A Forever Defeat

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

For two decades, we’ve lamented that George W. Bush launched two wars and never quite achieved American victory in either one. I have expressed this frustration to some degree myself.

 

But as I look at the American surrender that Donald Trump is engineering in Iran, I’m not even sure why I ever entertained the thought that we lost in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Today, we are leaving the enemy regime in place with access to a new tool of global blackmail, billions of dollars, and the knowledge—I wish I could say “impression”—that the U.S. doesn’t have what it takes to stop it. 

 

It’s true that Trump didn’t get us into a “forever war”; he just got us into a lost one. This is defeat.  

 

In Iraq, the U.S. didn’t topple Saddam Hussein only to hand over the Baathist tyranny to one of his sons or Tariq Aziz when we couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction. When the Sunni insurgency arose, we didn’t declare a cease-fire and negotiate the terms of our departure (despite many Americans hoping we would do just that). And we didn’t depose the Taliban only to leave Afghanistan once we couldn’t find Osama bin Laden.  

 

Nope. We stayed and, yes, we won. Say what you want, but Iraq is now a parliamentary democracy. And its leaders haven’t made trouble for its neighbors or the United States in decades. And before Joe Biden did give Afghanistan back to the insurgent Taliban, the country was governed, however fitfully and fragilely, by a pro-American technocratic reformer. 

 

I know that the promotion of human rights is now for sissies, but the U.S. also facilitated miraculous progress in alleviating mass suffering for the people of both countries. Scoff at that if you must, but Donald Trump is the one who told the Iranian people that help was on the way. Which means he’s now notched a total defeat for them as well. 

 

You may think that the cost of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan was too high—and you may very well be right. But don’t tell me that our current surrender to the Iranian regime was worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars (with billions more soon to come) and the lives of 15 American service members. If we wanted to tell Iran (and the world) that it finally won its near-50-year battle with the U.S., we could have done that for free. 

 

Of course, the total cost of a consequential defeat is unknowable in the moment. We don’t know what Iran will do with its forthcoming billions or the nuclear “dust” or its dug-up missiles or its demonstrated ability to close the Strait of Hormuz at will. And we don’t know what will follow the actions the regime will take. At the time of Biden’s effective surrender in Afghanistan, we didn’t know that Russia would read it as a signal to invade Ukraine six months later. And we still don’t know the ultimate cost of that war.

 

Because the price of defeat is compounded by an unpredictable series of chain reactions. The costs accrue as history continues to play out. Or, one might say, forever.

Our Ability to Fight Foreign Terrorism Just Got Weaker

By John Yoo

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

 

Beset by partisan scuffles for political advantage as the midterms approach, Congress on Friday night failed to renew one of the powers central to the fight against foreign terrorists. Without the power to intercept foreign electronic communications, Republican and Democratic leaders have allowed a large hole to emerge in Washington’s ability to detect and stop foreign attacks. Congress has demonstrated again that it cannot shoulder the government’s most fundamental duties; its failure now requires President Trump to draw on his constitutional power to fill the gap.

 

Until Friday night, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allowed the National Security Agency and FBI to intercept electronic communications abroad. The intelligence agencies can use this information to build a mosaic of terrorist activities and inform law enforcement to pre-empt attacks before they occur. If our government had the legal ability to collect this information and share it before September 11, 2001, it could have prevented the catastrophic strikes on New York City and Washington, D.C.

 

As a Justice Department official on that day, and in the weeks and months after, I worked to plug that gap. We created the Terrorist Surveillance Program to intercept broad swaths of foreign communications to detect terrorist activities. But it had to operate without congressional authorization or judicial approval because, we believed, holding a public debate would tip off our enemies about our advantages and tactics. We knew that critics could challenge the program on Fourth Amendment grounds, because the interception of the messages occurred without a warrant. But we also concluded that foreigners had no constitutional rights against the U.S. government and that any U.S. communications unintentionally swept up would fall within the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment. “The Fourth Amendment would almost certainly permit an appropriately tailored roadblock set up to thwart an imminent terrorist attack or to catch a dangerous criminal who is likely to flee by way of a particular route,” the Supreme Court observed in 2000.

 

When the existence of the program leaked, Congress eventually enacted Section 702 to place the surveillance program on a firm constitutional basis but included a sunset that required periodic re-authorization. Now that Congress has allowed Section 702 to lapse, President Trump will have to return to the constitutional basis that President Bush invoked at the outset of the war against al-Qaeda on September 11. FISA ultimately cannot limit the president’s powers to protect national security through surveillance because that authority stems from his unique Article II responsibilities. Intercepting enemy communications has long been part of waging war; indeed, it is critical to the successful use of force. The U.S. military cannot attack or defend to good effect unless it knows where to aim.

 

America has a long history of conducting intelligence operations to obtain information on the enemy. General Washington used spies extensively during the Revolutionary War. As president, he established a secret fund for spying that existed until the creation of the CIA. President Lincoln personally hired spies during the Civil War, a practice that the Supreme Court upheld. In both World Wars I and II, presidents ordered the interception of communications leaving the United States. Some of America’s greatest wartime intelligence successes have involved signals intelligence, as it is known. The most important was probably the breaking of Japanese diplomatic and naval codes during World War II, which allowed the U.S. Navy to anticipate the attack on Midway Island. Signals intelligence may be even more important in waging war against terrorists than nation-states. Al-Qaeda has launched a variety of efforts to attack the United States, and it intends to continue them. The primary way to stop those attacks is to find and stop al-Qaeda operatives who have infiltrated the United States. The best way to find them is to intercept their electronic communications about infiltrating the country.

