The Iran Peace Deal Is What Trumpism Looks Like

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

 

In Lethal Weapon 2 Joe Pesci offers some advice: “They f— you at the drive-thru.”

 

That line has kept popping into my head over the last few months, as one new crop of people after another learns what should have been obvious long ago: When it comes to politics, Donald Trump is the drive-thru.

 

I can’t write a whole “news”letter laden with more F-bombs than the Strait of Hormuz has mines. So, as the john said to the erudite hooker he worried was secretly recording him, let’s get euphemistic.

 

You can divide the people who have invested great trust in Donald Trump into two camps: those who are an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axis and those who will become an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axis. Or to put it another way: There are people who have been screwed by Trump, and people who are destined to be screwed by Trump.

 

Let’s flash back to March, when the anti-Israel and anti-“forever war” crowd felt “betrayed” by Trump’s Iranian adventure. I wrote, “The idea that Trump’s war on Iran is a betrayal of ‘True Trumpism’ is the last gasp of people who told themselves that Trumpism was an ideology. And it’s embarrassing.”

 

The title of the piece was “The Iran War Is What Trumpism Looks Like.”

 

Well, guess what? The Iran ‘peace’ deal is what Trumpism looks like, too.

 

When a weathervane points north, we don’t confuse it for a compass. When the winds shift and it points south, we don’t say, “We’ve been betrayed!” We just say, “That’s what weathervanes do.” But an amazing number of people think Trump is more like a compass, pointing toward the True North of “America First” or “patriotism” or some other blather.

 

Donald Trump has no ideological or moral compass. Or if he does, it doesn’t point outward toward any True North, but inward, toward himself.

 

When Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, many sincere hawks and sincere Trump apparatchiks (not the same thing) cheered, celebrating his courage and commitment to protecting America, Israel, the world. “I’m in awe of President Trump’s determination to be a man of peace but at the end of the day, evil’s worst nightmare,” proclaimed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Trump’s Nethers).

 

Mark Levin insisted, “He doesn’t want to go to war. But then again, he will do what has to be done to protect the American people who he loves. He’s a patriot.”

 

“Thank you for the courage to stop this terror state from holding the world hostage with missiles while building or attempting to build a nuclear bomb,” Levin said on another occasion. “Thank you for doing the work of the free world.” And: “The president of the United States knows what the hell he’s doing, okay? He knows what he’s doing.”

 

Pete Hegseth proclaimed, “The real endless war is the war that Iran has waged on us for 47 years. President Trump is the only president with the guts and moral clarity to finally do something about it.” He added that “President Trump’s fortitude is unshakable and his mission is crystal clear.”

 

His fortitude looks pretty shaky, the mission cloudier and more protean than a lava lamp. He didn’t know what he was doing. And he won’t do what has to be done. He is not evil’s best friend, but he’s hardly its worst nightmare. Because he’s nobody’s, no idea’s, no cause’s best friend. His best friend is the guy he sees in the mirror as he puts on his bronzer.

 

Trump did real damage to Iran and, in isolation, that’s a good thing. Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 bombing campaign that targeted the nuclear facility at Fordow, was a real and valuable accomplishment. I am skeptical of the more grandiose dunking on this fiasco as leaving Iran stronger than it was on February 27. But that doesn’t mean this hasn’t been a fiasco.

 

The terms of surrender.

 

Let’s detour for a moment to outline just some of the reasons this has been a fiasco.

 

First, fiasco is the right word, because it originates as a theatrical term for disastrously failed performance. And this was, like virtually everything Trump does, a performance.

 

The war was previewed with Trump promising the Iranian people “help is on its way” and unleashed with vows to accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender.” It ended with Trump recognizing the regime as “very rational”—not just rational, but very rational—and “not radicalized” at all, and “very nice to deal with.” Oh, and he explained, “I never cared about regime change. It was never a part” of the plan.

 

That’s not exactly evil’s nightmare fuel.

 

He insisted for months that he didn’t care about the damage to the economy caused by the war he unilaterally started because what mattered was depriving Iran of a nuclear bomb. Now he suggests that the people—like Graham, Levin et al.—who loyally supported him are “very stupid people” because they’re willing to risk a “global recession” by wanting to see Trump follow through on his “crystal clear” mission.

 

Now, in his own telling, he’s a hero for getting the Strait of Hormuz open and lowering the price of oil to “in the $70s.”  The price of oil on February 27, the day before the war started, was in the $70s, and the Strait of Hormuz was open. The Iranians get to keep their “dust.” They will also get some $300 billion for reconstruction, and according to some reports, $12 billion upfront and then another $24 billion just to agree to chat.

 

This afternoon he said the deal “achieves everything we set out to accomplish and much more.” The three objectives he cited: “ending the current conflict,” “reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” and “preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He added, “That’s what it was all about.” So by his own accounting a goal of the war he started was to end the war he started. Another was to open a waterway that was open until he started it. And to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon, which he has not done.

 

In short, Iran’s strategy to force Trump into a conditional surrender on its terms worked.

 

Of course, this is just a deal to talk about a deal for 60 days. Until this morning, J.D. Vance and others were saying leaked versions were Iranian propaganda or misinformation. They issued talking points that are so lame, if they were a horse you’d humanely unload your shotgun into its temple. It now turns out that the “propaganda” was essentially accurate—which Vance knew when he lied to all of those interviewers.

 

No wonder they’ve signaled that we shouldn’t put too much stock in the actual text when it is released. “People shouldn’t read too much into the language of the [memorandum of understanding],” one administration official told CNN’s Alayna Treene, describing the agreement as merely a “political document.” “What’s more important than the actual document is the understandings we have with each other. … We came up with language that allows [Iran] to say what they need to say for their domestic politics.”

 

The Trump administration—rightly—said Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was deeply flawed because it relied on a mere promise from the deceitful, untrustworthy, fanatical Iranian regime to not pursue nuclear weapons and because we gave them billions to reward that worthless promise. Now Trump is touting the exact same promise they made under the JCPOA. The administration claims the key difference between this “deal” and the JCPOA  is that we’re not giving Iran “U.S. taxpayer” money. Well, the vast bulk of the money Obama “gave” wasn’t U.S. taxpayer money, but frozen Iranian assets and sanctions relief. We’re doing the same thing, just on a far grander scale.

