Still no one 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 warned his followers “not to listen to losers, who are critical of something they know nothing about.” But as this war approaches the brink, it’s clear that the president is also lost: He didn’t know what he was doing when he started it, and now he doesn’t know how to get out.
Just a day ago, Trump was trying to give confidence. Yesterday, he praised the agreement with Iran as much has been done; it was, he said on his Social Truth website, “discussed” and close to “completed.” The Iranians, of course, immediately protested this behavior, and the next day, Trump was supporting it. “If I make a deal with Iran,” he posted this afternoon, “it will be good and accurate, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran a large amount of MONEY, and a clear and clear path to a Nuclear Weapon.” The deal that had been made just a day earlier was “heavily negotiated” was now just a document, and Trump maintained that it was wrong to criticize it because “no one has seen it, or knows what it is,” and “it hasn’t even been fully negotiated.”
As of this afternoon, Trump had been reduced posting memes of a plane carrying a bomb under its wing and Thank you for your attention to this matter written on it.
Many of those most worried about what Trump might end up accepting from this latest crisis in Iran are not his critics, but his supporters. Trump enablers may not have access to the details of the deal, but they are clearly worried: Senators Lindsey Graham, Roger Wicker, and Ted Cruz were all posting expressions of shock and dismay on social media. Graham he said that any deal that hits Iran “makes one wonder why the war started”; Wicker said that a possible 60-day ceasefire would be “disastrous.” Cruz he gently suggested that the king had no idea what his rogue boys were up to, describing the plan as “pushed by some voice in the administration.”
Even Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, posted long screed warning Trump not to make a deal. “I know you want to get out of this mess,” he said. He then advised the president to “think.” Trump’s former secretary of state and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to be measured similarly, comparing the outline of a possible deal to the kind of thing Barack Obama’s team might have come up with when crafting the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Comprehensive Joint Action Plan (JCPOA), and warned that it could mean that the US will end up paying “the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.” Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, during his first term, and frequently speaks of the JCPOA (and Obama) with disdain; Pompeo’s comparison was sure to anger the Trump team.
And sure enough, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, responded to Pompeo immediately—giving the world a glimpse of what appears to be a building of fear inside the White House. “Mike Pompeo doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Cheung published on X. “He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He doesn’t read anything that happens, so how would he know.” (Cheung also continued to post updates about Trump working in the Oval Office on Saturday, as if this is an amazing example of the president’s work ethic.)
Trump’s worried mouthpieces probably know that the details of a future deal may not matter much at this point. Like my colleague David Frum he noted earlier today, the war has already ended in a strategic defeat for the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, an outcome that Trump is directly responsible for. How much Iran will get away with, and how much humiliation the United States will endure, has yet to be resolved by negotiators, but the war is now almost over with Tehran’s theocrats in power, and with more influence over their people and the global economy than they had three months ago.
Not only is Trump teetering on defeat, but he now risks signing a deal that could be worse than anything Obama negotiated with Iran a decade ago. I was critical of the JCPOA at the time because I believed that it violated some basic diplomatic logic by putting forward the JCPOA agreement while hoping that they would comply with its terms later. Obama, too, knew the risk he was taking, like he admitted at the time for AtlanticEditor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. “Look, 20 years from now, I’ll still be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on it,” he told Goldberg in 2015. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our great national security interest, I have a personal interest in shutting it down.”
The JCPOA agreement was not perfect, but was the result of the efforts of professional diplomats, scientists and other experts, and once it was in place, it was the only game in town. Obama gambled that Iran would feel pressure to comply with the JCPOA once it went into effect, and he was right. Three years later, few argued that Iran was violating the agreement; Trump deleted it anyway, without any thought or preparation, as he has done with it other arms deals.
Trump could uphold the JCPOA, and if Iran tried to run away with the bomb — and there is no evidence that Tehran was doing so in 2026 — he could blame Obama, make a case to Congress for war, and initiate military action. Faced with the ticking clock of an imminent Iranian nuclear test, even Trump’s most dedicated opponents at home and abroad could rally behind him. Instead (probably still basking in the sugar of a quick victory in Venezuela) he decided that he would seek glory as the liberator of Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reported he told Trump that the mullahs will fall; CIA Director John Ratcliffe, however, he told her that such predictions were “foolish.”
Now the president will end up having to sign off on a set of conditions that will likely make the JCPOA seem too demanding by comparison. Trump began this war assuming that all the other issues—nuclear weapons, terrorism, Iran’s regional adventurism—would disappear when the regime was overthrown. When that happened, he had no plan of what to do next, and seems to have decided to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons as the main explanation, not only why he went to war, but why the Americans must now. affected by economic effects of conflict. The Iranians may promise to abandon the nuclear program—as they did to Obama a decade ago—but for now, not only are they presenting themselves as the aggrieved party, they are behaving like winners: making demands, getting the Americans to negotiate the status of the Strait of Hormuz, and dismissing the nuclear issue.
Yesterday, the president said Axios that the chance of reaching an agreement with the Iranians was “firmly 50/50,” and that he would either accept a “good” deal or “beat them so the kingdom comes.” None of these things will happen. Instead, a piece of paper will, at some point, come out of a boardroom in Pakistan. It will prove that the US must accept strategic defeat in the Middle East. And Donald Trump, who brought America to this point because of his ego and his incompetence, will sign.