 

The need for executive authority over electronic intelligence-gathering became apparent at the outset of the nation’s war against Islamist terrorist groups. In the hours and days after the September 11 attacks, members of the government thought that al-Qaeda might try to crash other airliners or use a weapon of mass destruction in a major East Coast city. Combat air patrols began flying above New York and Washington. Suppose a plane was hijacked and would not respond to air traffic controllers. In order to protect the nation from attack, it would be reasonable for U.S. anti-terrorism personnel to intercept any radio or cellphone calls to or from the airliner, in order to discover the hijackers’ intentions, what was happening on the plane, and whether it would be necessary for the fighters to shoot down the plane. Or suppose the government had to put up a net to intercept all cellphone calls in a city because it was searching for a terrorist cell that had yet to launch an attack. Under such circumstances, the absence of congressional authorization, or even limits imposed by Congress through FISA, should prevent the president from monitoring any radio or cellphone calls to or from the airliner; after all, the purpose is not to arrest and gather evidence for trial, but to protect the nation from attack. Indeed, because the United States is in a state of war, the military can intercept the communications of the plane to see if it poses a threat and target the enemy if necessary. This authority is not only within the president’s executive powers, but it also comports with the principle of reasonableness that guides the Fourth Amendment.

 

As commander in chief, the president has the constitutional power and the responsibility to wage war in response to a direct attack on the U.S. During the Civil War, President Lincoln undertook several actions — raising an army, withdrawing money from the treasury, launching a blockade — on his own authority in response to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, moves that Congress and the Supreme Court later approved. During World War II, the Supreme Court similarly recognized that once war began, the president’s authority as commander in chief and chief executive gave him the tools necessary to effectively wage war. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Congress agreed that “the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

 

Even legal scholars who argue against this historical practice concede that once the United States has been attacked, the president can respond immediately with force. The ability to collect intelligence is intrinsic to the use of military force. It is inconceivable that the Constitution would give the president the responsibility to protect the nation from attack but then disable him from gathering intelligence to use the military most effectively to defeat the enemy. Every piece of evidence of the Framers’ understanding of the Constitution suggests that the government would have the ability to meet a foreign danger. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 41, “security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society.” Therefore, the “powers requisite for attaining it must be effectually confided to the federal councils.” After World War II, the Supreme Court declared in Johnson v. Eisentrager that “this grant of war power includes all that is necessary and proper for carrying these powers into execution.” Covert operations and electronic surveillance are clearly part of this authority.

 

During the writing of the Constitution, some Framers believed that the president alone should manage intelligence because only he could keep secrets. Several Supreme Court cases have recognized that the president’s role as commander in chief and the sole organ of the nation in its foreign relations must include the power to collect intelligence. These authorities agree that intelligence rests with the president because its structure allows it to act with unity, secrecy, and speed.

 

Presidents have long ordered electronic surveillance without any judicial or congressional participation. More than a year before the Pearl Harbor attacks, but with war clearly looming with the Axis powers, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the FBI to intercept any communications, whether wholly inside the country or international, of persons “suspected of subversive activities against the Government of the United States, including suspected spies.” FDR was concerned that “fifth columns” could wreak havoc with the war effort. “It is too late to do anything about it after sabotage, assassinations and ‘fifth column’ activities are completed,” FDR wrote in his order. FDR ordered the surveillance even though a federal law at the time prohibited electronic surveillance without a warrant. Presidents continued to monitor the communications of national security threats on their own authority, even in peacetime. If presidents in times of peace could order surveillance of spies and terrorists, executive authority is only greater now, as hostilities continue against al-Qaeda. Justice Departments under Republican and Democratic presidents alike have held a similar view of the executive branch’s authority to conduct surveillance outside the FISA framework.

 

Courts have never opposed a president’s authority to engage in warrantless electronic surveillance of foreign individuals to protect national security. When the Supreme Court first considered this question in 1972, it held that the Fourth Amendment required a judicial warrant if a president wanted to conduct surveillance of a purely domestic group, but it refused to address surveillance of foreign threats to national security. In the years since, every federal appeals court, including the FISA Appeals Court, to address the question has “held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.” In its 2002 decision in In Re: Sealed Case, which upheld the constitutionality of the Patriot Act’s main provisions, the FISA Appeals Court believed that the president’s power here was so obvious as not to merit much discussion, taking the president’s power to conduct surveillance during wartime “for granted,” and observing that “FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”

 

Congress also implicitly authorized the president to carry out electronic surveillance to prevent further attacks on the United States. Congress’s September 18, 2001, Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) puts no limitation on time or place — only that the president pursue al-Qaeda. Although the president did not need, as a constitutional matter, Congress’s permission to pursue and attack al-Qaeda after the attacks, its passage shows that the president and Congress fully agreed that military action would be appropriate. Congress’s approval of the killing and capture of al-Qaeda members must obviously include the tools to locate them in the first place.

 

A choice between FISA and his constitutional authority gives the president the discretion to use the best method to protect the United States, whether through the military or by relying on law enforcement. There is a downside to relying on the president’s constitutional authority to wage war. It may mean that the fruits of warrantless surveillance will be used only to stop possible attacks but cannot be introduced into the criminal justice system. President Trump could alleviate any constitutional concerns about the expiration of Section 702 by publicly declaring that no evidence generated after its sunset will be used to prosecute criminal suspects. Although Section 702 cannot limit the president’s constitutional authority, it can provide a more stable system for the domestic collection of foreign intelligence, such as the NSA’s collection of phone call metadata and foreign e-mails, especially when used in prosecutions in federal court.

