Donald Trump Has Lost the Iran War.

It only took three and a half months to negotiate a deal that brings everything back to square one.

Photo by Do Nhu on Unsplash

After what seems like endless claims of an imminent deal with Iran, over the weekend the Trump administration could actually announce that a deal had been negotiated — and get confirmation from Pakistan and Iran.

Let’s pause for a moment here and point out how low the U.S. government’s reputation has fallen: the administration that cried “peace deal” needed to have the Islamic Republic of Iran — not the world’s most reliable source, mind you — confirm the existence of a deal before everyone believed that it might be possible.¹

The word “possible” is important here, because it is easy to envision how Israel and Hezbollah spoilers who are not signatories might derail things between now and the signing in Geneva this Friday. Furthermore, while the U.S. and Iran have signed, well, something, the terms remain secret for now. Heck, Axios identified at least eight known unknowns about whatever was electronically signed over the weekend and will ostensibly be signed on paper this Friday.

But let’s be generous and assume that things go off without a hitch this week. Where does that leave the Trump administration three and a half months after initiating this conflict?

The editorial pages are, shall we say, unimpressed with the outcome. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

President Trump is touting his latest cease-fire deal with Iran as peace in our time, but the world is more likely to see it as a strategic retreat short of achieving his war aims. To reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Mr. Trump is accepting Iran’s promises merely to negotiate over its nuclear program….

There’s no denying that Mr. Trump is retreating from his main goals as political pressure has built at home and finishing the job requires greater military risk. Despite Israel’s urging, he never authorized a mission to seize Iran’s enriched uranium. He never tried to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force.

Those who say Mr. Trump had no alternative to this retreat ignore that the U.S. blockade was squeezing Iran more by the day, while Iran’s blockade was leaking. Mr. Trump simply didn’t want to endure higher oil prices for longer. This is his choice, not a strategic imperative….

Iran’s new leaders are likely to conclude that Mr. Trump has no desire for more conflict, and they will negotiate accordingly.

And here’s the New York Times:

The preliminary deal ending President Trump’s four-month war with Iran is welcome but brings with it hard truths. Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war. He prosecuted it recklessly and in open defiance of the law. The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come….

Since the war began, [Trump] has said the United States would achieve “total and complete victory” and that Iran must agree to “unconditional surrender.” He suggested that regime change would occur. He said that Iran would be permitted “no enrichment” of uranium and that “the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried” near-bomb-grade nuclear material that it already holds.

None of this appears to be true. Iran’s hard-line government remains in place. The specifics of the nuclear agreement will apparently be negotiated over the next two months, but the terms seem likely to resemble those of a 2015 deal that President Barack Obama negotiated and that Mr. Trump canceled in 2018. He described the Obama agreement as the “worst deal ever” and said it put Iran on “a route to a nuclear weapon.” He criticized it for failing to force Iran to stop supporting terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and for loosening economic sanctions. Yet his destructive war seems likely to leave him with a similar deal.

To be fair, the Economist’s take is marginally more supportive:

If that is indeed how the war ends, it ends with no outright winners. When the bombs started falling Mr Trump told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand”. Now he is making a deal with the regime he sought to topple. Any such agreement is likely to be controversial in Washington. Lindsey Graham, a hawkish Republican senator, has already said it must be subject to congressional review. He also looks keen to lay the blame for a bad deal at the feet of Mr Vance, whom he describes as the “architect” of the MOU….

A pair of events helped bring America and Iran to this point: the failure of two previous rounds of nuclear negotiations, in February and in early 2025; and the mass protests in Iran this past winter, fuelled by high inflation and a collapsing currency, which became Mr Trump’s pretext to attack. The MOU addresses neither of these. It leaves the nuclear dispute unresolved, and the limited sanctions relief it offers will not be enough to pull Iran out of its severe economic crisis.

The risk, then, is that a stripped-down deal may not be the end of the war after all.

