By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
For the second straight day, the biggest news in the
world is a peace agreement that no American outside the West Wing has seen.
How’s the average joe supposed to tell whether that deal is a good one or a bad
one for the United States?
Well, let’s consider a few clues.
Clue one: The fact that an administration that’s normally
terrible at keeping secrets has managed to suppress the
text suggests it’s very, very motivated to hide the details. Even John
Thune, the Senate majority leader and a member of the president’s party, had
yet to be briefed on the deal as of this afternoon.
Imagine your child came home from school with their
report card, assured you they’d gotten straight A’s, but refused to let you see
it. What would you assume? Is that report card a good one or not?
Clue two: Leaks are springing about hawkish Cabinet
members being skeptical of the terms. Sources told Axios that intelligence officials have evidence that
“the way Iranian officials were discussing the deal among themselves was
inconsistent with what they were telling the mediators and the U.S.” Because of
that, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have
allegedly made clear during deliberations that they “doubted the Iranians would
agree to take the nuclear steps the U.S. was seeking.”
When top-level advisers and their allies are working the
press to disassociate themselves from a new White House policy on day one,
that’s usually a sign that the policy isn’t great.
Clue three: The president’s desperation to make and
preserve a deal already has him sounding like a mouthpiece for Iran’s regime,
as I predicted.
“We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people,” Donald Trump
said
of the Iranians this morning at the G7 summit in France. “They were nice to
deal with. They were strong people, smart people. … They’re not radicalized,
and they’re looking to help their country.”
When asked about Lebanon, he complained
that “Israel has been fighting Hezbollah too long and too many people are being
killed. And you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re
looking for somebody. Because there are a lot of people in those apartment
houses and they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”
He even downplayed
the urgency of getting Iran to give up its enriched uranium. Does that sound
like a man who’s operating from a negotiating position of strength or weakness?
Clue four: J.D. Vance was all over cable news yesterday
trying to sell the deal to viewers and ended up making three points. First,
even basic U.S. security priorities like halting
Iran’s enrichment of uranium and allowing
snap inspections of its nuclear facilities are still TBD. Second, there is
in fact a scenario in which Iran would receive
up to $300 billion in reconstruction aid, depending on how it
behaves. And third, supposedly senior Iranian leaders have had a belated
awakening about building better relations with the United States, which the
vice president finds “cool.”
You can always tell when the Trump administration
believes it’s come out ahead against some adversary because it will exult
boorishly in
its own dominance afterward. Do any of Vance’s talking points scream
“dominance” to you?
All of these clues suggest that the negotiations to come
won’t end well for the United States, but I think it’s more likely that they
won’t end—period.
Ratification.
James Lankford has always seemed like one of the more
sober members of the Senate GOP conference, so I was surprised to see that he
said this of the agreement with Iran: “If you want a deal to
last, it can’t be an executive agreement. We’ve got to have a vote of Congress
to be able to solidify [it] long term.”
I can’t make heads or tails of that.
For starters, it’s a little late for lawmakers to
be getting chesty about their role here. The president went to war illegally,
without congressional authorization; he was abetted in that illegality by
Republican legislators who opposed Democratic efforts to assert the
legislature’s war powers; and he may yet resume the war unilaterally if
negotiations with Iran break down.
Where does Lankford get off now, insisting that his
branch gets a say?
I don’t understand, either, why he or other hawks in the
Senate would want to “solidify” the deal. If it’s as bad as the circumstantial
evidence indicates, Republicans shouldn’t want to solidify it. If they
luck out and somehow end up with President Marco Rubio in 2029, they won’t want
him bound by an agreement that forces the new administration to maintain a weak
posture toward Iran.
And if they end up with a Democratic president in 2029,
whether the deal has been “solidified” or not won’t matter. Trump’s successor
will likely abide by the terms anyway to advance the yearslong left-wing
project of detente with the Khomeinists.
Still, the strangest part of the quote is Lankford’s
apparent desire to vote on the matter. Other lawmakers have also said as much, which I find mystifying. What do
Republicans stand to gain by bringing the deal to the Senate floor and going on
the record about whether they support it?
