The New Iran ‘Deal’ Would Be a Disaster

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

On what proved to be the eve of the full-scale U.S.-Israeli war against the Iranian regime, it was already clear that Donald Trump’s presidential legacy is inextricably bound with his efforts to reshape the Middle East.

 

“Trump spent a decade bending the arc of history toward this point,” I wrote of the Abraham Accords, the president’s support for Israel’s campaigns against Iran’s terrorist proxies, and his 2025 strikes on the Iranian nuclear program. “He stands on the threshold of a new era. If the past is prologue, he will cross it.”

 

Cross it, he did. But the many tactical successes that the U.S. and Israel enjoyed over the kinetic phase of this war are increasingly overshadowed by the cease-fire’s failures. Now, the administration insists that a deal to end the war is at hand — a claim the Iranian side of this equation undermines at every available opportunity.

 

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, there is “a pretty solid thing on the table in terms of their ability to open up the strait [and] enter into a very real, significant, time-limited negotiation on the nuclear matter.” Late on Monday, Trump himself broadened the aperture of the deal he hopes to negotiate when he fantasized about a permanent regional peace accord that not only defangs Iran but welcomes it — along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan — into a normalization agreement with Israel.

 

The Trump administration’s optimism is unwarranted. The draft memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran would create the conditions for future talks and mutual de-escalation, but this is not a peace deal. Reportedly, the regime would agree to an unspecified method by which it would dispose of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. In exchange, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would withdraw its threat to the Strait of Hormuz and ensure maritime traffic returns to pre-war levels within 30 days.

 

If the deal suffers from one blinding conceptual flaw, it is the notion that the pre-war status quo can be restored. The Iranian Foreign Ministry insists that it will continue to extort fees from shipping interests in the Strait of Hormuz regardless of the terms of any deal. And some energy industry experts anticipate that commercial concerns will capitulate to Iranian demands even as the market adjusts around “a permanently more risky operating environment” in the region.

 

More unnervingly, the Trump administration’s negotiators may be beginning to soften their posture in pursuit of a deal. The chatter in recent days has involved the prospect of entertaining restrictions on Israeli operations against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon — an Iranian ask at which the U.S. has previously balked. The president is backing away from his (probably unnecessary) insistence that Iran must surrender its enriched uranium to U.S. custody. Rather, it can be “destroyed in place” or handed over to a third party, like the International Atomic Energy Agency. And, of course, the cash-strapped Iranian regime insists it will not undertake any de-escalation of hostilities until it gets a healthy bribe: $24 billion in unfrozen assets, for starters.

 

For all the president’s happy talk about the emerging prospects for a durable and advantageous peace, neither side seems close to anything more than a written commitment to keep talking. Many, including many within the administration, may be leaning out over their skis by assuming this deal is a fait accompli. Still more are talking themselves into the notion that the 40-day war achieved nothing.

 

It would be hard to argue in good faith that the Iranian regime enjoys more freedom of action today than its American or Israeli adversaries. On February 27, the Islamic Republic still had an air force, a navy, a layered air defense network, a defense-industrial base capable of fully replenishing its ballistic missile arsenal, an intact leadership cadre, and a complex and expensive indigenous uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons program. Today, the regime has been stripped of those instruments of statecraft, and it is more isolated in its region than at any point since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Tehran’s last real point of leverage over the West — its throttling of traffic through the strait — is as painful for it as it is for the rest of the world.

 

And yet, what the administration seems to be talking itself into risks sacrificing those gains. Indeed, the consequences of capitulating now could reverberate throughout the geopolitical landscape.

 

Contrary to popular belief, the Iranians have not been able to close the strait via overwhelming military pressure. On Monday night, the U.S. executed air strikes on Iranian assets attempting to do just that, as well as on an anti-air battery that shot at U.S. warplanes. But even the modest application of force — or even the threat of force against traffic in the strait — ground it to a halt, and the United States appears to lack the will to reopen that contested waterway with force. Resigning ourselves to the status quo that prevails today will all but guarantee that other revisionist powers, most notably China, would attempt the same gambit.

 

In addition, the perception that the United States can be deterred by commercial pressure will ensure that Trump and his successors face much more commercial pressure. If Iran succeeds in strong-arming shipping interests, we can expect America’s role as the sole guarantor of free global maritime trade to rapidly erode. Foreign government and global enterprises will make their own arrangements. Spheres of influence would naturally arise within this new modus vivendi. And even if the Iranian regime has been fatally wounded, as it may very well have been, U.S. interests will be challenged with more frequency and, perhaps, effect.

 

“The temporary agreement that the Trump administration announced with Iran this weekend isn’t a peace deal,” New York Times reporters David Sanger and Tyler Pager wrote over the weekend. “It isn’t a nuclear deal. It isn’t a missile deal.” Rather, it’s an agreement designed to relieve the political pressure on Republicans who fear voters’ wrath over elevated gasoline prices — a burden the president refuses to acknowledge and which he most certainly won’t ask the American people to bear in a national effort to consign this blood-soaked regime to history’s dustbin

 

Nothing is settled yet. But if this agreement proceeds on the terms reported publicly, Trump’s once promising legacy in the Middle East will be indelibly tarnished.