 

The real problem with operating under a Fourth Amendment framework is that it remains rooted in a law enforcement approach to surveillance. It ties the government’s counterterrorism efforts to individualized suspicion. Searches and wiretaps must target a specific individual already believed to be involved in harmful activity. But detecting terrorists who have no previous criminal record in the United States, and who are undeterred by the possibility of criminal sanctions, requires the use of more sweeping methods.

 

To successfully prevent attacks, the government must devote surveillance resources where there is a reasonable chance that terrorists will appear, or communicate, even if their specific identities remain unknown. What if the government knew that there was a 50 percent chance that terrorists would use a certain communications pipeline, such as e-mails provided by a popular Pakistani ISP, but that most of the communications on that channel would not be linked to terrorism? An approach based on individualized suspicion would prevent computers from searching through that channel for the keywords or names that might suggest terrorist communications, because there are no specific al-Qaeda suspects, and thus no probable cause. Rather than individualized suspicion, searching for terrorists depends on playing the probabilities, just as airport screenings do. The private owner of any website has detailed access to information about the individuals who visit the site that he can exploit for his own commercial purposes, such as selling lists of names to spammers, or gathering market data on individuals or groups. The government’s effort to find violent terrorists is a far more legitimate use of such data.

 

Individualized suspicion dictates the focus of law enforcement, but war demands that our armed forces defend the country with a broader perspective. Armies do not meet a “probable cause” requirement when they attack a position or fire on enemy troops or intercept enemy communications on a frequency. In the criminal justice system, the purpose is to hold a specific person responsible for a discrete crime that has already happened. It does not make sense when the purpose of intelligence is to take action, such as killing or capturing members of the enemy, to prevent future harm to the nation from a foreign threat.

 

This year is an anniversary not just for celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but also for honoring those killed 25 years ago in the 9/11 attacks. This year should remind us not just of the idealism of the Founders, but also of the difficult choices that they (and we) faced in waging war. Properly understood, their other handiwork — the Constitution — should not be understood to subject the government to unreasonable burdens in carrying out its highest duty of protecting the nation from attack.

The Bill of Rights’ Missing Amendment

By Hans A. von Spakovsky & Marc Wheat

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

 

As we celebrate the birth of our nation 250 years ago — a moment at which we declared our independence from a powerful monarchy that was oppressing the American people — a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” (as it says in the Declaration of Independence) justifies our looking back at our Founding documents to understand precisely where we came from and where we are today in preserving our republican form of government. One of those is, of course, the Bill of Rights, a crucial document outlining Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties that was essential to the ratification of the Constitution itself.

 

In retrospect, it’s easy to acknowledge our Constitution and Bill of Rights as the great achievements that they are. We ought to go further, though, and recognize how our foundational documents could have been even better — particularly when one considers the threats to our liberties and prosperity that we face today from a bloated administrative state. Specifically, our Constitution would have been much benefited had one of the amendments that James Madison proposed to the First Congress not been dropped from the final version of twelve amendments that were adopted by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.

 

Most Americans today don’t realize that the House of Representatives actually approved 17 of the amendments that Madison originally proposed in August 1789. But the Senate passed its own versions of the proposed amendments, and both houses of Congress finally settled on twelve, which were sent to the states. Ten of those were ratified by the necessary three-quarters of the states by the end of 1791.

 

One of the two proposed amendments not ratified was an apportionment formula specifying the size of the population each House member would represent, initially set at one representative per 30,000. The other amendment that was not ratified, at least not by the end of 1791, said that any law passed by Congress to raise congressional salaries would not take effect until after an intervening election.  That amendment was not ratified until 1992, after a revival campaign started by a college student.

 

But there was one amendment that Madison originally proposed that was not sent to the states and which, looking at the problems and ailments of our federal government today, we can say without hesitation should have been in what ultimately became the indispensable Bill of Rights. Included in Madison’s proposal to the House on August 24, 1789, was the following, labeled as “Art. 16”:

 

The powers delegated by the constitution to the government of the United States, shall be exercised as therein appropriated, so that the legislative shall never exercise the powers vested in the executive or judicial; nor the executive the powers vested in the legislative or judicial; nor the judicial the powers vested in the legislative or executive.

 

The obvious purpose of this amendment was to prevent each of the three branches of government from intruding into the specific powers and authority given to the other two branches by the Constitution. Separation of powers is an essential principle in the Constitution, designed to ensure that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches check each other’s power.

 

But since the Progressive and New Deal eras, the federal government has abandoned the careful balance of power that the Constitution strikes among the three branches in significant ways — and in ways that the amendment might have prevented.

 

To give one such example, for decades, executive agencies have been exercising power reserved to the judiciary by Article III of the Constitution. For instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) long adjudicated violations of the law or SEC regulations with in-house “administrative law judges” — an invented category of judge that was not part of the judiciary and incompatible with our separation-of-powers framework. It wasn’t until 2024 that the Supreme Court somewhat restored the proper role of the judiciary in SEC v. Jarkesy. In that case, the Court said the Seventh Amendment requires that a defendant be able to request a trial in an Article III court in certain cases, rather than be subjected to an in-house “trial” by an SEC employee.