They can’t win—literally. There’s no universe in which
the agreement will receive the two-thirds majority needed for ratification, in
which case a Senate defeat can only complicate Trump’s attempt to wind down a
war hardly anyone still wants. Would he declare that he’ll continue to abide by
the deal despite Congress’ vote of no confidence? Would the Iranians declare
that the deal is no longer binding and resolve to close the Strait of Hormuz
again?
A floor vote would achieve nothing except forcing
vulnerable incumbents like Susan Collins into an impossible choice between
infuriating Trump and his fans by opposing ratification or embracing a
settlement that everyone except MAGA zombies appears destined to dislike. I
wonder, in fact, if that’s why Thune hasn’t been briefed on the terms: Maybe
his ignorance is less a function of White House secrecy than of Senate
Republicans simply not wanting to know what’s in the deal.
Think of it as the diplomatic equivalent of an especially
obnoxious Trump tweet. Whenever the president barfs up something indefensible,
Republican lawmakers cornered by reporters reliably (and unpersuasively) insist
that they haven’t seen it. If they haven’t seen it, they can’t fairly be
expected to do anything about it, right?
Well, the same goes for major diplomatic agreements with
longstanding U.S. enemies, perhaps.
I have no theory to explain why Lankford and other hawks
like Lindsey Graham are claiming to want to vote on the deal apart from
atavistic Reaganism. As much as Republican lawmakers have reconciled themselves
to Trumpism on domestic policy over the past 10 years, the president’s
postliberal infatuations with regimes like Russia and China plainly grate on
most of them even now. Their sense of America as a heroic liberating force
against totalitarians was etched in their souls by World War II and the Cold
War; they’re never going to abandon it entirely to please a dimwitted Caesar
who thinks the U.S. could learn a thing or two about governing from Vladimir
Putin.
Yet the fact remains: Voting on the deal in the Senate
will only cause trouble for every Republican involved, from Trump to Collins to
everyone in between. Soon enough, the president and his allies in Congress will
start looking for excuses to avoid doing so. And they’ll find one.
The excuse will be that negotiations are ongoing. And
going. And going.
Endgame without end.
Trump has two goals with respect to the Iran war at this
point. Forget denuclearization, ballistic missiles, regime change, and the rest
of it. His priority—and this is always his priority, really—is image
management.
Specifically, he wants to salvage what’s left of his
disintegrating image as a president who’s been good for the economy by
reopening the Strait of Hormuz and keeping it open. And he wants to protect his
lifelong image as a pillar of “strength” and dominance in all things by
avoiding a deal that will be savaged as weak by critics across the spectrum.
Well, there’s a way to do all of that: Bribe Iran as
needed to play nice in the strait and simply extend the 60-day phase of talks
on the country’s nuclear program indefinitely. Trump can’t “lose” a negotiation
that never actually ends. And Senate Republicans can’t be expected to vote on a
deal while negotiations continue.
The bribery part has already begun. “The U.S. will allow
Iran to immediately begin selling oil and fuel under the deal to end the war,
offering Tehran an early financial incentive to wind down the conflict,” the Wall Street Journal reported today. That comes after
the United Arab Emirates released $3 billion in frozen funds to the regime with
more on the way, according to a Reuters story published this weekend. And if you believe this Israeli outlet, Qatar has been quietly paying Iran
billions of dollars with U.S. approval for the better part of a month to allow
its tankers safe passage through the strait.
Although details remain scant, it’s clear enough from
Vance’s public comments and sources who are whispering to the press that the
deal is little more than a series of bribes to ensure Iranian cooperation. The
regime gets something up front to reopen the strait, then it presumably gets
more if the strait stays open, and eventually it’ll receive a $300 billion
bonanza (to be funded by who isn’t clear) if it meets all American demands to
the White House’s satisfaction. U.S. officials flatly described the arrangement
to Axios as “pay for performance,” which sure sounds like diplo-speak
for “bribe.”
Trump deputies who briefed reporters on the outlines of
the deal yesterday were also frank about the incentives, per Politico:
“The more that the Iranians are
willing to work with us on their nuclear program, on verifying that they’re not
building a nuclear weapon, on not funding radicalism and terrorism in the
region, the more that they’re going to be welcomed into the world economy
through a combination of sanctions relief and other economic measures,” said a
second senior U.S. official, who, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss
the talks.