 

World War II analogies are overdone. But this is like agreeing to reparations and reconstruction funds for Germany or Japan before we defeated them.

 

There are several reasons why this deal could end up being worse than the JCPOA. I’ll name just three. First, the JCPOA at least held out the hypothetical option of taking military action against Iran. Trump’s fire, aim, ready approach probably exhausts that card. We’re not going back to war with Iran any time soon, and Iran is less scared of that possibility than before. We’ve pissed away deterrence. Second, the MOU says that the strait will be “toll free” for 60 days, which, okay, great. But Iran now considers the Strait of Hormuz its sovereign property and it appears it is planning to charge “fees” for passage, once our ships leave. Even if that falls away in negotiations—which I doubt—the billions up front are a massive toll payment for opening the strait. Last, if all this holds, we’re now condoning the Iranians’ pursuit of a nuclear program so long as they don’t rub it in Trump’s face while he’s still president. Oh, and just today, he said that of course Iran has to be allowed to have a ballistic missile program. And anyone who says exactly what the administration told them to say two months ago is “not very smart.”

 

We’ve gone from hearing that Trump is a hero for having the courage to solve a problem no other president was smart or brave enough to tackle to leaving it as a thornier problem for future presidents.

 

The drive-thru president.

 

Which brings me back to where I started. Tickets on the Trump Train are cheap because the fine print states that you can be thrown off, or even under, the train by the conductor at a time of his choosing. And the train is under no obligation to even slow down beforehand.

 

For instance, Bibi Netanyahu bet his political fortunes and Israel’s security on the conviction that Trump could be counted on to see this thing through. Now he’s getting a tour of the underside of the Trump Train. He ordered the kosher Filet-O-Fish and now he’s unwrapping a Big Mac with extra bacon.

 

We don’t need to dwell on Israel’s predicament. At the G7 summit in Évian, France, Trump provided rhetorical cover for Israel’s enemies, condemning Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. The MOU, according to the administration, is binding for Israel in Lebanon, meaning that Trump has traded Israel’s security and sovereignty at Iran’s behest to protect Iran’s terrorist proxies.

 

The salient point here is that the friends of Israel who supported Trump are now scapegoats for not putting Trump’s interests first, while the enemies of Israel who felt “betrayed” by Trump are ecstatic because “the real Trump” has returned. The guys who claimed he was a pawn of Israel are overjoyed to learn that their idiotic, and often antisemitic, theory of Trump’s treachery was nonsense all along. All they care about is that the real MAGA Trump is back.

 

The real Trump never left. He does what he does for reasons having to do with his self-interest. That’s it. It’s not more complicated than that. If he can do the right thing easily and at low cost, he’ll do the right thing if he gets the credit for it. If it becomes hard, boring, costly, or embarrassing, he’ll give up or reverse course.

 

The hilarious or pathetic or hilariously pathetic part is that the same “It’s never the czar’s fault” game is underway yet again. Trump can never fail, he can only be failed. When the MAGA isolationists and Israel-haters were pissed at Trump, they demanded to know who tricked Trump into going to war. Now, the hawks and friends of Israel are searching for someone other than Trump to blame for Trump’s decision. As of now, they’ve settled on J.D. Vance, the “architect” of this deal, according to Lindsey Graham. It’s the “Vance Plan” and “Hillbilly Obama” foreign policy. I take a backseat to nobody when it comes to criticizing Vance, and I am totally open to the idea that his fingerprints are all over this deal, but Vance isn’t the president. The buck doesn’t stop with him. You can’t go around claiming Trump is a unique, historic genius when you like what he’s doing, and a dupe of Wormtongues and string-pullers when he does something stupid. I mean, you actually can, because people do it every day.

 

Including Donald Trump himself. Today in Évian—which, coincidentally, is naïve spelled backward—Trump said that if the deal works out, he’ll take the credit. If it doesn’t, “I’m blaming J.D.”

 

Trump doesn’t hide who he is, he admits it. He might as well say over the intercom at the drive-thru: “What’s your order? I need to know so I can f— you.”

In California, Organized Labor Might Just Defeat Itself

By Will Swaim

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

An SEIU-backed measure to tax the global assets of California’s roughly 200 billionaires may be the rare progressive tax proposal defeated not by corporate money but by organized labor itself.

 

That’s the assessment on Polymarket, where, as of Wednesday, 64 percent of bettors predict the union-backed initiative won’t make it to the November ballot. They’re betting that the measure’s backers, Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), will withdraw their “2026 Billionaire Tax Act” before the June 25 filing deadline.

 

The assumptions come from a rumored compromise that SEIU-UHW insists won’t happen. The union notes it gathered more than 1.5 million signatures to qualify the initiative — far above the roughly 875,000 valid signatures required. It also boasts support from Senator Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary and University of California professor. Supporters say the one-time tax — which they predict will capture about $110 billion — is necessary to backfill cuts in the rate of growth of federal Medicaid funding.

 

But SEIU’s biggest challenge isn’t signature-gathering. It isn’t a lack of progressive allies. It isn’t even the prospect of an opposition campaign funded by the targets of the wealth tax, California’s richest residents.

 

The biggest threat to the wealth tax is organized labor.

 

Leading the opposition is Governor Gavin Newsom, who has spent months assembling an unlikely coalition against one of labor’s own proposals. His antipathy for wealth taxes (he killed a 2022 legislative attempt by merely signaling his disapproval) is rooted in a longstanding California fiscal problem: The state relies heavily on a relatively small number of affluent taxpayers whose incomes are tied to volatile capital gains. An oft-cited Legislative Analyst’s Office report warns the top 1 percent of California’s wealthiest residents pay nearly half the state’s income tax. Because capital is mobile, those taxpayers won’t necessarily wait to see whether the measure passes. The Hoover Institution notes that mere rumors of the impending wealth tax were enough to prompt several billionaires to hit the eject button: director Steven Spielberg (who reportedly established residency in New York City); PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (Miami); Google co-founders Larry Page (Miami) and Sergey Brin (reportedly Nevada); venture capitalist David Sacks (Austin); and auto-finance billionaire Don Hankey (Las Vegas). And though SEIU included him in its calculation of billionaire wealth in California, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison left California for Hawaii in 2012.