 

The executive branch itself has not emerged from the constitutional breakdown unscathed. In 1935, the Supreme Court, in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., wrongly bestowed Congress with authority over the executive branch, ruling that it could insulate the heads of certain federal agencies — arms of the executive branch — from presidential removal.

 

But Article II vests the entire executive power of the U.S. government in the president alone. Yet, for 90 years, certain government officials have purported to exercise executive power outside of presidential control. Fortunately, the Supreme Court appears poised to finally overrule this constitutionally erroneous precedent in Trump v. Slaughter and restore a president’s power to run the executive branch, including supervising (and terminating) the heads of executive agenices. If the president wins the lawsuit, the century-long progressive experiment of separating executive power from the president and putting it into the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats will be at an end.

 

Finally, the judicial branch has for too long ceded its duty “to say what the law is” to the same administrative state that exercised Congress’s lawmaking power without the constitutional authority to do so. Under the Chevron doctrine, courts deferred to agency interpretations of supposedly ambiguous statutes and, under another precedent, Auer v. Robbins (1997), even agency interpretations of their own “ambiguous” regulations. Just two years ago, the Supreme Court rightfully restored the power of the judiciary to interpret statutes for themselves in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, although it still hasn’t fixed the agency deferral problem (and there is no pending case that would give the Court that opportunity).

 

Had Madison’s proposed amendment been ratified, these attacks on the Constitution’s separation of powers might have been stopped in their tracks. At the very least, “Art. 16” would have given those attacking these violations of the Constitution in the courts more ammunition. The principle of nondelegation — that one branch cannot pass its powers off to another — is essential to America’s system of ordered liberty. Although the structure of the Constitution is the greatest safeguard of our freedom, it’s clear that this amendment would have immeasurably strengthened that structure.

 

The Supreme Court itself needs to take every opportunity it has in the cases that come before it to restore the strict separation of powers between the three branches that is outlined in our Constitution’s structure. It is also not too late to reconsider placing Madison’s nondelegation amendment in our Constitution to reinforce that imperative.

Memorandum of Misunderstanding

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

The first thing they teach you in law school is that a valid contract requires a “meeting of the minds.”

 

That is, the parties must have a common understanding of what each is obliged to do. That’s why the terms are written down, of course—to ensure that the signatories are on the same page (literally) with respect to their rights and obligations. There is no agreement unless there’s, you know, an agreement.

 

Yesterday the White House announced that the United States and Iran had at last negotiated a memorandum of understanding to end the war between them. Finally, after 38 false alarms, there’s an agreement!

 

It’s just that there’s no, you know, agreement.

 

To begin with, the written document laying out the terms is being treated as a state secret on par with the nuclear codes. Trump-loving Iran hawks like Mark Levin have been reduced to begging the administration to publish the accord so that Americans can see what their government has agreed to.

 

“Maybe there was a handshake deal with a written instrument to follow,” you might say. Could be, in which case we’re forced for the moment to rely on the parties’ accounts of the terms. But that’s a problem in this particular instance of a “meeting of the minds,” as the minds on both sides happen to belong to completely unreliable sociopaths.

 

In this case, when one party claims that the deal requires X and the other insists it requires not-X, there’s no way to feel confident about which is telling the truth. “American credibility has deteriorated to the point where the president can announce a diplomatic agreement and the near-universal reaction is ‘let’s wait for confirmation from Tasnim,’” a reporter from The Economist snarked, referring to an Iranian state media outlet.

 

It was just a week into the war, remember, when Donald Trump stated “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Based on what we know about the bargain he struck this weekend, not only has Iran not surrendered unconditionally, it’s surrendered hardly anything at all. What was the president’s pledge worth? What is American credibility worth in 2026?

 

In the first hours of the war on February 28, the Washington Post asked Trump what his goals were. “All I want is freedom for the people,” he replied. That was consistent with what he said during the mass demonstrations that swept the country in January, when he urged Iranians to keep protesting and vowed that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” Iran’s threat to America can’t be neutralized without replacing the Khomeinist regime and the president seemed to understand that.

 

After the deal to end the war was announced on Sunday, he walked it all back. “As far as regime change, I never cared about regime change,” he glibly told the Wall Street Journal. “This is the third group [of Iranian leaders] we’ve dealt with, and this is the most rational group yet.” That is emphatically not true, but this is what you get when the person dictating U.S. foreign policy is a pathological liar whose highest priority in any situation is to convince observers that he’s come out ahead.

 

His words mean nothing. The Iranians’ words mean nothing. Good luck to all of us in trying to decipher who’s telling the truth as the two sides set about contradicting each other on even the most basic terms of the deal.

 

Uncertainty.

 

The tone was set on Sunday when the president triumphantly announced the deal on Truth Social, declaring, “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz…. Ships of the World, start your engines.” Minor problem: The deal won’t be formally signed until Friday, forcing him to publish a second post clarifying that the Ships of the World will need to wait a few more days.

 

It felt like a bad sign that Trump himself seemed not to know that basic detail. And it was.

 

If there’s any element of the agreement whose terms should be clear and undisputed, it’s the reopening of the strait. That’s supposed to happen up front, by all accounts, with the U.S. relaxing its blockade of Iranian ports simultaneously. The two countries will then spend 60 days negotiating a long-term agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and economic relief, but one might reasonably assume that disposition of the strait has already been settled if shipping is set to resume as soon as next weekend.

