By Nick Catoggio
Friday, July 10, 2026
“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the
last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior
leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what? We may have some
animosity, we may have some mistrust. But we recognize the way that we’ve done
business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something
else.’”
That was the vice
president speaking to CNN in mid-June after the White House struck a peace
deal with Iran. To hear J.D. Vance tell it, not only was the war (tentatively)
over, a new age of better relations between our two nations had dawned. Now
that we’re almost a month in, it’s time to ask: What does this era of “trying
something else” look like so far?
It looks exactly like the old era of not trying something
else, it turns out.
“We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational
people, and they were nice to deal with,” Donald Trump said of Iran’s current leadership days after the deal was
signed last month. “They were strong people, smart people.… They’re not
radicalized and they’re looking to help their country.” With a kinder, gentler,
more diplomatic-minded cabal now in charge of the Iranian terrorist regime, rapprochement
was in the air.
Less than a month later, Iran has resumed shooting at Gulf nations and ships in the Strait of
Hormuz, and the U.S. has resumed bombing Iranian targets and sanctioning Iranian oil. The Iranian diplomats who
negotiated the ceasefire are under threat at home from hardliners, to the point
that Iran’s president “had to be rescued from an angry crowd by his security detail”
during Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral procession.
At the burial, numerous banners were unfurled explicitly promising to kill Trump in retaliation for
Khamenei’s death. They meant it, too: Israeli intelligence recently informed
the White House of a new Iranian assassination plot against the president,
causing Trump to ditch the luxe new jet he received from Qatar and fly home
from this week’s NATO summit on the old Air Force One because of its superior missile
defenses.
By Wednesday of this week, the president’s opinion of
Iran’s stronger, smarter leadership had changed. “I don’t want to deal with
them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick
people. They’re led by sick people,” he told reporters. “And they’re vicious, violent people. And
if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, [the
peace deal is] over. There’s something wrong with them, they’re cuckoo.”
Reportedly he’s begun considering a return to “all-out war” in the name of “finishing the
job,” as some officials put it to the Wall Street Journal, but what that
would mean is no clearer today than
it was a month ago. “We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand
we’re not f—ing around,” one Trump deputy said to Axios about the latest American strikes on Iran. The
U.S. spent months doing that this spring, though, only to end up with the peace
agreement that’s left us in the present limbo.
Plus, Trump continues to show the Iranians that he has no
appetite for sustained escalation, especially with global oil reserves precarious. “Anything that happens is
going to happen very fast,” he said Wednesday after a new round of American strikes.
“We’re not looking for a long time.” If America’s military were capable of
“finishing the job” quickly and with little risk to U.S. troops, the president
presumably would have ordered it to do so already. As it is, with Plan A
(bombing) and Plan B (diplomacy) both having failed to reopen the strait, what’s Plan C?
The new era with Iran looks dead on arrival, a figment of
Trump’s and Vance’s nationalist imaginations. Which is ironic, because their
provincial ignorance about nationalism abroad is what got us here in the first
place.
When bribes don’t work.
The White House arrived at this point because its
strategy toward Iran was the same as its strategy toward all adversaries:
Everyone has their price.
The latest hostilities reportedly arose from a disagreement over how to interpret Paragraph 5 of the memorandum of understanding that was supposed to end the
war:
5. Upon the
signing of this MoU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using
its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for
60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa. The
traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need
for removing the technical and military obstacles, and de-mining by the Islamic
Republic of Iran, will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran
will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman, to define the future
administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussions
with other Persian Gulf Littoral States, in line with applicable international
law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. officials read that language as Iran agreeing to
reopen the strait to free transit by oil tankers for 60 days while the two
sides worked out a long-term deal. The Iranians, however, read it as the U.S.
conceding Iran’s hegemony over the strait going forward in partnership with
Oman.
So when Oman and the U.N. International Maritime
Organization devised a new route through the strait that would hug Oman’s coastline, passing exclusively through
Omani waters with help from the U.S. Navy, the Iranians felt betrayed.