 

Cataloging the chaos, researchers at Hoover concluded that, after accounting for taxpayer flight and implementation challenges, the measure would actually leave California $25 billion poorer.

 

Newsom saw it all.

 

“The evidence is in,” he told Politico in January. “The impacts are very real — not just substantive economic impacts in terms of the revenue, but start-ups, the indirect impacts of . . . people questioning long-term commitments, medium-term commitments. That’s not what we need right now, at a time of so much uncertainty. Quite the contrary.”

 

“This will be defeated — there’s no question in my mind,” Newsom told the New York Times that same month. “I’ll do what I have to do to protect the state.”

 

Now, Politico reports, Newsom is rallying labor unions representing teachers, police, construction workers, and carpenters, along with such prominent health-care organizations as Planned Parenthood, to join him.

 

The most striking defection came from the California Teachers Association. For decades, CTA has championed higher taxes on wealthy Californians. Early this month, the union voted to oppose the SEIU wealth-tax initiative, arguing that it would tank the state’s general fund on which public education gets a constitutionally guaranteed 40 percent.

 

That vote revealed the real conflict. This isn’t primarily a fight over whether billionaires should pay more taxes. It’s a fight about whether the Atlas Shrugging of California’s billionaires will destroy an economy — and a tax system — on which multiple parties depend.

 

But whatever the merits of those policy arguments, the initiative’s political problem is even more immediate: Powerful unions appear increasingly unwilling to support it.

 

Insiders say Newsom’s campaign to kill the measure before the June 25 deadline is more carrot than stick. He’s threatening to kick SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan off Good Time Island.

 

“Dave Regan is seeing very plainly what he’ll be up against if he goes through with this,” a Newsom consultant told Politico.

 

Regan expected — was indeed counting on — opposition from billionaires: The image of wealthy Californians financing attacks on a tax-the-rich initiative would fit neatly into the union’s political messaging.

 

But that strategy becomes far more difficult when opposition ads include teachers, police officers, construction workers, health-care organizations, and a Democratic governor.

 

One of SEIU’s few union allies, Unite Here Local 11 leader Kurt Petersen, says bring it on.

 

“This is the fight we want,” Petersen told Politico. “We’re at war. People need to decide which side they’re on.”

 

Some have already made that decision. San Francisco voters in June rejected that city’s “overpaid CEO tax” despite the support of every local labor union. And pre-campaign polling for the wealth tax is an anemic 52 percent.

 

Meanwhile, back on Polymarket, 82 percent of bettors predict that if Team Newsom fails — if the wealth tax reaches the November ballot — California voters will reject it.

Just Say No

By Mike Coté

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

According to the leaders of Iran and the United States, Tehran and Washington have reached a deal to conclude hostilities between the two nations. This memorandum of understanding, the text of which was released on Wednesday by the U.S. at the conclusion of the G-7 summit in France, is an extension and expansion of the current cease-fire — if the still-ongoing, low-level combat between the U.S. and Iran can even be called that — and a step toward a broader agreement to resolve the issues between the opposing sides. The agreement, brokered by Pakistan, would add, at minimum, another 60 days to the cessation of combat, including on the Lebanese front, immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping, end the U.S. blockade of Iran and the Iranian threats to commercial vessels, release frozen funds to Iran, work to reverse American and international sanctions on the regime, and fast-track further talks on nuclear weapons.

 

Although we now have the text of the agreement, the argument over whether this is a good or bad deal has not abated. In fact, it seems to have just started. The memorandum is short on details and is extremely open to interpretation. No enforcement mechanisms have been discussed, implementation processes are nonexistent, and the 60-day timeline is quite open-ended — something acknowledged by President Trump himself. Despite the fact that there is very little substance to this memorandum, opinions on the deal have already hardened. Critics have labeled it a total American capitulation, arguing that the details we do have are already far worse for American interests than the failed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “the nuclear deal,” under Obama. They focus on the early release of Iranian monies, the inconclusive nuclear clauses, and the failure to address Iranian support for global terrorism. Supporters, including Vice President JD Vance, have countered these claims, suggesting that Iran will only benefit from the deal if it holds up its end of the bargain and accedes to U.S. demands. President Trump, in a press conference at the G-7, stated that this was a “historic deal” that our allies were “thrilled” with, but also that he will not hesitate to resume American bombardment if Tehran fails to comply.

 

In many ways, this whole back-and-forth misses the forest for the trees. It does not particularly matter if this deal is in some ways better or worse than the JCPOA. It does not much matter whether Iran has agreed to our demands or we have agreed to theirs. What matters is the ground truth: No deal that could possibly be agreed to by the Islamic Republic of Iran is a good one for the United States. Three major structural factors internal to the Iranian regime itself ensure that this is the case.

 

First, the regime’s domestic legitimacy depends on its stringent opposition to America. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the regime has rested on three pillars to justify its existence to the Iranian people. It claimed to be a better steward of the country than the government of the shah, it repudiated the hereditary monarchy and replaced it with a theocratic government of Islamic jurists, and it promoted itself as the mortal enemy of the United States, orienting all foreign policy to defeating the “Great Satan.” Today, two of those three foundational claims have collapsed. Over the past 47 years, the mullahcracy has proven to be a complete failure at improving the lives of its citizens, funneling funds best used to face down domestic challenges into foreign terrorist proxies, allowing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to co-opt much of the country’s productive economy, and brutally repressing ordinary Iranians who dare speak up in protest. After the killing of longtime leader Ali Khamenei, the second pillar has fallen as well; his son Mojtaba, nobody’s idea of a respected Islamic jurist, has been appointed supreme leader with the backing of the IRGC. All the regime has left is staunch opposition to Washington, something on which it has doubled down for the past three months. There is no way for the regime to surrender to American terms and continue to rule Iran, so any deal must be heavily biased toward the interests of the mullahcracy.