 

It hasn’t. Trump told the New York Times on Sunday that commerce will be “permanently toll-free” in the strait hereafter but Iranian media claims it will be toll-free only during the 60-day negotiating period. Thereafter, according to a foreign ministry spokesman, Iran intends to collect “fees” related to “navigation services, environmental protection, potentially ship insurance, and other services” from transiting vessels in coordination with Oman.

 

When J.D. Vance was asked about that discrepancy in an interview this morning, he claimed that the fate of the strait will also be settled during the 60-day period. “Our expectation is that the strait is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term,” he told CNBC, “and that’s the sort of thing that we’re going to figure out in these technical negotiations.”

 

If there’s been no meeting of the minds yet about a matter as elementary as how the Strait of Hormuz will operate, in what way does this contract exist?

 

Another elementary question: Does the deal cover Lebanon?

 

The answer is surprisingly “murky,” per the Times, despite the fact that this subject has more potential than any other to wreck the deal’s implementation. Iran wants the U.S. to agree that fighting should cease on all fronts, which would make further Israeli attacks on Hezbollah off-limits. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told the president that he won’t abide by terms restricting his ability to target the group, and far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir flatly declared that “Trump’s agreement does not bind us.”

 

It’s trivially easy to imagine the deal being signed on Friday, Hezbollah attacking Israel the next day, Israel responding, and Iran immediately closing the strait again in protest. An agreement that grants an Iranian proxy a de facto veto over its implementation is not an agreement in any meaningful sense.

 

More uncertainty: What will happen to Iran’s ballistic missile program, a key prewar White House concern due to its alleged potential to threaten the mainland United States? A former Netanyahu aide who spoke to the Times was surprised by the fact that the publicly known elements of the deal say nothing about it.

 

What will happen if the regime starts massacring Iranian protesters again? Trump seems to think the agreement would halt sanctions relief and the release of further frozen assets in that scenario. What about access for nuclear inspectors? He believes the deal will allow them near-instant passage into the country, unlike the long, torturous negotiations for inspections in years past.

 

But why he believes any of that isn’t clear. “Mr. Trump seemed to be describing Iranian concessions that the country has not yet made, or that have been kicked to the follow-up negotiations,” the Times observed.

 

How about money? The White House has apparently approved the release of $25 billion in frozen Iranian funds as part of the agreement, dwarfing the amount that Iran received under Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. For a sum that vast, one might think the regime would be required to fulfill certain obligations before the cash goes out the door. After all, the only thing worse than enriching the Khomeinists would be enriching them in exchange for nothing.

 

But it’s not clear that there’s been any meeting of the minds about that either, as an Iranian diplomatic official says the country won’t participate in the 60-day negotiating phase until it gets its frozen assets. According to Reuters, it’s already gotten some: The United Arab Emirates has forked over $3 billion and might be prepared to release $20 billion in all.

 

Does Iran have any duties under this contract that it’s obliged to perform before getting paid, or is this a “cash up front” deal in which we simply trust Islamist fanatics to hold up their end of the bargain? Does the president even know?

 

The only certainty, it seems, is that both parties will tentatively begin to relax their chokeholds on the strait this weekend. From there things will proceed just as they’ve proceeded for the past two months, with the two sides struggling to reach compromises that are tolerable to the hardliners in each of their respective bases.

 

Rather than a “peace agreement,” think of what’s happening this week as the U.S. and its allies paying Iran a bribe of some unknown but significant magnitude in return for immediate—and necessary—relief for oil markets. Everything else is up in the air, functionally unchanged.

 

If there’s little certainty about the minutiae of the deal, though, there’s much more certainty about the fallout from it.

 

Certainty.

 

In the first place, many Iran hawks are certain to cook up a scapegoat for this failure to avoid pitting themselves against Trump.

 

Sen. Lindsey Graham showed the way on Sunday after the deal was announced. “Under our law, any nuclear deal with Iran will be sent to Congress for review and a vote,” he wrote. “I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress.”

 

Vice President Vance? Vice President Vance isn’t in charge of this process. The guy who fancies himself history’s greatest dealmaker is. Blaming Vance is pitiful “good czar, bad boyars” logic of the sort that right-wing cowards like Graham have been using for 10 years to shift blame for the president’s stupidity onto less threatening political actors around him. It’s a raw deal for J.D., but oh well. No one forced him to join this garbage party.

 

I’m also certain that Congress won’t take up the nuclear deal, Graham’s tough talk notwithstanding. The Senate surely lacks the two-thirds majority needed to ratify this agreement and Graham lacks the courage to force a vote on it, knowing how its defeat would humiliate Trump. Some connivance will occur to spare Republicans from having to approve it, as happened in 2015 when Barack Obama’s nuclear pact was deemed non-binding and therefore not technically a treaty requiring Senate approval.

 

I’m frankly surprised that Trump agreed to put the agreement in writing at all. Maybe he had no choice, but doing so cuts against his lust for unaccountability. Instinctively he’d much prefer to have an understanding with Iran whose terms only he and his advisers know, so that he alone gets to decide when and whether to enforce it as political circumstances require. You can’t be accused of having made a bad deal if no one but you and the other party knows what’s in it, right?

 

Another certainty is that Iran will have all the leverage in these negotiations going forward.

 

I’m tempted to predict that the 60-day negotiating period will bring another 38 false alarms about a final deal being near, but the opposite is more likely to be true. The president is done talking about this war, I suspect, because the president is done with this conflict, period. Gas prices and inflation are up and his job approval is down, which explains why simply returning to the prewar status quo in the strait was America’s key goal in stage one. Trump would just as soon forget that the whole thing happened and everyone, especially the Iranians, knows it.

 

And because they know it, they’re now emboldened to drive the hardest of bargains in reaching a final agreement. They recognize that the president will bend over backward to avoid resuming the conflict, especially as the midterms draw closer. That means Trump being more generous with concessions to reach a final agreement—especially once Americans stop paying attention—and ignoring violations along the way by Iran and its proxies to whatever extent he feasibly can.

 

The president’s vanity will also align him psychologically with the Iranians, his new partners in peace. Having staked so much of his credibility on the deal they struck, he’ll feel compelled to preserve and defend it to critics even when Iran or Hezbollah does something to make him look like a chump. He’ll end up behaving like an Iranian ally, making excuses for their transgressions and eventually dangling more normal diplomatic relations if they’re willing to build on their agreement by cooperating further with the U.S.

 

Which leads to one more certainty: For Israel’s relationship with the president and with America, it’s all downhill from here.

 

Sunday morning brought a sneak preview of how Trump will behave toward the Jewish state once he’s bound to Iran by a deal. For the second time in a week, he flipped his wig when Israel retaliated against a Hezbollah attack by striking Beirut; in this case, however, with the announcement of a peace agreement hours away, he seemed to take the Israelis’ reprisal personally. Didn’t they realize they were spoiling his big moment?

 

“It is so bad—I couldn’t believe it. An hour before we are supposed to sign the deal,” he complained to Axios. “Why did Bibi have to do a f—ing attack? I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no f—ing judgment. I let him know that.” An Iranian state news outlet reported that the White House was so frantic to avert an Iranian military response to Israel that it agreed to add last-minute concessions to the deal, “including speeding up the end of the naval blockade.”

 

I believe it. Israel is finding out, and will yet find out, how miserable it is to be at odds with Donald Trump when he has leverage over you. The Iranians, over whom he has little, will get carrots from him to ensure their compliance in months to come. Israel, a client state, will get sticks—private threats, angry presidential rants, and warnings that it should learn to live with “very small and meaningless” attacks by its enemies if it wants continued American support.

 

Inevitably Hezbollah, with Iran’s backing, will attack the Jewish state again and Netanyahu will face the terrible choice of ignoring it to please the president or hitting back and risking a full rupture with the White House. All U.S. allies eventually learn that Trump’s patronage requires them to place his political interests above their national interests. Israel will learn the hard way.

 

So when we ask whether there really is a “memorandum of understanding” between the U.S. and Iran, the answer ultimately has to be: An understanding as to what? On the particulars of how postwar Iran will be allowed to project power, there’s no understanding at all. But on America’s need to invest in gaining and keeping Iran’s cooperation for at least the rest of Trump’s presidency, we have a meeting of the minds at last.

Trump’s Iran Deal: Billions Up Front for Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is still not publicizing its memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the jihadist Iranian regime.

 

It is laughable, of course, to speak of an agreement (or “understanding”) with Iran, which has a long, undeniable history of breaking agreements, in particular about its nuclear weapons ambitions. And while President Trump either doesn’t grasp or can’t be bothered to address the regime’s ideology, a core principle of sharia supremacism, including Iran’s Shiite version, is that lying to the enemy is a key part of warfare (“War is deception,” said Islam’s prophet in an oft-quoted hadith). This, for example, is why — even as the overwhelming evidence shows it was advancing its nuclear weapons program — the regime insisted that its leader, the now-departed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had issued a fatwa (a sharia law edict) against nuclear weapons. This would have been hilarious had not the Obama administration adopted it as part of its rationalization for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

 

It is the long-standing position of American administrations of both parties to pretend that the Iranians negotiate in good faith and are serious about such arrant nonsense. The Trump administration is no different. In fact, Vice President JD Vance is crowing that the incumbent administration negotiates directly with the regime — we are evidently to celebrate that they now lie to our faces rather than through intermediaries . . . progress!

 

Since the administration is trying to dizzy us with spin about the MOU rather than just showing us the MOU, it’s important to understand: There is not an agreement. The MOU is an agreement to talk about an eventual agreement (and talk, and talk, and talk, as the Iranians have mastered doing) rather than to make binding commitments on matters of vital American interest.

 

The only thing that seems clear is that the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism is going to get lots of money — we might even analogize it to “pallets of cash” — for nothing more than opening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had not closed until Trump decided to launch a war he had no intention of fighting to victory and to wave off advisers who warned him that Iran could close the strait. The figure under discussion is $24 billion up front — that’s before we get to astronomical sums down the line.

 

On this score, the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports the Trump White House’s emphasis that Iran is merely getting “its own money back,” not American taxpayer funds. How stupid do they think we are?

 

Iran’s funds are frozen based on sanctions imposed, in part, due to its terrorism support, in addition to its nuclear weapons work, its ballistic missile work, human rights abuses, and targeting U.S. military and civilian vessels on the high seas. If the U.S. could keep funds from Iran but is now instead allowing the funds to be paid to Iran, that is material support to a state sponsor of terrorism — which the Iranian regime has been since 1984 under a formal State Department designation. It doesn’t matter that the funds are supposedly Iran’s rather than a payout from the U.S. treasury. Our government is giving access to billions of dollars in funds to an entity our government concedes uses its funds to underwrite the arsenals and deadly activities of its terrorist proxies.

