The Humiliations Yet to Come from Trump’s Iran Deal

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

Donald Trump indicated at the G-7 summit in France on Wednesday that the deluge of criticisms his MOU has received may be getting to him. “No, it’s not final,” Trump insisted when asked if the document was still revisable. “And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head.”

 

That is not a credible threat. In pursuit of his deal, Trump abandoned each of the red lines that brought him to war with Iran in the first place. His willingness to look beyond the many Iranian violations of the cease-fire he negotiated in April suggests that nothing will dissuade him from coming to terms with Iran, even if those terms are awful.

 

Critics of the deal got some good news this week from the Congress-watchers at Punchbowl. Maybe, just maybe, the preventative measures Republicans took in the wake of Barack Obama’s Iran deal to prevent a similar usurpation of congressional authority will stop Trump from giving away the store, too.

 

In 2024, Congress passed legislation that included a provision compelling the State Department to provide the legislature with reports every 180 days indicating whether Iran had launched drone attacks on U.S. service personnel or assets in that period. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is involved in those attacks — and if Iranians are attacking Americans, the IRGC is involved — then the president is forbidden by law from de-listing the organization as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

 

“Lifting the IRGC’s FTO designation would almost certainly be required to implement the broad sanctions relief the admin has outlined under the MOU,” Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reported. If he were so inclined, the statute gives the president authority to waive the entire provision in the interests of national security. Even if he did that, though, the IRGC would still retain its terrorist designation. “But loosening IRGC sanctions by arguing they should be removed from the FTO list would be [a] tough sell” for congressional Republicans, Desiderio concluded.

 

That backstop will make it difficult for the president to secure the sanctions relief for Iran envisioned in the MOU, and it would probably scuttle the $300 billion Gulf-region-backed reconstruction fund reported in Article 6 of the document. After all, Trump isn’t going to go so far as to strip the IRGC of its designation as a terrorist organization, right?

 

In fact, that’s exactly what he might have to do.

 

The provision at issue was slipped into a 2024 supplemental designed to secure additional support for Ukraine’s defense. The legislative legwork on the provision began back in 2022, as Biden’s negotiators were doing their best to exhume Obama’s JCPOA from the grave to which Donald Trump had consigned it.

 

It was in February of that year that the administration provided Congress with “sensitive but classified” material revealing that the State Department was spending millions to protect former Trump administration officials Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook from credible threats against them issued by the IRGC.

 

Those threats “have been discusses [sic] in the nuclear talks in Vienna, where Iran is demanding the removal of all Trump-era sanctions,” the AP’s Matt Lee reported. “Those sanctions include a “foreign terrorist organization” designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that Pompeo and Hook were instrumental in approving.”

 

The previous Sunday, March 6, 2022, CBS News host Margaret Brennan asked then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the Iranian threat to the lives of American civil servants. What are the prospects for a new nuclear deal if Iran continues to hold American hostages and actively seeks the murder of Iranian dissidents on U.S. soil as well as U.S. government officials, she asked? Blinken “sidestepped the question,” according to CBS News’ analysis.

 

Blinken’s caginess caused a stir. Clearly, de-listing the IRGC as a terrorist enterprise was on the table in Vienna. Indeed, it seems to have been one of the Iranian regime’s primary preconditions for a new nuclear agreement. And the Biden administration may have seriously considered giving in to Iran’s demand.

 

In a subsequent interview, NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell helped Blinken clean up the mess he’d made on CBS. “Quick question on Iran before I let you go,” she asked the secretary at the end of an April 6, 2022, interview. “Is Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — which has attacked Americans and our allies — a terrorist organization?” Blinken agreed that “they are.” But “will they continue to be?” Mitchell inquired. Once again, Blinken hemmed and hawed.

 

Two days later, Biden administration officials finally put the issue to rest by telling Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that the president would not revoke the IRGC’s designation as a terrorist organization. “This might largely be a symbolic issue, but the IRGC needs to earn its way off the list,” Ignatius wrote.

 

After this, nuclear talks in Vienna stalled before ultimately collapsing in the fall of that year. Even as a prerequisite to revive the Iran nuclear deal, stripping the IRGC of its FTO status was a bridge too far for Biden.

 

So, will that also be too much for Trump to bear? Not if he sticks with the terms of the MOU.

 

Yes, Trump has the authority to suspend the State Department’s reporting requirements unilaterally, but that would not remove the IRGC’s FTO designation. The IRGC will, however, be primarily responsible for administering the “rehabilitation and economic development” funds envisioned in the MOU’s Article 6. After all, the IRGC has its hands around every critical industry inside Iran, including construction.

 

If the MOU is “finalized” within 60 days — a very tall order — there can be no “final deal,” unless the IRGC is stripped of its terrorist designation. Why? Because Gulf region governments and private enterprises cannot do visible business with a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. “The President can waive, but only 180 days at a time,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Miad Maleki observed. “No serious investor commits billions on a rolling six-month waiver cycle.”

 

Perhaps Trump will ultimately balk at giving the Islamic Republic a gift so valuable that even Joe Biden withheld it. But the alternative is to allow the deal to collapse. That would almost certainly trigger a new crisis in the region. Iran isn’t going to be deterred by Trump’s threats.

 

And why wouldn’t Trump give in to Iran’s demands? He’s already punted the nuclear issue over the horizon. The MOU makes no mention of Iran’s support for its terrorist proxies. In Europe, he’s even defended the existence of Iran’s missile arsenal — the development of which was one of the primary causes of the war in the first place.

 

“In other words, they must have missiles to some degree, because others have them,” the president said of Iran. If Trump has talked himself out of neutralizing the Iranian threat in all its many manifestations, it’s not hard to imagine him rewarding an organization that has sought the deaths of thousands of Americans — including himself and his family.

 

Maybe the president didn’t fully understand the scope of the national humiliation that he’s engineered for us all, but he’s about to find out.