By Tom Nichols
Sunday, May 24, 2026
No one yet knows the details of the Iran deal that
President Trump has been teasing on social media for the past day or so. The
president himself has admonished his followers not to “listen to the losers,
who are critical about something they know nothing about.” But as this war
stumbles to a close, it is clear that the president, too, is lost: He didn’t
know what he was doing when he began it, and now he doesn’t know how to get out
of it.
Only a day ago, Trump was trying to project confidence.
Yesterday, he hailed an agreement with Iran as mostly done; it was, he said on
his Truth Social site, “largely negotiated” and close to “finalization.” The
Iranians, of course, immediately disputed this characterization, and by the
next day, Trump was backpedaling. “If I make a deal with Iran,” he
posted this afternoon, “it will be a good and proper one, not like the one
made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open
path to a Nuclear Weapon.” The agreement that was only a day earlier “largely
negotiated” was now only a notional memorandum, and Trump griped that it was
unfair to criticize it because “nobody has seen it, or knows what it is,” and
it “isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”
By this afternoon, Trump was reduced to posting a
meme of a jet carrying a bomb under its wing with Thank you for your attention to this matter written on it.
Many of those most alarmed about what Trump might end up
accepting to get out of this dead-end conflict in Iran are not his critics, but
his supporters. Trump’s enablers may not have access to the details of an
agreement, but they’re clearly worried: Senators Lindsey Graham, Roger Wicker,
and Ted Cruz were all posting expressions of shock and dismay on social media. Graham
said that any deal that caves to Iran “makes one wonder why the war started to
begin with”; Wicker said
that a possible 60-day cease-fire would be a “disaster.” Cruz gently
suggested that the tsar does not know what his devious boyars are up to,
describing the deal as “being pushed by some voices in the administration.”
Even Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national
security adviser, posted a long screed
warning Trump not to make a deal. “I know you want to get out of this mess,” he
said. He then counseled the president to “give it some thought.” Trump’s former
Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo weighed in as
well, comparing the possible outline of a deal to the kind of thing Barack
Obama’s team might have come up when designing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran,
the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and warning that it could mean that
America would end up paying “the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the
world.” Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, during his first term, and he
regularly speaks of the JCPOA (and Obama) with contempt; Pompeo’s comparison
was sure to infuriate the Trump team.
And sure enough, Trump’s communications director, Steven
Cheung, responded almost immediately to Pompeo—and gave the world a glimpse of
what appears to be some sweaty panic building inside the White House. “Mike
Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about,” Cheung posted on X.
“He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.
He’s not read into anything that’s happening, so how would he know.” (Cheung
also kept posting updates about Trump working in the Oval Office on a Saturday,
as if this were an amazing illustration of the president’s work ethic.)
Trump’s worried sycophants probably know that the details
of an eventual agreement likely do not matter very much at this point. As my
colleague David Frum noted
earlier today, the war has already ended with America’s strategic defeat by the
Islamic Republic of Iran, an outcome for which Trump is directly responsible.
How much Iran will get away with, and how much humiliation the United States
will endure, has yet to be ironed out by the negotiators, but the war is now
almost certain to end with Tehran’s theocrats firmly in power, and with a
stronger chokehold both on their own people and on the international economy
than they had three months ago.
Not only is Trump incoherently staggering to defeat, he
now risks signing on to an agreement that could be far worse than anything
Obama negotiated with Iran a decade ago. I was a critic of the JCPOA back then
because I believed that it contravened some basic diplomatic logic by
front-loading concessions to the Iranians while hoping they would later abide
by its terms. Obama, too, knew the risk he was taking, as he
admitted at the time to The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey
Goldberg. “Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing.
If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he told Goldberg in 2015.
“I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security
interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”
The JCPOA was not perfect, but it was the product of the
efforts of professional diplomats, scientists, and other experts, and once it
was in place, it was really the only game in town. Obama gambled that Iran
would feel pressure to observe the JCPOA once it went into effect, and he was
right. Three years later, few argued that Iran was in violation of the
agreement; Trump trashed it anyway, without any thought or preparation, much as
he has done with other
arms agreements.
Trump could have adhered to the JCPOA, and had Iran tried
to sprint to a bomb—and no evidence exists that Tehran was doing so in 2026—he
could have blamed Obama, made the case to Congress for war, and launched
military action. Faced with the ticking clock of an imminent Iranian nuclear
test, even Trump’s most dedicated opponents at home and abroad would likely
have lent their support. Instead (presumably while still savoring the sugar
high of a quick win in Venezuela) he decided that he would seek glory as the
liberator of Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly
told Trump that the mullahs would fall; CIA Director John Ratcliffe, however, told
him that such a prediction was “farcical.”
Now the president will end up having to sign off on a set
of terms that will likely make the JCPOA look demanding by comparison. Trump
began this war assuming that all other issues—nuclear weapons, terrorism,
Iran’s regional adventurism—would vanish when the regime was toppled. When that
didn’t happen, he had no plan for what to do next, and he seems to have settled
on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the central explanation,
not only for why he went to war, but for why Americans must now suffer
the economic effects of the conflict. The Iranians may well promise to
forswear a nuclear program—as they did to Obama a decade ago—but for now, they
are not only presenting themselves as the aggrieved party, they’re behaving
like the victors: setting demands, making the Americans negotiate the status of
the Strait of Hormuz, and kicking the nuclear question down the road.
Yesterday, the president told Axios
that the chance of reaching an agreement with the Iranians was a “solid 50/50,”
and that he either would accept a “good” deal or “blow them to kingdom come.”
Neither of these things is going to happen. Instead, a piece of paper will, at
some point, come out of a meeting room in Pakistan. It will certify that the
United States must accept a major strategic defeat in the Middle East. And
Donald Trump, who brought America to this point because of his ego and his
incompetence, will sign it.
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