Having seemingly acknowledged Iran’s authority over the “safe passage of
commercial vessels” in Hormuz, the United States was now undermining it by
steering ships away from Iranian waters.
That’s why Iran began firing at passing tankers again.
They were losing leverage that they believed had been granted to them under the
memorandum and chose to regain it the hard way.
And not only was that foreseeable, it was foreseen.
According to mediators who spoke to the Journal, U.S. and Iranian negotiators realized
at the time that their understandings of Paragraph 5 differed but stuck with
the agreed-upon language in the interest of finalizing the deal, “figuring they
could assert their interpretations afterward.” The White House had every reason
to know that the disagreement might quickly imperil the ceasefire, in other
words. So why did they move forward without resolving it up front?
Because they believed that everyone has their price.
Team Trump’s One Neat Trick to get Iran to accept its
interpretation of Paragraph 5 was to offer the Iranians the fattest envelope
America could stuff. U.S. diplomats led by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff
proposed a trade-off to the enemy, per the Journal: “Relinquish its claim to control the
strait and renounce toll payments in exchange for billions of dollars of
unfrozen funds.” Some $100 billion in Iranian money is being held around the
world; dangling it at the regime if they’d let go of the strait was tantamount
to treating Hormuz as an income-producing Iranian asset that the United States
hoped to purchase.
If the price was right, a rational actor would happily
sell, no? And remember, that $100 billion is the tip of the iceberg under the
memorandum: $300 billion in new investments from private interests is
waiting for Iran if it complies fully with the terms of the deal, including
meeting U.S. demands on its nuclear program. That’s almost as much as the
country’s GDP last year. Bribes don’t get much sweeter.
Trump’s fat envelope should have worked. After all,
everyone has their price. Don’t they?
Too weak.
It’s always been strange that a nationalist would have
such a blind spot for how national pride and ideological commitment motivates
his adversaries. I wrote about that more
than a year ago, in fact, but Trump’s failed attempt to buy off Iran has
brought the subject back into vogue.
Alexander Burns marveled at it in a piece last month,
calling the president’s obliviousness to foreign nationalism “the most
surprising miscalculation of [his] second term.” Walter Russell Mead flagged it as well after the peace deal
was signed. “Mr. Trump’s disregard for ideas, ideals and people who claim to
believe in them leads him to underestimate the strength and determination of
people who mean what they say,” he wrote. “His failure to understand the power
of nationalism blinded him both to the resilience Ukraine has demonstrated in
its conflict with Russia and to Vladimir Putin’s determination to pursue the
struggle regardless of cost.”
Mike
Nelson also considered the point here at The Dispatch yesterday. “In
his campaign to coerce Tehran into compliance, he completely misread the
motivations and desires of the Iranian regime,” he said of Trump. “This is in
part because the president tends to view others as acting the way he acts
himself—transactional and generally without a guiding worldview…. Trump is
amoral whereas the Iranian regime is immoral, but they are immoral actors in
the pursuit of long-term goals, enshrined in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.”
No amount of resistance appears capable of convincing the
president that foreign nationalism usually can’t be broken by buying, bullying,
or bombing it into submission. Occasionally, it can: The predators who rule
Venezuela rolled over meekly when Trump demanded fealty. But Ukraine fought on
after the U.S. cut off military aid. Canada began organizing a western counterweight to U.S. power after Trump challenged
its sovereignty. And Denmark continues to defy White House threats to sabotage NATO if it doesn’t cough up
Greenland.
The president may have assumed that Iran would be
different because, unlike in those other examples, he’d be bringing military
firepower directly to bear. Wrong again: The battered Iranian regime seems
willing to bear any burden to protect the leverage it’s gained for Shiite
supremacy by seizing control over the strait.
Not everyone has their price, it seems. People motivated
by nationalism (and adjacent passions, like Islamism) often can’t be bought.
Why has Trump’s blind spot about that persisted for so long?
I think it’s because his own sense of nationalism is too
weak and too strong.