 

Here’s the State Department’s most recent report on Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism. In case anyone wanted to know where the money goes.

Why Not Show Us the Deal?

By Mike Nelson

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

 

After a week of pure confusion, mixed messages, and wild fluctuation between military strikes by both sides and promises of imminent peace, President Donald Trump abruptly announced Thursday that Iran and the United States were inches away from a memorandum of understanding that would, at a minimum, codify a cessation in hostilities, open maritime traffic through the contested Strait of Hormuz, and set conditions for later negotiations about the Iranian nuclear program. He went on to specify the agreement would be formalized in a signing ceremony to be attended by Vice President J.D. Vance on Sunday, June 14, coincidentally Trump’s 80^th birthday, a conflict that apparently would have prevented the president from attending the signing himself.

 

Rather than clarify matters, this statement led to further confusion, in part because of a long history of administration dishonesty and hyperbole about the Iran war and in part because of the tumult in subsequent days. What was announced as a formal ceremony in Europe shifted to plans to e-sign the document, and then—as late as Sunday afternoon—it seemed there was no agreement at all. Grossly misaligned characterizations of the terms of the agreement, followed by resumed Israeli strikes against Hezbollah, threatened to collapse whatever discussions were taking place.

 

Finally, on Sunday evening, just prior to Trump’s UFC-themed birthday party, the White House made it official, announcing there was an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif specified the agreement would be formalized at a ceremony on Friday—an announcement further confirmed by Iranian sources.

 

Trump—with all the exuberance of Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy and apparently the same level of impact—posted, “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” Then, in a clear indication of the gap between the president’s desire for omnipotence and the realities of events, followed up that the strait would actually open “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.” Adding to this confusion, Vice President J.D. Vance told Good Morning America on Monday morning that the memorandum was actually e-signed the night before. The administration should get on the same sheet of music as to whether the deal has been signed or hasn’t, and whether key portions of it are in effect yet or are not—but why should we expect that a team that hasn't been consistent throughout the war could be so now?

 

Regardless of whether the effective date of the ceasefire is 24 hours past or a week in the future, the elephant in the room remains: What has been agreed to? Despite assurances of an incredible deal from members of the administration and their surrogates, the White House seems reluctant to release the actual text of the memorandum.

 

If the deal has in fact been finalized, and potentially even signed as Vance suggests, the administration's unwillingness to share the details suggests the terms are, as many have feared, tantamount to a surrender. Why not transparently share something of which you are proud?

 

Instead of letting the agreement stand on its own, the administration has gone on a full-court press to characterize it as a success and is arguably failing in that characterization. In his Good Morning America interview, Vance said, “What this agreement does is really twofold—on the one hand, it ensures that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, while simultaneously opening the Strait of Hormuz.” Regardless of what else comes out of the deal, which will almost assuredly be the portions that benefit Iran and of which the White House is too embarrassed to release now, these two “achievements” seem to be what we have to show for the war—and neither is an achievement in any quantifiable way.

 

The vice president is not the only administration official to try to spin the first element as some kind of major win. On Face the Nation Sunday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “The document says Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won't seek one, won't buy one, won't have one.” But this is nothing new. This Iranian assurance seems to be, verbatim, the same promise enshrined in the JCPOA, which stated, “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”

 

These words were hollow and meaningless when Iran provided them in 2015, and we have no reason to suspect they are offered now with any greater level of sincerity. In fact, the administration has spent the past year rightly characterizing the Iranian regime as duplicitous, yet it now wants the American people to find a newfound faith in its forthrightness and trustworthiness. When the Obama administration took the mullahs’ assurances at face value, it did so based on the naïveté that Iran could and should be a responsible actor in the Middle East. Now the Trump administration seems to take the Iranians at their word not out of earnest belief but out of a cynical willingness to accept the deceit in order to pass it on to a domestic audience growing frustrated with their ineptitude.

 

As to the second point, reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will relieve the economic and political pressure facing the president by freeing the flow of 20 percent of the world’s energy supplies and potentially calming market concerns over further volatility. But it’s worth noting that this condition existed on February 27, prior to the president's initiation of combat operations.

 

In other words, the portions of the agreement the administration points to with pride are not gains at all, just a return to status quo ante bellum and a meaningless pinky promise.

 

While these are—in the White House’s eyes apparently—the brag-worthy portions of the MOU, there is greater concern for what is not being said. Iranian media have reported various types of economic benefits, from the lifting of oil sanctions to the unfreezing of Iranian assets to direct payments for wartime damages to the potential for tolls on international shipping after the 60-day period, all of which should be taken with a grain of salt. But while the administration tries to describe any of these as “performance-based” measures that require Iranian compliance first, the lack of specificity suggests, as is reported and seemingly confirmed by Vance, that the total benefit will dwarf the $1.7 billion Iran received under the JCPOA, about which Trump has railed against Obama for years. One can understand why the White House is delaying news of concessions to Iran that outstrip by orders of magnitude those the president has mocked as weak.