…
“We are prepared to release
frozen funds, and we are prepared to give these sanctions, and we’ll do some
small gestures of that in the beginning if they make some small gestures to us
that show that they’re willing to meet their commitments,” the first official
said.
The Iranians are vowing that they’ll eventually begin charging “fees” for transit through the strait, knowing
that doing so will humiliate the president by demonstrating America’s
powerlessness to stop them. Desperate not to look weak, I assume Trump will
solve that problem by offering to release more frozen funds or authorize
further sanctions relief if they agree to delay their extortion.
In effect, America itself will be paying the “fees” in
order to keep the president from looking bad. It’s ironic that a man who spent
the first 16 months of his second term running
protection rackets domestically will soon find himself victimized by one
abroad.
That’s how it will go for the rest of the year, I
suspect, with the Iranians occasionally gesturing toward doing something that
would embarrass Trump and the White House scraping together more cash to
purchase their quiescence. The strait will remain open, gas prices will
continue to deflate, and the Khomeinist terror regime will refill its coffers
with America’s approval.
As for the other part of the deal, the 60-day period
during which the parties are meant to reach agreement on, er, everything, it’s
not a 60-day period in any real sense. According to Iran’s foreign minister,
the timetable can be extended “if there is progress,” and whether there’s been progress
will doubtless be up to the parties themselves to decide.
A White House that won’t release a one-and-a-half-page
agreement that ended the war will not feel obliged to share evidence that
the two sides are getting closer in negotiations, I’m guessing, which means
that the second “60-day” phase of talks will last as long as Donald Trump and
Iranian leaders want it to. If the president wants to slow down for political
reasons—waiting for Americans to lose interest, sparing Senate Republicans from
an awkward pre-midterm vote, denying Democrats an opportunity to accuse him of
having surrendered by signing a bad deal—a regime that’s getting occasional
bribes for its cooperation will accommodate him.
Remember how Trump spent years insisting that he wanted
to release his tax returns but couldn’t do so yet because they were still being audited by the IRS? It’ll be like
that, except with U.S. national security. He’ll contrive a process excuse to
spare himself a public embarrassment indefinitely.
Image is everything.
I do wonder if it’ll work for him this time, though.
The president has been disappointing the rubes who adore
him with unkept promises for 15 years. In 2011 he assured them that he’d sent
people to Hawaii to find out the truth about Barack Obama’s birth certificate,
alleging that his investigators “cannot believe what they’re finding.” They found nothing,
of course, presuming they existed at all. In 2024 he told an interviewer that
he’d “probably” release Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged client list if
reelected, then turned around and fought tooth and nail to get Republican lawmakers to drop the matter before Congress
ultimately forced his hand.
At some point even the most gullible schmuck wises up to
the fact that he’s being conned. If Trump spends the next six months reprising
the shtick he perfected during the ceasefire, bombarding Americans with empty promises about an imminent
final deal with Iran that never arrives, his image on the right as a pillar of
“strength” might finally begin to crack.
It’s cracking among Israeli right-wingers, one of the few cohorts outside
the United States that admired the president until recently. And those Israelis
weren’t already primed by economic grievances to turn against him the way many members of Trump’s white working-class base in the United
States are.
So much of Trump’s mystique among his fans derives from
his unapologetic thirst for dominance and silly reputation as a master
negotiator. If the year ends with him stuck in aimless zombie peace talks with
Iran, unable to get the regime to make concessions and unwilling to use
military force to try to squeeze them into doing so, what’s left of that
mystique? What does American politics look like when even many on the right,
hawks especially, no longer regard Donald Trump as “strong”?
I can only assume that it leads to Republican hawks and
doves at each other’s throats in 2028, the former accusing the latter of having
sabotaged a winnable war and the latter accusing the former of having started a
war that couldn’t be won. But either way, the never-ending Iran deal will end
politically with a broad right-wing consensus that the Trump administration
failed miserably to achieve its goals. Congratulations to the president on a
new chapter in his legacy.
