No one yet knows the details of the Iran deal that President Trump has been teasing on social media for the past day or so. The president himself has admonished his followers not to “listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.” But as this war stumbles to a close, it is clear that the president, too, is lost: He didn’t know what he was doing when he began it, and now he doesn’t know how to get out of it.
Only a day ago, Trump was trying to project confidence. Yesterday, he hailed an agreement with Iran as mostly done; it was, he said on his Truth Social site, “largely negotiated” and close to “finalization.” The Iranians, of course, immediately disputed this characterization, and by the next day, Trump was backpedaling. “If I make a deal with Iran,” he posted this morning, “it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon.” The agreement that was only a day earlier “largely negotiated” was now only a notional memorandum, and Trump griped that it was unfair to criticize it because “nobody has seen it, or knows what it is,” and that it “ isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”
By this afternoon, Trump was reduced to posting a meme of a jet carrying a bomb under its wing with Thank you for your attention to this matter written on it.
Many of those most alarmed about what Trump might end up accepting to get out of this dead-end conflict in Iran are not his critics, but his supporters. Trump’s enablers may not have access to the details of an agreement, but they’re clearly worried: Senators Lindsey Graham, Roger Wicker, and Ted Cruz were all posting expressions of shock and dismay on social media. Graham said that any deal that caves to Iran “makes one wonder why the war started to begin with”; Wicker said that a possible 60-day cease-fire would be a “disaster.” Cruz gently suggested that the tsar does not know what his devious boyars are up to, describing the deal as “being pushed by some voices in the administration.”
Even Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, posted a long screed warning Trump not to make a deal. “I know you want to get out of this mess,” he said. He then counseled the president to “give it some thought.” Trump’s former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo weighed in as well, comparing the possible outline of a deal to the kind of thing Barack Obama’s team might have come up when designing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and warning that it could mean that America would end up paying “the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.” Trump withdrew from the JCPOA during his first term, in 2018, and he regularly speaks of the JCPOA (and Obama) with contempt; Pompeo’s comparison was sure to infuriate the Trump team.
And sure enough, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, responded almost immediately to Pompeo—and gave the world a glimpse of what appears to be some sweaty panic building inside the White House. “Mike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about,” Cheung posted on X. “He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He’s not read into anything that’s happening, so how would he know.” (Cheung also kept posing updates about Trump working in the Oval Office on a Saturday, as if this were an amazing illustration of the president’s work ethic.)
Trump’s worried sycophants probably know that the details of an eventual agreement likely do not matter very much at this point. As my colleague David Frum noted on Sunday, the war has already ended with America’s strategic defeat by the Islamic Republic of Iran, an outcome for which Trump is directly responsible. How much Iran will get away with, and how much humiliation the United States will endure, has yet to be ironed out by the negotiators, but the war is now almost certain to end with Tehran’s theocrats firmly in power, and with a stronger chokehold both on their own people and on the international economy than they had three months ago.
Not only is Trump incoherently staggering to defeat, he now risks signing on to an agreement that could be far worse than anything Obama negotiated with Iran a decade ago. I was a critic of the JCPOA back then because I believed it contravened some basic diplomatic logic by front-loading concessions to the Iranians while hoping they would later abide by its terms. Obama, too, knew the risk he was taking, as he admitted at the time to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. “Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he told Goldberg in 2015. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”
The JCPOA was not perfect, but it was the product of the efforts of professional diplomats, scientists, and other experts, and once it was in place, it was really the only game in town. Obama gambled that Iran would feel pressure to observe the JCPOA once it went into effect, and he was right. Three years later, few argued that Iran was in violation of the agreement; Trump trashed it anyway, without any thought or preparation, much as he has done with other arms agreements.
Trump could have adhered to the JCPOA, and had Iran tried to sprint to a bomb—and no evidence exists that Tehran was doing so in 2026—he could have blamed Obama, made the case to Congress for war, and launched military action. Faced with the ticking clock of an imminent Iranian nuclear test, even Trump’s most dedicated opponents at home and abroad would likely have lent their support. Instead (presumably while still savoring the sugar high of a quick win in Venezuela) he decided that he would seek glory as the liberator of Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told Trump that the mullahs would fall; CIA director John Ratcliffe, however, told him that such a prediction was “farcical.”
Now the president will end up having to sign off on a set of terms that will likely make the JCPOA look demanding by comparison. Trump began this war assuming that all other issues—nuclear weapons, terrorism, Iran’s regional adventurism—would vanish when the regime was toppled. When that didn’t happen, he had no plan for what to do next, and he seems to have settled on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the central explanation not only for why he went to war, but for why Americans must now suffer the economic effects of the conflict. The Iranians may well promise to forswear a nuclear program—as they did to Obama a decade ago—but for now, they are not only presenting themselves as the aggrieved party, they’re behaving like the victors: setting demands, making the Americans negotiate the status of the Strait of Hormuz, and kicking the nuclear question down the road.
On Saturday, the president told Axios that the chance of reaching an agreement with the Iranians was a “solid 50/50,” and that he either would accept a “good” deal or “blow them to kingdom come.” Neither of these things is going to happen. Instead, a piece of paper will, at some point, come out of a meeting room in Pakistan. It will certify that the United States must accept a major strategic defeat in the Middle East. And Donald Trump, who brought America to this point because of his ego and his incompetence, will sign it.
The post Trump’s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat appeared first on The Atlantic.
