Analysis
Trump’s
Iran deal is result of unrealistic ambitions for an untenable war
Andrew
Roth
in
Washington
US
entered war with maximalist goals and exits it with pragmatic decision to end
conflict despite political cost
Middle East crisis – live updates
Wed 17
Jun 2026 23.17 BST
As the
adage goes: no plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy.
Donald
Trump entered the war with Iran with maximalist goals: eliminating the
country’s nuclear programme, destroying its ballistic missile programme and
ending its support for regional military groups including Hezbollah and Hamas.
He exits
it with Iran’s word not to build a bomb and to hold further nuclear
discussions, no mention in writing of the ballistic missile programme and with
Hezbollah celebrating a “victory” as the memorandum of understanding (MOU)
instituted a ceasefire in Lebanon, where Israel has seized a swath of the
country as a “buffer zone”.
Iran’s
key asset ended up being the strait of Hormuz, the waterway that almost every
previous simulation of the war predicated would be quickly cut off by Iran. To
reopen the strait, the administration was forced to fold on its broader goals
or face what Trump called a “worldwide depression”.
Barbara
Leaf, a distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute and a
former US assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, said the US
had started the war with “disastrously unrealistic assessments of the regime’s
resilience”, as well as Iran’s readiness to seize the strait of Hormuz and
attack US and foreign facilities in the Gulf.
“The US
rapidly found that overmatching an adversary that has spent four decades honing
its asymmetrical warfighting doctrine and skills would not be the war it had
prepared for,” she said. “And the rapid escalation of economic pain globally
that eventually came to American consumers made the war all the more
untenable.”
Now, she
added, Trump faced a conundrum: “He doesn’t want to go back to warfighting. But
he’s tossed away so much of the leverage he might have had if the war had ended
in the first or second week.”
It has
been clear for days that the Trump administration was skittish about putting
out the text of its MOU. It was only finally read out by a senior
administration official on a briefing call on Wednesday, and the White House
still has not published a copy online.
The
reasoning is clear: many in Trump’s own party will hate this deal. The outgoing
US senator Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, called it the “worst foreign policy
blunder in decades”.
“Reagan
is rolling over in his grave,” he wrote. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not
curbed, and they have learned that threatening the strait of Hormuz works and
will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new
infrastructure under this deal.”
Thom
Tillis, Republican senator for North Carolina, said the 14 points published on
Wednesday were “not sufficient for me to say it’s a good deal”.
Trump has
for years attacked the Obama-era joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA),
saying that the former president had sent over “pallets of cash” to bribe Iran
into not making a bomb. But when it came time for Trump to make his own peace
with Iran, he found himself justifying the potential turnover of a far larger
set of assets – as well as other financial incentives, backing a ceasefire in
Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, and allowing Iran and Oman to discuss the
future of the strait.
“It’s not
our money, it’s their money, and we froze it at a certain point in time,” Trump
said of the frozen Iranian assets. “I guess we’re going to have to give it
back.”
At
moments on Wednesday, it almost seemed that Trump was echoing Iranian talking
points, saying that if US ally Saudi Arabia has ballistic missiles then Iran
had a point that it should too. As to the potential for Iran’s uranium
enrichment, he said: “It’s a little hard when other people have it, other
adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of
electricity and things like that. You have to use a little common sense.”
The MOU
was ultimately a pragmatic decision by the Trump administration that the
conflict must end as quickly as possible despite the political cost. Leaf said
she was “deeply relieved that this ill-conceived war appears to be ending”, but
added that there was “little to ensure that the administration won’t find
itself slipping back into conflict”.
Robert
Malley, a former state department official and negotiator on the JCPOA , wrote
that there is not much value in comparing the two agreements, which were
“fundamentally different agreements that emerged from starkly different
contexts”.
“The
bottom line is that the MOU is far preferable to any of the alternatives on
offer,” he wrote. “Period.”
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