President Trump declared in March that a deal to end his war with Iran would require “unconditional surrender,” but that wasn’t quite right. The preliminary agreement he just reached with the Iranian regime was more like a conditional surrender — by the United States.
In the past few days, various Republicans and war hawks have emerged, seemingly bewildered, to criticize the deal. “Trump has surrendered to Iran,” wrote Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas warned, “Giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea.”
The criticisms are correct: The Iran deal is a major setback. It gives immediate relief to Iran, including the prompt unfreezing of billions of dollars of Iranian assets and later a $300 billion fund to help rebuild Iran. And it appears to open the door to Iran gaining at least partial control over the Strait of Hormuz, with the ability, 60 days hence, to charge fees of ships transiting the strait.
“This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” lamented Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
Yet these denunciations miss the most important point. Trump’s fundamental mistake was not ending the war but getting into it in the first place.
At this stage, Trump was right to retreat, for he had no good options and continuing the war would surely have cost more lives. It was already shattering the global economy and Republicans’ chances in the midterms.
“If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years; you would never have the Hormuz Strait open,” Trump said. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.”
The unpalatable truth is that Iran won the war, and that’s why it won the negotiation. Trump dawdled as long as he could, because he realized any deal he could hope to reach would be a humiliation — but the failure of the war had left him with no good exit.
The lesson to be learned from this debacle is to avoid starting needless wars, to temper our hubris that everything will work out perfectly and to rely far more on diplomacy to solve global problems.
In this case, the hawks who were most determined to destroy Iran have done the most to strengthen it, and that should be a cautionary tale.
We had a solution — a highly imperfect one — to the Iran nuclear problem back in 2015 with President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. Iran shipped nearly all of its enriched uranium out of the country, limited enrichment and opened itself to rigorous inspections. But Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the hawks denounced it.
Obama’s Iran deal “was so bad,” Trump said in 2018, focusing on money that was returned to Iran as part of the agreement. Last year he said that he would “have never given them back the money” as part of a deal. He added, “I would have won that negotiation.”
Well, perhaps not.
After Trump tore up the Obama deal eight years ago, Iran’s leaders predictably built up their nuclear program until they created a crisis. Trump probably could have secured a good bargain in February of this year, on the eve of war, but instead he rashly began dropping bombs, without any exit strategy and, apparently, without calculating how he would respond to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
This lesson about avoiding needless wars is not a new one but apparently must be learned afresh by every generation. In the “Iliad,” Achilles lamented “this insane voyage” to wage the Trojan War, “fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes.”
Indeed, ever since Homer wrote of the Greeks’ attempted regime change in Troy, we’ve seen that the grander the military ambition, the more wary we should be.
The new Iran deal punts serious questions about Iran’s nuclear capabilities into a further period of negotiations. And I fear one result of this war is that Iran will be more likely to pursue nuclear weapons. My guess is that the 60-day negotiating period will be extended, that Iran will slow-walk nuclear negotiations and that Trump will be reluctant to accept anything that looks like the Obama accord. Then Trump will lose interest in the same way he seems to have forgotten about Gaza. There will be almost no appetite in America for another Iran war, and the newly empowered Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will weigh whether to adopt North Korea’s strategy and try to build a nuclear arsenal to seal its regional primacy.
The cost of this war is a weakened America and thousands of lost lives, mostly Iranian and Lebanese but also those of 13 American service members. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on war financing, tells me that she believes the eventual total bill for this war — including repair of bases, replacement of munitions and years of benefits to injured veterans — is very likely to be $1 trillion. Instead of paying for Medicaid, college, child care or humanitarian aid, vast sums were squandered in the Persian Gulf.
Those whom we have betrayed the most are ordinary Iranians. In January, after the Iranian regime massacred thousands of its own people, Trump said, “Help is on its way.” Instead we have left Iranians to suffer under a more oppressive government — and with less hope for change. As a tribute to American indifference, the Trump administration this month reportedly deported an Iranian woman to the Central African Republic, a war-ravaged country that the State Department advises not to visit “for any reason.”
So by all means, denounce this failed Iran war agreement. But the tragedy here is not Trump’s exit from the war but the war itself, and the lesson of history is that when you see a cast of overconfident hawks promising painless victory, beware.
