President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site on Sunday evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless, extremely dangerous—adversary.
The details of the agreement remain unconfirmed, but the president, of course, is eager to spin the outcome as a victory. (Trump was in a hurry to sign the deal on his birthday; the Iranians, who now seem to be in charge of this whole business, instead said they will send someone to a meeting in Switzerland on Friday.) But even before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.
If defeat seems a strong word, consider what we do know about how this war will end. Iran has suffered significant damage from U.S. and Israeli military action. But as I and others warned at the outset, killing people and bombing things does not by itself produce victory. The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the IRGC; the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks; Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks; the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror; and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran. In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own.
Indeed, the United States has perhaps done worse than gaining nothing. Iran, while temporarily weakened, is now an even more powerful political actor: The regime in Tehran stood up to a massive U.S. onslaught, survived, and then inflicted pain on various states in the Gulf as punishment for going along with Trump’s war.
The Israelis, for their part, have been left out in the cold. It is difficult to shed any tears for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unwisely encouraged Trump to attack Iran, but he, too, is feeling the sting of humiliation. The Iranians cagily linked Netanyahu’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon to Trump’s war in the Gulf, and Trump is now angry at Netanyahu for making it harder for the United States to get out of the conflict. (When Netanyahu planned major strikes in Beirut at the beginning of June, Trump called him, swore at him, and said “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.”)
Reportedly, the upcoming agreement requires a cessation of hostilities in the region, including in Lebanon—and Trump is negotiating as if he can deliver on that demand while leaving Jerusalem out of it. On Sunday, the Israelis said that Hezbollah had launched weapons into Israel. Rather than calling on the Iranians to restrain their proxy, Trump took to social media to tell the Israelis to calm down, noting that the attack “was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process.”
The Trump administration will claim that it achieved a victory because it got an Iran without nuclear weapons. But this claim is both silly and redundant. Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally cancelled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere near getting a bomb, and certainly not within weeks of a weapon, as Trump asserted. The effort to claim that this war has defeated Iran’s nuclear ambitions is merely an effort to distract from the administration’s failure to achieve regime change, which was always its main goal.
(Trump’s self-congratulations about averting the Iranian bomb are like the old joke about the London cabbie who used to throw “lion powder” out of the window to keep lions away. When told that London has no lions, the cabbie said: “And a bloody good thing, too, because the powder don’t work.”)
The agreement—if it actually gets signed on Friday—will then initiate a two-month period of further negotiations, and Trump could argue that he’ll get more in that process. But how?
Trump has for weeks talked about getting rid of Iran’s “Nuclear Dust”—his odd term for the uranium now lying under the rubble produced by U.S. bombings—and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday morning that the United States has multiple plans for removing this material. The Iranians, however, are busily planting booby-trapsaround the uranium to ensure it stays where it is, and despite Hegseth’s blustering, America is not going to march into Iran and dig it out without Tehran’s consent. If anything, the Iranians now have every incentive to sprint to a bomb, and can do so with far less transparency than they had to endure under the JCPOA.
Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz will “open,” but it was already open, at least to those the Iranians allowed to pass. In his celebratory message, Trump said: “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” That’s terrific, but such a statement has about as much effect as if I or my wife or my cat declared the Strait open; only Iran can make that decision. Trump also declared the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports is over, something that is indeed within his power, but that only means that America will withdraw while Iran remains.
Meanwhile—and again, these are the terms that so far have been leaked to the press, mostly from the Iranians—Iran claims that it will not only get some $12 billion up front, but another $12 billion within 60 days. Down the line, the Iranians are claiming they will get a $300 billion fund for reconstruction. (U.S. officials have insisted to reporters that any release of funds will be performance-based, a fuzzy condition that raises more questions and could invite the Iranians to dig in and haggle if the Americans balk at delivering the money.) The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.
Trump on Sunday also claimed that he is perfectly willing to restart hostilities if the Iranians don’t cooperate. Tehran, however, can be forgiven for smirking at the idea that Trump is going to tie down U.S. forces and then ignite a second conflict just weeks from the midterm elections, especially because the American people—and perhaps more importantly, from Trump’s perspective, the international markets—have soured on the conflict.
Trump began this war by promising the Iranian people that they would be able to seize their government from the theocratic tyrants who oppress them, and he repeatedly said he would settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender.” Had Trump toppled the regime in Tehran, he would have had the thanks of most of the world—and congratulations from even his most dedicated critics. Instead, the United States has been defeated, and Sunday evening found Trump out on the lawn waiting for the rain to clear so he could begin his party.
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