The Never-Ending Deal

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.