Only two questions remain regarding the U.S. war with Iran. One, how big a plate of crow will President Trump have to eat to end this conflict with at least some achievements? And two, will he tell us the crow he’s eating is lobster or filet mignon?
Personally, I am fine if Trump has to eat a pile of crow — for instance, the “unconditional surrender” of Iran that he promised will not be coming his way — if it results in Iran relinquishing its roughly 1,000 pounds of near weapons-grade uranium. It would take the immediate threat of an Iranian bomb off the table, and that would be a very good thing.
But please spare me the nonsense that Trump has secured a perfect and delicious deal. Because securing that highly enriched uranium will not only leave the vile, murderous Islamic republic regime in power (and still holding some 10 tons of low-enriched uranium) — but actually strengthen it in troubling ways.
For starters, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will all be remembered as the team that gave the Islamic republic a second lease on life just when it was more on the ropes than ever with its own people.
That’s because the only way Iran will relinquish that near bomb-grade uranium will be as part of a deal that over time lifts the U.S. blockade on Iran’s oil exports and the whole web of U.S. economic sanctions on Tehran. That relief will provide the regime with a huge injection of cash that it will be able to use to buy off — or continue to repress — its opponents at home and to fuel its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
“Trump launched this war of choice with the transformational goal of regime change,” Robert Litwak, an arms control expert and the author of “Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy,” told me. “He is on the verge of ending it through a transactional deal that will be a variant of the agreement Obama negotiated in 2015, and Trump recklessly jettisoned in 2018, that constrained Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”
Such a transactional deal leaving the regime in power will be anathema to the pro-Trump hard-liners “who define the threat from Iran as deriving from the character of its regime,” Litwak added.
Because Trump and his national security team did no apparent scenario planning before the war — relying only on promises by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that the Iranian regime would fall like a house of cards after a few weeks of heavy bombing — they failed to anticipate what Iran might do with its back against the wall.
The first was to close the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil shipping lane through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s crude oil has to pass, a move that sent the price you pay at the pump soaring. With just some drones, cruise missiles and Revolutionary Guards in speedboats firing machine guns, Iran discovered it could put the U.S. economy and many others in a chokehold.
To put it another way, Trump and Netanyahu assumed their multibillion-dollar giant weapons systems could be used to bomb Iran into relinquishing its ingredients for a weapon of mass destruction. Accidentally, though, they enabled Iran to discover it had a weapon of “mass disruption” — cheap drones that could close the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, and forever, Iranians will know that we know that Tehran can shut off the world’s most important oil tap anytime it wants. This new source of leverage for the Iranian regime is priceless.
Trump’s failure to anticipate this is no accident. It is because he thinks he knows everything — when he doesn’t at all.
Remember when Trump and Vance lectured Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office last year, telling him that he had no “cards” and essentially had to submit to the will of Trump’s man-crush Vladimir Putin? Imagine if Trump and Vance had instead been curious and humble and asked Zelensky: “Volodymyr, your ability to resist the Russian superpower has been amazing. What cards have you been able to play to do that?”
Zelensky would have said: “Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance, let me tell you how drones have reshaped the modern battlefield and enabled the small to act big and the weak to act strong.”
Maybe then Trump might have asked Hegseth before he started this war with huge strikes, “Hey, Pete, but what if Iran pulls a Ukraine and just tosses a few $30,000 drones into the Strait of Hormuz and shuts it down? Then what do we do?”
Because Trump apparently never asked that question, and Hegseth was too ignorant or afraid to, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards regime “has achieved the functional equivalent of a nuclear weapon through its ability to strangle the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz and to hold hostage the oil and civil infrastructure of the Gulf states,” Litwak said.
What Trump also never asked was: What if Iran responds to U.S. airstrikes by trying to hit the oil infrastructure of America’s Arab Gulf allies, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain?
That is exactly what Iran did. Among other things, with drone and cruise missile attacks in March, Reuters reported, Iran “knocked out 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas (L.N.G.) export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia.” It added, “The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tons per year of L.N.G. for three to five years.”
Three to five years!
Basically, Iran told America’s vulnerable Arab Gulf oil state allies the geostrategic equivalent of that line from “The Wizard of Oz” — when the Wicked Witch of the West says to the scarecrow made of straw: “How about a little fire, Scarecrow?”
Now you understand why the Arab oil producers absolutely do not want to see Trump restarting the war, and how Tehran is using that as leverage in its negotiations with Washington.
Here’s what else both Iran and our allies can also see. Trump is not a mentally stable person, and therefore he — and his America — cannot be counted on. The latest evidence is a proposal that Trump tossed out over the weekend that was so unhinged it had to have come from someone sitting next to him at the Mar-a-Largo bar.
Trump said in a Truth Social post that in light of “all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together,” he was “mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords.” The list included Turkey, whose leader detests Netanyahu and already has ties with Israel; Pakistan, which has long harbored animosity toward Israel; Jordan and Egypt, which both already have peace treaties with Israel, so why would they need to join the Abraham Accords; and Saudi Arabia, which has made it abundantly clear that the only way it will (or should) normalize relations with Israel is if Israel opens a pathway with Palestinians toward a two-state solution.
Trump even claimed that several allies told him they “would be honored” if Iran itself were to join the accords. If Iran signs “it will be the most important Deal that any of these Great, but always in Conflict Countries, will ever sign,” he wrote. “Nothing in the past, or in the future, will surpass it.”
On what planet of the Milky Way Galaxy would this regime in Tehran, which is practically founded on hatred of Israel, just up and make peace with it after this war?
The whole thing was so ridiculous, juvenile and unvetted by any experts that it had to have left our Israeli and Arab allies deeply worried that their American protector is led by a truly unstable man.
So let me end with what I said the day Trump and Netanyahu started this war: Nothing would improve the future of the Middle East more than if this terrible regime in Tehran were toppled and its nuclear ambitions eliminated.
But to accomplish that you needed to have a very sophisticated plan, and to have thought through all the different scenarios and enlisted as many allies and as much global legitimacy as possible, because this would be hard and would take time. Trump and his clown-car team did none of that.
Yes, they brought immense military force to bear and damaged Iran’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities. Those are very good things. And if Trump can get the near bomb-grade uranium out, that would be an even better thing.
But his supporters shouldn’t fool themselves or our allies: Even if he achieves those things, we will now have to pay for them by giving one of the world’s worst regimes a new lease on life, a permanent stranglehold over critical world oil supplies — and the resources to continue making terrible mischief in the region.
So please don’t tell me this is lobster or filet mignon.
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