To accurately assess the reported outcome it’s worth revisiting the five U.S. goals that were articulated at the start of the war and see if anything has changed:

1. Destroy Iran’s missile-industrial complex. Nope. If anything, reporting suggests that Iran’s capacity has improved in recent months. Bloomberg reports that intelligence agencies estimate that Iran has retained three-fourths of its pre-war missile capacity. With an actual cease-fire, Iran can ramp up production to return to the pre-war status quo.

2. Destroy Iran’s navy. Yes, but it doesn’t matter all that much. Iran has demonstrated that a combination of speedboats and drones can still shut down the Strait of Hormuz pretty effectively.

3. Sever Iran from its terror proxies. Nuh-uh. Iran insisting that any cease-fire includes Lebanon indicates that Tehran still values its ties to Hezbollah and other violent non-state actors in the region.

4. Ensure Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. That’s what the 60 days of negotiation is going to settle. If the reported terms are actually honored, the U.S. may have made some headway in this area — but no one thinks this will be settled anytime soon.

5. Create the conditions for regime change. No. Well, technically, the U.S. has kinda sorta succeeded in regime change. The problem is that the post-decapitation regime appears to be even more radical and risk-taking than the old regime.

Back in April I concluded, “a military campaign against an adversary that has failed to achieve four out of five objectives does not seem like a successful operation…. The longer this war drags on, the greater the costs for the United States. Absent a full-scale ground invasion, Iran can hold out. But Trump can’t simply declare victory and tap out either. Which means he is stuck trying to sell a strategic defeat as a tactical victory.”

And now? There is no denying that the U.S. bombing campaign has damaged Iran’s capabilities. But the problem with a “mowing the grass” strategy is that the grass always grows back. In the meantime, Trump has devoted inordinate amounts of ordinance and the possible lifting of economic sanctions to get Iran to agree to return things to the pre-February 28th status quo. So much deadweight loss — and little to nothing in return.

If this is what victory looks like then all Americans should be sick and tired of all the winning.

Francis Fukuyama’s assessment is even more bleak:

This “deal” was nothing of the sort. If the reports are accurate, it instead represented a total U.S. capitulation to Iran. It basically set the clock back to February, when the Strait was open and the United States and Israel had not yet started bombing the Islamic Republic. It merely solved a problem that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had themselves created by launching the war in the first place….

The reported “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) kicks all of the contentious issues down the road into negotiations that are to take place during the 60-day ceasefire. Trump treated all of these issues as having been conceded already, but if that were the case, why weren’t they in the MOU? It is very unlikely that Iran will budge over the next two months, since it is precisely these issues that speak to the regime’s core identity….

The MOU that Trump celebrated is a worse agreement than Obama’s 2015 deal, which Trump endlessly castigated in the past. Obama’s deal forbade Iran from enriching uranium beyond 3.67 percent for 15 years (far below the 90 percent enrichment necessary for bomb-grade purposes), and provided specific measures for removing enriched uranium from Iran. All of these provisions were to be overseen by outside inspectors, and Iran complied with its terms until Trump withdrew from the agreement. The major criticism of the deal, which U.S. hardliners stressed, was that it said nothing about Iranian support for regional proxies and that it provided sanctions relief at the start of the agreement.

Trump’s reported MOU, meanwhile, places no limits on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and makes no commitments about regional proxies. It does not provide for sanctions if Iran doesn’t concede by the end of the 60 days, though the Iranians have said that they will not proceed with final negotiations unless such relief occurs first. So Trump’s purported deal achieves considerably less than the agreement that Obama made.

By now the hard-working readers of Drezner’s World should logically infer that whatever is in this memorandum of understanding, it is not a great deal.

The open question is whether the mere existence of a cease-fire that can be extended works in the strategic favor of the United States or Iran. And that will be a topic for a follow-up post.

1. It is also super-weird for Trump to thank the leaders of Russia and China for their assistance.