 

Second, the regime as it exists today — massively degraded, with less centralized control than ever before — may not even be in a strong enough position to enforce a deal on its own radical cadres. Since the decapitation strikes that began this war in February, the Iranian response has relied on disparate and self-directed regional factions within the IRGC, granting serious autonomy to each sector to prosecute the war; this at least partly explains the continued cease-fire violations and the maintenance of the threat to commercial shipping. Our Iranian interlocutors may not be in control of the kinetic situation, especially if they are, as media reports suggest, politicians, not military leadership. If a deal is viewed as suboptimal by the most fundamentalist segments of the IRGC, even if leadership disagrees, they simply will not comply with it. And when the biggest current issue, the disruption of Hormuz, is being carried out entirely by rhetorical threats, the suggestion of mines, and occasional low-level drone launches, those independent actors within the system have immense ability to ruin the bargain. This has the potential to scuttle any deal we make, even if it receives widespread buy-in at the top levels of the regime. Hoping that our negotiating partners are able to enforce our demands on intransigent armed radicals is at odds with the evidence of reality.

 

Finally, we come to the Iranian regime’s specialty: deception. The Islamic Republic has routinely dissembled in the past. It says one thing and does the opposite. It talks out of both sides of its mouth, making conciliatory noises in discussions with credulous Westerners while simultaneously redoubling its malign efforts. Nowhere was this more obvious than with respect to the JCPOA. Iran repeatedly averred that it would never seek a nuclear weapon and solely intended to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. This was a lie, as we discovered when the Israelis spirited away the regime’s secret nuclear program archive from Tehran in 2018. It turns out that they never stopped working on weaponization, never intended to stop working on weaponization, and sought to use the fig leaf of the nuclear deal to protect its clandestine program until breakout was assured. They have returned to this strategy of mendacity throughout this war, including in the current cease-fire, during which the Strait of Hormuz was supposed to be open to all shipping. Clearly, it isn’t. Their continual redefinition of terms in these very negotiations similarly shows their deceitfulness.

 

Believing that Iran will comply with an agreement it makes is foolish in the extreme. The regime has proven again and again who they are and how they act. They lie, they cheat, and they find any and every way to undermine what has been agreed to. This constant deception, paired with the other structural factors detailed above, makes it impossible for any deal we sign with Iran to be a good or durable one for us. This agreement with the Iranian regime is not worth the paper it is written on. American leaders must recognize this fact and act accordingly. Anything less is courting disaster.

Surrender

By Mike Nelson

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

On Tuesday night, Bloomberg published the text of the 14-point memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran that effectively ends the conflict between those two countries, the full details of which the Trump administration had seemed so resistant to disclose. We can now see why. While not as disastrous as it might have been, it largely amounts to American concessions to many Iranian demands in exchange for hollow promises and hopes of future Iranian flexibility, none of which actually amounts to anything in the short term. In the aftermath of three days of atrocious communications about the deal to which they agreed, White House representatives read the MOU on a call with several press outlets, with slight variations from what was reported by Bloomberg.

 

There are many legitimate criticisms of what is in the MOU, but of equal concern is what is not specified in the document. Unlike the popular expression, the devil isn’t in the details of this agreement; it’s in the broad strokes—gaps in specificity so wide they make clear the differences in how the U.S. and Iranian governments attempted to spin this to their domestic audiences over the past several days. But beyond the spin, these gaps leave a great deal of space for the Iranians to take advantage, using their most liberal interpretation of the terms while loudly declaring they are still in compliance. We should expect that Iran will take the full opportunity to exploit vague language—because what is not agreed to cannot be enforced, and what cannot be enforced should not be hoped for. Despite Vice President J.D. Vance’s seeming amusement that we can talk directly to Iranian leaders, to quote Greg Graffin, “contracts determine the best friendships.”

 

The memorandum—which Axios reported was signed Wednesday, despite a planned ceremony Friday in Switzerland— does end the fighting that began on February 28 and reopens the Strait of Hormuz through a series of steps over 60 days. Upon signing, the United States will lift the blockade of shipping transiting to and from Iran. Iran will end its disruption of maritime traffic, with up to 30 days to remove deployed mines. Since the beginning of the conflict, this maritime disruption has been the greatest source of both Iranian leverage and of pressure weighing on President Donald Trump, transforming him from the man making bold statements about unconditional surrender and picking the next ayatollah to demonstrating the kind of desperation for an end to the conflict that led to this agreement. But while a return to the free flow of global commerce is inherently good and necessary, we shouldn’t chalk this up as a win. Like a magician using distraction to pull off a trick, Iran made the war about the strait and the economic woes its disruption caused, getting the administration to take its eye off the causes for initiating the war and any of the goals it said we would achieve through it.

 

The version of the MOU dictated by senior U.S. sources, which differs slightly from the text published by Bloomberg, prohibits any kind of tolling or fees on shipping during the 60 day period, but seems to open to door to such a shake-down scheme afterwards when it states, “The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.”

 

Whether Iran ever attempts to extort international shipping or not, it will enjoy an influx of cash under this agreement. During his marathon media day selling this deal and preemptively spinning it, Vance swore the Iranians would not get the financial incentives until they deliver verifiable progress. While that appears to be true of $300 billion intended for Iran’s “rehabilitation and economic development,” Vance was not entirely honest, lying by omission about immediate and short-term benefits to the regime. Immediately upon signing, the U.S. agrees to issue sanctions waivers allowing Iran to export and sell oil, potentially netting the regime billions of dollars without any further need for concessions or compliance. The U.S. also agrees to return Iran’s frozen assets—upward of $100 billion— with the only stipulation being the parties “mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during the negotiations.” I think it’s highly likely that Iran will demand access to these assets, claiming “progress,” as they continue to, in the president’s words, tap us along in the negotiation period, the same way it extorted us for preconditions and demands in the lead-up to this.

 

But what about any of the conditions Trump said were in America's interests throughout the war? There are many, including myself, who said this agreement seemed to copy the JCPOA’s meaningless promise that Iran would never pursue a nuclear weapon. The wording in the dictated version of the MOU is, in fact, slightly weaker: “The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” This phrasing does not include the previous assurances never to “seek” them. While I’m not sure there are varying levels of meaninglessness in Iranian promises, by the letter of the law, this would seem to allow for continued research short of some breakout threshold.

 

Setting this watered-down assurance aside, the final disposition of Iran’s nuclear program is completely unclear, nominally to be determined through the course of this 60-day period of negotiations. But the language in the document doesn’t inspire confidence that the United States is going to restrain Iran’s nuclear program stringently—“The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal.” This leaves a lot of wiggle room for the right of domestic research and enrichment, and we seem to already be conceding to Iran keeping its existing highly enriched uranium with the language that it will be “downblend(ed) on site.” This isn’t surprising since President Trump said Tuesday of the uranium, “You could make the case, why even bother? It’s not very valuable stuff.” Even if we do resist a final agreement that would codify an unacceptable nuclear program, the MOU specifies that the 60-day period can be extended indefinitely by mutual agreement. It seems highly likely that a president who has so clearly demonstrated his lack of interest and attention will continue agreeing to extensions for as long as it takes for him to be able to continue that disinterest in dealing with the difficult situation he has left unresolved.

 

One of the other explicit goals of the war was to sever the links between Iran and its proxy militias. In remarks during a Medal of Honor award ceremony on March 2, President Trump said, “Finally, we're ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders." Not only does the MOU extend a blanket of protection over Hezbollah (“an immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon”), it attempts to bind Israel (“the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war,”) which was not a party to the negotiations and had to find out the details the same we all did after the United States refused to provide them a copy of the MOU. Despite grandiose hopes that the end of this conflict would lead to regional cooperation and an expansion of the Abraham Accords, the result of this MOU and the two weeks leading up to it are strengthened ties between Iran and its malign network and the simultaneous marginalization of Israel and its right to defend itself from that network.

 

There is, notably, nothing in the MOU that—despite previous characterizations from administration sources—prohibits Iran from funding and sponsoring these networks, or from rebuilding and maintaining their drone and missile capabilities. In fact, despite the destruction of the Iranian missile program being an explicit and repeated goal of the campaign, much like his softened stance on the enriched uranium, the president suggested at the G7 summit that Iran should be able to retain this capability.

 

Finally, and shamefully, the agreement puts a final nail in the coffin of the Iranian people’s hopes that the United States would support their cries for freedom. “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” A conflict that started with the hopeful protests of a people pushing back against almost five decades of oppression ends with the country meant to be the beacon of freedom agreeing to turn a blind eye to the slaughter of 30,000 Iranians, or the inevitable continued crackdowns, executions, and repression. No matter how he wishes to run from it now, we should never forget the president’s undeniably clear messages to the Iranian people when he thought this would be easy—“help is on the way,” “the hour of your liberation is at hand.” Vance, already having shown his callous disregard for the deaths of Ukrainians, adds the Iranian people to the mix in his attempt to carry his boss’s water, “if the Iranian people want to rise up, great. That's their business. That's between them and their government.”

 

The conflict ends with a seeming disregard for the disposition of uranium we said we were fighting to secure, for the arsenal of missiles we said we were seeking to destroy, and for the oppressed Iranians we promised we were going to help. The war ends with nothing of value to show for it. We will have killed thousands of Iranians, destroyed hundreds of missile launchers and air defense systems, but to what end? For the privilege of achieving nothing quantifiable, we have provided Iran with proof of a strategic deterrent it can exercise at any time, provided the regime with access to a massive cash influx, rebuilt its relationship with proxies that was damaged after October 7, damaged our alliances and relationships, spent billions of dollars, expended a large percentage of our critically short precision munitions, and lost 13 American lives, to say nothing of the hundreds of wounded. As with so many of his missteps or failures, President Trump will likely try to categorize this as a win, shift the way it is remembered with the passage of time, blame someone else, or just hope it fades from memory as he moves on to what he deems truly important business, like ballrooms and reflecting pools. But this will likely be the largest and costliest error of his presidency, and one for which he deserves permanent shame.

‘Hillbilly Obama’

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

 

Conventional wisdom has it that J.D. Vance has been set up to be the fall guy for our new devil’s bargain with Iran. I don’t buy it.

 

Although there’s evidence to support it, I admit.

 

The vice president, not his boss or the secretary of state, will be in Switzerland on Friday for meetings that will take the place of the signing ceremony, after the deal was formally signed ahead of schedule on Wednesday. He’ll be forced to smile awkwardly for the cameras and glad-hand conniving Khomeinists whom the White House hoped to depose as recently as four months ago. That photo op is a 2028 attack ad waiting to happen.

 

It’s also the vice president, not Donald Trump or Marco Rubio, who’s spent the week doing the rounds of national media to sell the deal to skeptical Americans. He’s selling a book too, I realize, which gives him a modest financial incentive to seek out airtime. But he surely understands that his visibility at this moment is making him the public face of a geopolitical s—t sandwich.

 

And as I conceded on Monday, it’s the vice president who’ll be scapegoated for the deal by Republican hawks in politics and media. Blaming Donald Trump for a policy failure is a poor career move for anyone whose professional success depends on the favor of a right-wing constituency. So politicians and pundits will tailor their criticism accordingly to hold Vance, not the alleged greatest dealmaker on the planet, responsible for this one.

 

Fox News contributor Ben Domenech derisively described the worldview behind the Iran deal as “Hillbilly Obama,” alluding to another work in the veep’s literary oeuvre. Vance will wear that all the way to the next election cycle. Going forward, hawks will treat his “America First” isolationism as nothing more than a MAGA-friendly veneer for feckless Democratic-style accommodationism toward enemy regimes. Among traditional conservatives, suspicions that he’s a weakling will be set in stone.

 

The events of the past 72 hours have all the trappings of making him a fall guy for the deal. Yet I still don’t buy it.

 

I don’t buy it because it seems probable to me that Vance wanted to become the White House’s chief public advocate for the deal. This wasn’t a case of him being tapped by Trump to do a thankless job and accepting dutifully but reluctantly, to prove he’s a good soldier. This was him seeking out an assignment and getting it, I suspect.

 

He’s gambling on the direction of the right post-Iran. “At some point, this Republican Party needs to decide which kind of foreign policy it’s gonna have,” Domenech told Fox. “Is it going to be an ‘America First’ foreign policy, one that is bold, that uses American power in key moments decisively in order to affect what it wants to achieve? Or are we going to just backslide into being some kind of ‘Hillbilly Obama’ kind of GOP?”

 

I think J.D. Vance would agree with all of that. The Republican Party does need to decide, and it will decide in 2028.

 

It will decide to be a “Hillbilly Obama” GOP, he’s wagering.

 

An unpopular war.

 

The Iran war put the vice president in a terrible position. Isolationists like Tucker Carlson clamored to have him on the ticket in 2024, believing he’d be a counterweight inside the White House to the war-hungry “blob” of interventionists that dominates Washington.

 

They got their wish—whereupon Trump turned around and attacked Iran not once but twice in his first 14 months in office. Vance had failed miserably at his core task of preventing another Middle East misadventure. The right’s Lindbergh faction, whom he’s counting on to turn out for him two years from now, was sorely disappointed.

 

The VP needed to atone to them, and now he has. He couldn’t stop the war from starting but he could, and did, spearhead the effort to end it before it escalated. Making himself a spokesman for the deal this week in national media is his way of showing the Tuckerites that he’s still one of them, still committed to curtailing foreign entanglements even if his boss isn’t.

 

That will help him in the next primary, particularly when you remember that he faces more danger from the GOP’s isolationist flank than from its hawkish majority. Vance has always been more careful not to offend the right’s postliberals than he has been not to offend Reaganites, and not just because he’s a postliberal himself. I think he assesses, correctly, that a postliberal challenger could do him more damage in 2028 than any traditional Republican could.

 

All the charisma and grassroots energy is on that side of the party. Ted Cruz isn’t going to successfully primary J.D. Vance by calling him an Obama-esque weakling for brokering a deal blessed by Donald Trump, but a passionate Lindberghian demagogue like Tucker Carlson could cause trouble by accusing the vice president—and his boss—of having sold out “America First” by waging a foolish war with Iran. By making himself the face of a peace deal, Vance is hedging against that.

 

He’s also aligning himself with the vast majority of general election voters. That’s normally a smart thing for a politician to do, no?

 

Support for the war in Nate Silver’s polling tracker stands at 37.9 percent as I write this. Never once since it began has it exceeded 40.5 percent in popularity. It doesn’t necessarily follow that because most Americans oppose the war they’ll be in favor of the terms Trump and Vance have negotiated for peace, but it’s noteworthy that Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy who hate the deal are backing it nonetheless in the name of ending the conflict.

 

My guess is that public opinion will run that way too: The deal is bad, but the war—and the persistently high gas prices it’s caused—are worse. If the former ends up curing the latter, Vance will take credit for having restored something akin to the prewar status quo.

 

Bear in mind too that, by 2028, all factions of American voters are likely to have landed on the position that the conflict with Iran was a failure. Even the right will end up in broad agreement on the point, as I noted yesterday, with Republican hawks and doves split only with respect to whose fault that mistake is. The war failed because its aims were unrealistic from the jump, isolationists will say; the war failed because the president refused to “finish the job,” interventionists will counter.

 

There are worse fates politically than being known as the guy who wound down a conflict that literally everyone agrees fell short of its goals. That’s the fate J.D. Vance is trying to engineer for himself.

 

But there’s risk.

 

Suckers and fighters.

 

The vice president is making a wager with respect to the future of his own party.

 

The wager is that Republican disillusionment over Iran will lead the right to become more reluctant to flex America’s military muscle. “If even a pillar of national strength like Donald Trump couldn’t impose America’s will on the Iranians by force, no one can,” right-wingers might conclude. “Military interventions don’t work.”

 

J.D. Vance, man of peace, will be in a strong position if that’s how things shake out, especially if Democrats take interventionist stances in 2028 with respect to supporting NATO and Ukraine. A dovish nominee will look more attractive to the right if hawkishness in the next election appears more left-coded.

 

But there’s another scenario. The right might conclude that failing to “finish the job,” not undertaking the job in the first place, was the key problem with the Iran war. They’re primed to do so, frankly: Trump’s party has been conditioned to believe that all problems can be solved, and solved easily, through applications of sufficient ruthlessness. If America failed to bring the Iranians to heel—to “use American power in key moments decisively,” in Domenech’s words—its failure must have been a failure of will.

 

And which peace-loving figure around the president demonstrated the most conspicuous lack of will to engage Iran militarily?

 

Vance aspires to lead a party whose members divide the world into “suckers” and “fighters.” It is very risky for him to tout himself as reluctant to “fight” in the belief that the party will change so much in the aftermath of the war that it will come to see such reluctance as prudent, not weak.

 

And it will get riskier still if Iran’s behavior in the months ahead ends up making him look like a sucker.

 

The early signs don’t look good. NBC News reported yesterday that the Iranians launched drones at commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz after the agreement with the U.S. was signed. Sources tell Reuters that Iranian leaders fully intend to share the wealth their country will receive under the deal with Hezbollah. And news is circulating that federal law might force Trump to take the embarrassing step of delisting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization if he undertakes to lift sanctions.

 

Vance himself had been reduced to mumbling about “sensitivities” in the Muslim world to justify why the U.S. hadn’t officially released the text of the peace agreement until today. Other U.S. officials who spoke to CNN have taken to insisting that the text hardly matters at all. “What’s more important than the actual document is the understandings we have with each other,” one said, referring to the Iranians, “and that’s why it’s important to get it done, that we can create the environment to go and talk about all these things.”

 

Supposedly, per one source, Iranian officials have told the White House privately that they’ll satisfy Trump’s nuclear demands. Supposedly.

 

One regional expert summarized the White House’s grim predicament in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: “When it comes to nuclear negotiations, we are back at the prewar stage, but with the U.S. leverage [of a military attack] removed.” That’s not J.D. Vance’s fault, but the schmuckier this deal comes to appear to the average American, the schmuckier the administration’s most enthusiastic mouthpiece for it is destined to appear by extension.

 

Faith in Trump’s “toughness” and alleged negotiating savvy is such that most of the right won’t let itself be persuaded that a deal he supports is a sucker’s bargain. That will give Vance cover against naysayers as long as the boss continues to reassure Republican voters that it’s a great compromise, maybe the greatest compromise ever. But if our fickle president’s all-important image ends up battered by hawkish attacks, it’s possible that he’ll get cold feet and scrap it, leaving the VP hung out to dry. His feet might be getting cold already.

 

Republicans will nominate a dove for president—they already did, or thought they did, in the last three elections—but they won’t nominate someone whom they’re convinced is a sucker. The president disowning a deal that the VP is excited about would brand Vance a sucker to the right forever.

 

Crisis management.

 

Ending an unpopular war without looking like a pitiful rube in the process is the vice president’s challenge. What will he, or can he, do to manage his risk?

 

One thing he’s going to do is try to broker a durable, comprehensive peace with Iran.

 

Listen to any Vance interview this week and you’ll find him cooing over the possibility of rapprochement with the Iranians. On Monday, for instance, he told CNN that “the coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust. But we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something else.’”

 

Yesterday he told Megyn Kelly that the president deputized him to do nothing less than “negotiate a deal that transforms the Middle East.” The linchpin of that transformation is the $300 billion under the deal that Iran will be able to access if it ends its nuclear program permanently. According to Reuters, the money consists entirely of private-sector funds, more than half of which have already been committed to “securing loans, establishing credit lines or directly financing the reconstruction of sites damaged in the war.” For the first time in decades, Iran might see meaningful foreign investment.

 

It’s the China playbook, in other words. The West is going to try to deradicalize a dangerous regime by wooing it with filthy corporate lucre and integrating it into the global economy. If it works, with Iran ultimately agreeing to more normal relations with the U.S. and its neighbors, Vance will say that the agreement signed this week ended up defanging the Khomeinist menace to a degree that no war ever did or could. (An Obama talking point from 2015, not coincidentally.) “Suckers” don’t normally score transformational diplomatic breakthroughs, do they?

 

If that really is the play, Vance and Trump will spend the rest of their term courting the Iranians in hopes of justifying this week’s deal retroactively as the first step toward a more meaningful peace. Which brings us to the second thing the veep will do to manage his political risk: As Jonathan Last notes, he’s all teed up to shift blame to Israel if the deal collapses.

 

The text was practically designed to make it easy to do so. The official text draft says nothing about restraining Iran’s use of terror proxies while declaring in its opening sentence “an immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Iran demanded that Lebanon be included in the agreement because it wants Trump to use his leverage over Israel to prevent further Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Israel opposed including Lebanon in the deal for the same reason. Iran won.

 

Because it did, Vance now has a ready scapegoat if the Iranians fail to meet their obligations under the agreement. It’s not that he and the president were schmucks for trusting the Khomeinists, and it’s not that the Khomeinists aren’t willing to be friends. It’s that Israel—which is destined to resume hostilities with Hezbollah and Iran at some point—selfishly refuses to absorb a few missile strikes now and then without retaliating as the White House goes about trying to secure lasting regional peace.

 

That spin has already begun, as you probably know. The hostility between Washington and Jerusalem is allegedly such that, as of yesterday, the White House had refused thus far to show the text of the deal to the Israelis, our allies in the conflict since day one.

 

And it’s unfortunately smart, cynical politics in America 2026, particularly for someone like the vice president who has his eye on the next election cycle. Vance’s Tuckerite postliberal base will love seeing him take up the cause of peace against Benjamin Netanyahu. So will Democrats and independents, as more members of each group now view Israel more negatively than positively. And so will plenty of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 49, of whom 57 percent now hold an unfavorable opinion of the Jewish state.

 

Vance wasn’t a rube for making a bad deal with the Iranians, you see. He was just saddled with the bad luck of having a renegade Israeli regime as his partner.

 

We should not underestimate the degree of difficulty involved in convincing the American right, a faction populated by millions of evangelical Christians, that Iran is a more trustworthy broker than Israel. But if the last 10 years have proved anything, it’s that right-wingers are willing to change their beliefs about all sorts of things to rationalize their allegiance to Donald Trump. J.D. Vance is betting that embracing Hillbilly Obama-ism toward a terrorist regime is one more belief that they’ll come around to. I wouldn’t bet against it.

A Lopsided Deal for Iran

National Review Online

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

State Department official John Negroponte made the droll comment after Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign in North Vietnam that “we bombed them into accepting our concessions.”

 

A similar verdict seems appropriate for President Trump’s war on Iran.

 

The memorandum of understanding that both parties are signing is lopsided in Iran’s favor. The main concession from the Iranians is reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but the commercial artery won’t be returning to the status quo ante. The memorandum says that Tehran will not charge fees “for 60 days,” implying that Iran will begin extracting tolls thereafter. In exchange, the U.S. is lifting its blockade on Iranian ports and agreeing to let the Iranians sell oil, a source of revenue totaling tens of billions of dollars a year.

 

The memorandum also says that the U.S. will unfreeze Iranian assets — good for another roughly $24 billion — “upon the implementation of this M.O.U.”; in other words, perhaps within weeks. We wonder how many proverbial pallets will be needed to deliver this cash windfall to Iran.

 

The agreement also contemplates the lifting of all U.S. sanctions and delivery to Iran of a $300 billion reconstruction fund raised by its neighbors, dependent on a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The terms are studiously vague, although there is a specific reference regarding the enriched uranium to “down-blending on site under the supervision of the I.A.E.A.” (which was a key part of Barack Obama’s Iran deal from which Trump rightfully withdrew in his first term). It’s all supposed to be worked out within 60 days, but that period is extendable.

 

This section also refers to Iran’s “nuclear needs,” presumably a euphemism for enrichment. In a lamentable press availability at the G-7 summit, President Trump explicitly said Iran should be able to enrich at low levels. This, coupled with Trump’s consistently dismissive remarks about obtaining Iran’s nuclear “dust,” suggests that Iran won’t give up enrichment or hand over its uranium, both of which have long been considered key benchmarks for setting back Iran’s program.

 

Meanwhile, there is no reference to Iran’s missiles, even though ending Iran’s missile threat was originally one of the U.S. war aims. At his presser, Trump pooh-poohed constraining Iran’s missile arsenal, arguing — incredibly enough — that any individual missile strike only causes limited damage. There’s similarly no direct mention of Iran’s support for regional proxies; that Obama’s JCPOA didn’t address this, either, was supposed to be one of the main criticisms of it.