It’s weak in precisely the way Nelson describes. For all
of Trump’s flag-hugging pretensions, the story of his second term is that he
most
assuredly has a price and the interests of his nation do not supersede it.
Patriotism is an irrational impulse insofar as it implies that one should be
willing to make great sacrifices for the good of one’s country, and the
president is an eminently rational actor. (In the economic sense of the term.
No other.) He’s a draft-dodging mobster, not Nathan Hale. Naturally he assumes
that the Iranians are too.
On top of that, his nationalism has always been
intellectually vacuous. Ask him to define the essence of American greatness and
I’m sure he’d point to some conspicuous manifestation of national power—the biggest
economy, the strongest military. But there’s no deep conviction that
seems to drive the patriotism he claims to feel so passionately; traditional
American ideals like freedom, equality, and “melting pot” cultural dynamism are
reliably absent from his rhetoric.
In a war like the one in Iran, led on one side by someone
who believes in nothing and on the other by people who believe fervently in
crazy things, which is more likely to misjudge the other’s willingness to
persevere toward strategic victory rather than be bribed to quit?
Too strong.
What the president lacks in intellectual foundations for
his patriotism, he makes up for in raw chauvinism. That’s what I mean by his
nationalism being “too strong.” He plainly revels in leading the most powerful
country in the world because it’s the most powerful country in the
world. That people abroad might feel similar pride in their own lesser nations
is hard for him to grasp, I’m sure. What do they have to feel pride about?
Without chauvinism, what is patriotism worth?
Consider the term “America first.” Superficially it’s a
simple statement of nationalist priorities: Americans should place the welfare
of their own country and their own people before the welfare of others. No more
nation-building abroad. No more foreign aid, even to close allies like Israel.
American interests come first.
But it can also be read as a statement of American
supremacy, granting the White House moral license to impose its will on
pipsqueak nations that lack the ability to resist. That certainly seems to be
how Trump understands it. From Greenland to Venezuela, from Cuba to Iran,
imperial America’s pursuit of its own interests entitles it to unapologetically
assert those interests whether the people on the other side like it or not.
America first.
In his piece last month, Burns detected an evolution in
Trump’s nationalism over time. “Somewhere between railing against OPEC in the
1980s, applauding Brexit in 2016 and winning the presidency in 2024,” he wrote, “Trump started blurring the difference between a
right-wing politics that insists on putting national identity above
international institutions, and a purely American variant that wants to replace
resolutions from the United Nations with edicts from Truth Social.”
Is there really a contradiction, though? The president
still supports other nations ruthlessly advancing their national interests
against toothless leftist Euroweenie institutions like the U.N.. What he does not
support is them asserting those interests when the mighty United States, led by
him, demands that they set them aside and serve the White House instead—or
else. Might makes right. America first.
Needless to say, the second understanding of “America
first” conveniently serves Trump’s preposterous narcissism. But it also leaves him unprepared
and likely confused when people abroad decide that not only do they not like
the world’s strongest power pushing them around, they’re willing to do
something about it. Why would they insist on defending their “sh-thole
country”? As Trump himself (allegedly) said in a different but not entirely
unrelated context, “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?”
He’s offering a revolutionary messianic Islamist regime
$100 billion, and potentially as much as $400 billion total, to reopen the
strait, give up its nuclear ambitions, and be a normal country that plays nice
with its Sunni and Israeli neighbors. They won’t take the bribe. I don’t get
it. What’s in it for them?
The most one can say for all this is that the president’s
version of nationalism might be slightly better than J.D. Vance’s. If Trump’s
brand is egocentric, vacuous, and chauvinistic, Vance’s is ethnotribalist,
ideologically postliberal, and naive. More so than the president, I suspect his
hope for a new era in which the U.S. and Iran might “try something else” beside
conflict is driven by dogmatic isolationism and the belief that America could learn
a thing or two from liberalism’s “sh-thole” enemies. How lucky we are to
have the two of them at the helm.
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