Two Cheers for Trump
His critics must ask themselves: if not this peace deal, then what?
As readers of this substack know, I’ve consistently argued that President Trump’s decision to launch the war on Iran was a mistake. But credit where it’s due: he was right to end it.
Trump’s critics insist the Memorandum of Understanding gives away too much. They may be right. But what, precisely, was the alternative?
A renewed bombing campaign would simply have returned Washington to a strategy that had already fallen well short of its stated objectives. Iran’s regime remained in power. Its nuclear program had been damaged but not eliminated. Its ballistic missile capability survived, and its regional proxy network, though weakened, remained intact.
Why should anyone believe another round of air strikes would suddenly have produced a fundamentally different result? More to the point, how long would that campaign have continued before Washington concluded that the costs outweighed the diminishing prospect of success?
Nor would the costs have been confined to the battlefield. Another sustained campaign would have consumed scarce American precision munitions at a time when many strategists remain focused on the Indo-Pacific.
More importantly, it would almost certainly have invited another round of Iranian retaliation against Gulf energy infrastructure and commercial shipping. Tehran cannot conventionally match American military power. But the past several months have demonstrated that it retains the capacity to impose enormous economic costs by threatening the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting energy flows across the Gulf.
Perhaps even the President himself has come to recognise this reality. His recent comments, however weird, suggest an appreciation that continued escalation carried unacceptable economic and strategic risks. If so, that represents less a contradiction than a tacit acknowledgement of what the past four months have demonstrated: military power, however overwhelming, has its limits.
Critics also argue that Trump’s agreement will likely amount to little better than the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump himself abandoned three years later. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action really such a failure?
Under that agreement, Iran broadly observed restrictions on uranium enrichment throughout the remainder of the Obama presidency and into Trump’s first term. It was only after Washington withdrew from the accord in 2018 that Tehran progressively abandoned those constraints, enriching uranium to levels approaching weapons grade.
Whatever the shortcomings of the original agreement, it had succeeded in imposing meaningful limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Those constraints steadily unravelled after the United States walked away.
None of this makes Trump’s original decision to wage war a wise one. Nor does it make the memorandum an ideal settlement. It does, however, explain why the President ultimately chose to stop escalating.
Statesmanship sometimes consists not in beginning wars but in recognising when their original objectives have become unattainable. Trump deserves credit for recognising that the costs of pressing on were likely to exceed the benefits.
His harshest critics have yet to answer the most important question of all: if not this imperfect peace, then what?
For two views, hear my exchanges with Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton and Tehran university professor Foad Izadi: