Surely something about this preliminary agreement between the United States and Iran must have felt familiar to America’s real-estate mogul president. After all, it reads like a real-estate bankruptcy filing — an act of financial capitulation.
It is a measure of how much Iran had Trump over a barrel, and how thoroughly it cleaned his clock, that Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told Iranian state TV after the details were announced: “The agreement is a record of U.S. failure. People will see it and judge.”
You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to see what happened here. You need to be a domestic policy expert. Trump sold out America’s ally in the war, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states for the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan. Trump knew that the food inflation and high gasoline prices triggered by this war were a prescription for a Republican wipeout in the midterms. He had to stop the war now to get prices down by November, because if the Democrats take the House and Senate, Trump will be looking at endless investigations into how he has used the presidency to enrich himself and his family — and possibly even impeachment.
So, Trump did what he always does: He abandoned all principle and all allies and put his personal interests above all other considerations.
He even prepared the terrain to set up his vice president, JD Vance, for a fall. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.” People laughed — but nervously, because everyone knew it was a joke, but also not a joke. It was Trump’s inner voice speaking.
This was not a war I advocated, but once it started I was sure hoping Iran would lose. As such, I am shocked by the outcome so far — by the sheer cynicism with which Trump and Vance have gone from damning Iran, and telling its people to rise up because “help is on its way,” to praising its leaders, and how this deal has left Iran stronger and all its neighbors more vulnerable to Tehran’s whims.
I would have much more sympathy for Trump’s stress-filled handling of the wicked problem that is Iran if he had just once shown the same to President Obama or acknowledged that he couldn’t deliver now for the Iranian people as he promised. Instead, he just pretends that everything he did was perfect.
Let us count the ways it is not perfect. The deal not only puts off the question of the disposal of Iran’s near bomb-grade uranium to future negotiations — negotiations in which the Trump administration has already given up its military leverage — but also, most amazingly, it clearly leaves open the possibility that Iran will be able to charge a toll in the future to any ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
Just read the cease-fire agreement: Upon the signing of this memorandum of understanding, “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 …”
After billions of dollars of bombs dropped on Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner won from Tehran 60 days of toll-free passage through Hormuz. After that, oil tanker captains, bring your credit cards. Thank goodness we had these crack real-estate negotiators on the case, not wimpy diplomats.
The cease-fire deal not only is silent on any commitments by Iran to curb its development of long-range missiles and its support for proxies undermining the governments of Lebanon and Iraq, but it also makes the 60-day negotiation on Iran’s nuclear future contingent on Israel’s halting its military operations in Lebanon against Iran’s mercenary army there, Hezbollah. If Barack Obama had ever agreed to such a thing, Fox News would have interrupted its regular broadcasting to denounce it.
All of this is the result of the fact that Trump and Netanyahu never took seriously the idea that Iran would do the obvious: close the Strait of Hormuz in response to their attack. So in their attempt to stop Iran from developing a weapon of mass destruction that it was unlikely to ever use — since Israel would immediately use one on Iran — Trump and Netanyahu inspired Iran to develop a weapon of mass disruption, a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, which it can use anytime it feels too much pressure from the United States or Israel.
The message to America’s Gulf Arab allies — the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait in particular — is that we are cutting and running, so you’d better make the best deals you can with Tehran to keep it at bay. This is the biggest geopolitical power shift in the Gulf since the start of the Iran-Iraq war. There is a new sheriff in town. Dial 1-800-Ayatollah.
In case they did not read that between the lines, Trump spelled it out in a news conference justifying why he did not try to curb Iran’s missile development: “What am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” he asked. “Doesn’t work that way, you know, it doesn’t work that way, and missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”
If you are reading those words in Tel Aviv or Riyadh, a shiver just ran down your spine, along with the dawning awareness that the president of the United States no longer is playing with a full deck and you are home alone.
For all of these reasons, it is simply impossible to listen to Trump and Vance without being reminded of Nick Carraway’s famous observation about Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Indeed, shortly before Ghalibaf and his Iranian colleagues were boasting that they had imposed a “failure” on the United States, Trump was declaring the Iranian leaders to be “very rational people.” “They were nice to deal with, they were strong people, smart people,” he added. “They are not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.” He called them “smarter” than past regime leaders.
Compare this also with how Trump and Vance talked to and about President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — the leader of a heroic democracy that has been resisting a Russian invasion for four years: “You don’t have the cards,” Trump told him, urging Zelensky to cut a filthy deal with Vladimir Putin.
That is how they talk about the leader of a people defending the frontier of freedom from its worst enemy. For Iranian leaders — part of a regime that just gunned down thousands of their own people who were seeking freedom — Trump says they are “nice.”
Trump and Vance “have no coherent view of U.S. interests, and they have absolutely no core commitment to democratic values of any kind,” Gautam Mukunda, the author of “Picking Presidents: How to Make the Most Consequential Decision in the World,” told me.
That’s the point. Trump loves to wrap himself in the American flag, but he is the least American president, in terms of his core values, in modern times.
You have to ask how Trump and Netanyahu could have miscalculated so badly as to think they could topple a regime that had been in power since 1979 by bombing it from the air. The same answer applies to both: It’s because they have surrounded themselves with sycophants and purged their parties of anyone who might challenge them.
“There are two ways to make sure your executive is a good leader — either by selecting people of good character or putting limits on what they can do — and America and Israel today have failed at both,” Mukunda said. “This war is the most perfect example of what happens when you disdain all forms of expertise, knowledge and principles, in favor of gut instincts.” Experts had predicted everything that went wrong in the war.
But therein may lie a possible silver lining for both America and Israel: The failed Trump-Netanyahu endeavor to destroy Iran’s Islamofascist autocracy might end up saving American and Israeli democracy. Both countries are facing fateful elections — America’s midterms in November and Israel’s national election in the fall. Trump and Bibi, both sinking in the polls, were hoping that a quick win in Iran would propel each of them or their parties to victory.
The whole world is worse off with a stronger Iran, but it will be triply worse off if Trump and Bibi win their elections. Because five more years of Netanyahu as prime minister would be the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy. And two more years of Trump controlling the White House, the Senate, the House and effectively the Supreme Court would pose the same danger to American democracy.
Is there any way Trump can salvage a good outcome in Iran? Yes, but it has nothing to do with the fate of its nuclear weapons. In the wake of this war, if there is a diminished threat from Israel and America, that might unlock politics in Iran as well. It might just create the space for an Iranian majority to ask: “What does this regime have to show for 47 years in power besides a multibillion-dollar waste of money to get a nuclear bomb and funding militias around the region with cash we Iranians desperately need for our own development and turning our country into a water-starved environmental disaster?”
Who knows what politics, what pressures for regime reform or regime change, would be unleashed in Tehran if Iranian leaders can no longer distract their people with war?
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