 

Finally, the memorandum says the conflict will also end in Lebanon, an Iranian ploy to protect Hezbollah and drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel.

 

For all the talk of Iran’s leadership being degraded by the attacks against its top ranks, it obviously still has adept negotiators.

 

The enduring achievement of this war and last year’s Midnight Hammer is the large-scale destruction of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure that will take the regime years to recover from. Its defense-industrial base, including its capacity to manufacture missiles, has also taken a pounding. Once Iran cut off the flow in shipping in the strait, though, it gained enormous leverage against the U.S. At his presser, Trump made it clear how desperate he’d become to get the Iranians to agree to reopen the strait; he said that the continued closure risked global economic calamity and he didn’t want to be remembered as Herbert Hoover.

 

His conception of the war was beset by a lack of realism and reckless optimism. He apparently believed that taking out Ayatollah Khamenei would bring a rapid end to the Iranian regime and, by all accounts, didn’t take seriously warnings that Iran would act against the strait. When that happened, he had limited options because he thought, reasonably enough, that there was little appetite in the U.S. for a risky, protracted military campaign to reestablish freedom of navigation in the waterway.

 

More fundamentally, he didn’t go to Congress for authorization of the campaign and did almost nothing to make the public case for it beforehand. Thus, there was no reservoir of political support to fall back on when things didn’t go as he had hoped. His seat-of-pants governance and executive high-handedness bear much responsibility for the unsatisfactory outcome.

 

It may be that the lifting of sanctions and $300 billion reconstruction fund don’t happen because there’s ultimately no nuclear deal. But the Iranian regime is living to fight another day with greater control over the strait and significant financial relief, while the president of the United States is saying how impressive the regime’s leaders are. Trump has dropped all talk of the Iranian people taking back their country, when his assurances that “help is on its way” during last year’s street protests helped create the predicate for Operation Epic Fury.

 

Trump has said in the past that Iran has never won a war, yet never lost a negotiation. As the president and his administration now make the case for a memorandum of understanding that doesn’t meet any U.S. strategic objective, it’s impossible to say he was wrong.

Trump’s Feeble Threats Are Not Credible

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

 

Donald Trump’s aides and allies continue to claim that the versions of the Iran War-ending Memorandum of Understanding presently circulating in Western media outlets do not reflect the text of the actual document. Perhaps the language in the real MOU departs from the drafts that have been made public, but it’s unlikely that those departures are significant or substantive. It stands to reason that the administration could not suppress the most sought-after document on earth.

 

So far, public reporting on the MOU indicates that it is an instrument of American surrender, and we have little reason to question those reports’ conclusions. After all, when the president talks about why he endorsed it, he articulates the logic of capitulation.

 

“The alternative” to the MOU, Trump told reporters at the G7 conference in France, “would be a worldwide depression.” There are, of course, “stupid people” who “want to have a worldwide depression.” And because they’re “stupid,” they don’t understand that “you can only go so far.” If you “drive somebody into the ground, and a lot of bad things happen.”

 

First, the Strait of Hormuz “would never open.” After all, Iran retains its capacity to menace the strait with mines and rockets and drones, and the president lacks the requisite will to do what America has done in the past and reopen the strait through force. “So, the strait would never be open — it wouldn’t be open for a long time.”

 

It’s hard to argue with that logic. If the administration doesn’t have the stomach for a dangerous campaign designed to rob Iran of its last point of leverage over the West — even one that entailed a return to high-tempo combat operations against Iran’s missile and drone launch and production facilities — but Iran does, the United States must retreat.

 

And yet, the president still insists that he retains the capability to deter Iranian aggression and even coerce Iran into compliance through the threat of military force.

 

“No, it’s not final,” the president declared when asked if the MOU was still subject to revision. “It’s a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head.”

 

This is a hollow threat. If the terms of the MOU resemble those that have been publicly reported, Trump will have deprived himself of the ability to return to war even if he wanted to.

 

Forget the parts of the MOU that are supposed to be resolved in 30 days or even 60 days. Multi-stage agreements that require the compliance of Middle Eastern terrorists tend not to progress beyond stage one. And the first stage here gives Iran everything it wants and more.

 

Stage one saves Hezbollah from its fate, constrains the Israelis in Southern Lebanon, and will provide a ready-made way to accuse Israel of being the obstacle to peace in the region if Jerusalem responds proportionately to Hezbollah’s inevitable future attacks. It lifts the naval blockade that throttled the Iranian economy and deprived the IRGC of funds it desperately needs to maintain cohesion. It compels the U.S. Treasury to issue immediate waivers for exports of Iranian crude oil, refined products, and petroleum derivatives. And it puts an end to Operation Economic Fury, lifting restrictions on Iranian “banking, insurance, transportation, and the like.”

 

All that is required of Iran right now is that it “immediately take steps” to “ensure the movement” of merchant vessels through the strait. But not really. After all, everyone must take “into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.”

 

Let’s say the MOU is signed and operative and, 30 days from today, Iran has not managed to restore the “pre-war volume” of traffic through the strait (something Tehran may not even be able to control). What then? Does anyone believe that Donald Trump will admit that he was hoodwinked in this process? The damage to his credibility will have been done, and Iran will already be enjoying financial relief.

 

The MOU abandons all the red lines the president went to war to secure. Some might argue it even attempts to roll back the clock to February 27. “Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear program,” the MOU supposedly reads, “and the United States will not impose new sanctions on Iran or strengthen its forces in the region.” The document is focused almost exclusively on bribing Iran into withdrawing its threat to shipping in the strait.

 

But if that threat does not dematerialize, will the president credibly threaten to go back to the conditions that were, by his estimation, destined to result in a “worldwide depression?”

 

When it comes to Iran, the American stick is no longer a valid instrument of statecraft. Trump has invalidated it. But American carrots are still enticing enough to induce Iranian compliance with the MOU’s terms. After all, what is there to comply with? All they have to do to reap the benefits of Trump’s surrender is nothing at all.