknowledged that there were Iranian officials engaged in talks with U.S. officials, though many of them were killed as part of the new war.

“Most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big — that was a big hit,” Trump added.

Whether the president fully understands this or not, the talks were ongoing — and by some measures, progressing. Late last week, Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, the senior Arab diplomat mediating talks between the United States and Iran, told MS NOW that Tehran made major concessions regarding its nuclear program and urged the White House to give negotiations more time.

A related report in Axios quoted a U.S. official who agreed that Friday’s talks were “positive.” Al Busaidi told CBS News that a peace deal was “within our reach.”

Less than half a day later, the bombs began dropping.

By all appearances, there was a foundational lie at the heart of the talks: Trump wanted to destroy the government that he and his team were negotiating with. For the president, failure wasn’t just inevitable, it was apparently desirable, since he was principally focused more on regime change and less on a diplomatic breakthrough. The goal wasn’t to negotiate the terms of a nuclear agreement with a foreign adversary, since the U.S. administration intended to start killing the leaders of the foreign adversary in the middle of the negotiations.

But stepping back, there are broader consequences to these developments. As The New York Times reported:

The attacks, in much of the world’s eyes, appeared to short-circuit the Trump administration’s nuclear talks with Iran. It was at least the third time — after his Iran bombings in June and his attack on Venezuela in January — that Mr. Trump deployed heavy force against a country with which he had been negotiating.

In so doing, experts say, Mr. Trump may be gaining leverage in the short term but sapping his, and America’s, credibility in ways that could resonate for years to come.

Thomas Greminger, a former European diplomat who now heads a Swiss think tank that deals with conflict resolution, told the Times: “This is basically abusing diplomacy to cover up a military operation.”

Greminger added that, going forward, when the U.S. seeks support from countries in negotiations, those countries could “think twice about reengaging if you’re faced with this kind of bad faith behavior.”

International diplomacy can be incredibly complex, but in broad strokes, the basic elements here are simple: U.S. officials were in talks with Venezuela shortly before we started bombing the South American country. And soon after U.S. officials were in talks with Iran, we started bombing the Middle Eastern country.

The next time White House officials invite a foe to the negotiating table, why would anyone trust them to work in good faith?