 

Part of the legitimate and correct criticism of the JCPOA was that it front-loaded incentives and rewards for Iran while delaying the implementation of measures to address American and international security concerns. The new agreement sets forth a 60-day timeline to negotiate the disposition of the Iranian nuclear program. President Trump told the New York Times that if an agreement is not reached at the end of that period, he would resume military action. Like many things Trump says, I do not believe he has any intent of following through, and it is likely the Iranians do not view this as a credible threat either. They have watched time and time again as Trump threatened a resumption of military strikes when they failed to meet diplomatic benchmarks, only for him to “TACO” predictably. Moreover, the Iranians have calendars and a keen awareness of American politics. Sixty days after June 19 is August 18, or, said another way, only 77 days before the midterms. The chances of Trump resuming an unpopular war and causing economic disruption right before what is already likely to be a catastrophic “thumping” for his party in Congress are not zero, but they are awfully close. We will be going into these nuclear discussions having surrendered all our leverage: Even the threat of snapback sanctions could trigger Iran’s resumed disruption in the strait.

 

So now we wait to see what is in the actual memorandum, fully confident that if the portions the administration feels are worthy of hyping seem pretty dismal even through the spin, what will be revealed in the coming days will be inherently worse. There’s also the potential that whatever is agreed in this memorandum will be all that we get, with no future agreement on the enriched uranium or limitations on Iranian nuclear research beyond the single line hollow promise. Not only does there seem to be no agreement about severing Iran from its proxy militias, as the White House had repeatedly claimed was a goal of the war, but the deal provides an umbrella of protection over Hezbollah that, combined with America’s scolding of Israel for strikes against the Iranian proxy, suggests the opposite. And, of course, for the Iranian people, there will be none of the promised help on the way.

 

I await the actual language of the memorandum to assess just how bad it is—with a potential range between merely objectionable to truly disastrous. But I feel confident this isn’t a matter of assessing whether the glass is glass half-full or half-empty. The glass is likely 90 percent empty. The way this war ends was baked into the confusion in which it started. Trump was never clear about his exact reasons for going to war or what conditions he was trying to achieve. Without any fixed variables, he was failing, and the desire to end the crisis of his own creation, under any circumstances, became the only goal.

The Psychological Projection of Israel’s Enemies

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

One emerging, seemingly iron rule about understanding the motivations of Israel’s enemies: If you know the when, you’ll figure out the why.

 

Here are four recent noteworthy items:

 

On May 11, the New York Times published Nick Kristof’s wild accusations that Israel is training dogs to rape Palestinian inmates, along with uncorroborated allegations of state-sanctioned abuse.

 

On May 12, a major commission on Hamas crimes released the results of a meticulous two-year investigation using photos, videos, and corroborated eyewitness testimony. The result was a massive catalogue of proof that Hamas used rape and sexual torture as a key tenet of its military strategy on October 7 and after. Suddenly the timing of the shockingly unethical Times piece, in preempting the results of an actual investigation into Hamas, became clear.

 

On May 28, the United Nations leaked word that its forthcoming annual sexual-violence blacklist would now include Israel. Though this was obviously unmerited, the UN had finally added Hamas to the blacklist a year earlier, and it was clear that the world body’s policy of false equivalence had to be applied even to this subject. But why release this nonsense now?

 

On June 8, it was announced that International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who had been pursuing cases against Israeli figures outside the court’s jurisdiction and at the behest of Hamas-aligned states, was being suspended. An investigation into Khan’s alleged sexual misconduct had found cause to remove him. Yet again, Israel’s accusers appear to be in preemption mode.

 

From Reuters:

 

A diplomatic source briefed on the decision told Reuters the court’s governing body’s executive bureau has ruled that Khan, 56, had committed serious misconduct. This followed an 18-month-long probe into accusations that the prosecutor had non-consensual sexual interactions with a female aide in his office. The source added that the bureau has recommended that the prosecutor be removed from office.

 

The ICC’s governing body will send its conclusion to all 125 ICC member states, which will vote on Khan’s fate in a special session. His removal will require a majority in a secret ballot, with sixty-three countries needing to support a measure to remove him.

 

So his job can still be saved, but the investigation is over. The ICC appears to have found that Khan, who is married, had “non-consensual sexual interactions” with his aide. That verdict has been delivered to the member states of the court. It is up to those states to decide whether the type of sexual coercion described in the investigation warrants losing his job or whether the hundred-plus countries in the ICC still want Khan to represent them.

 

Unless there is reason to fault the investigation, the sexual misconduct findings are likely to be enough to taint the “work” Khan was doing at the time, even if ICC member countries don’t think it warrants Khan’s removal. It’s important to remember that Khan’s alleged misbehavior was directly related to his frivolous prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

 

Since Israel isn’t part of the ICC, Khan had no jurisdiction to go after the Jewish state’s leaders in the first place. Compounding that lawlessness was the weakness of the case. When Khan issued requests for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, he had done so after canceling key investigatory trips to Israel.

 

What was the rush? It turned out, as the Wall Street Journal revealed last year, that Khan had been accused by a subordinate of sexual misconduct. According to court records, Khan was using his prosecution of Israelis to pressure his accuser to stay quiet. The Journal also reported that Qatar, Hamas’s financial and political patron, had encouraged Khan to push through the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant and suggested Doha would have his back if any trouble arose.

 

The whole thing appears to have been hopelessly corrupt from the get-go. Worse, court testimony paints the picture of a rogue and abusive prosecutor using his illegitimate prosecution of Israelis to shield himself from allegations of sexual assault.

 

Serious criminal accusations against Israel are not random. They are indications that Israel’s enemies have been found to have engaged in monstrous behavior that will soon be made public. It didn’t seem possible for Hamas’s defenders and enablers to be even further discredited, but here we are. Pay attention to the when, and you’ll figure out the why.