What the hell is going on with these negotiations with Iran?
They’re not over. In many ways, they have not really begun.
This is President Trump as a pragmatist. I may disagree with him, but that’s what’s going on.
Let’s start with the basics. First: The opening of the Iran war was good and righteous and militarily successful. The president of the United States went after the military capabilities of the Iranian regime, took out the top level of the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Iranian regime itself, including the Ayatollah, destroyed their air force, destroyed their navy, destroyed the vast majority of their ballistic missile launchers and facilities to develop new ballistic missile launchers.
All of that was very good.
Second, the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that President Trump just signed, if taken at face value, is a total mess, a massive problem.
Third, we probably should not take the MOU at face value, because it’s not the end of the story; what’s in the MOU is not where things are likely to go.
Why exactly did President Trump sign this crappy memorandum of understanding with Iran?
The answer is because the elections are in a few months, and he’s worried about the economy. This is not a secret. The president said yesterday:
I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened. But all I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship. It never went down. They didn’t like it, the people. You know, the stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is, including the people on this stage other than me.
Every time we said something amazing like “We’re going to settle,” it would go up. And every time we said something negative like “We’re not going to be able to settle,” it would go down very big.
The stock market will always choose the option least likely to lead to conflict because conflict is costly. That does not mean the conflict is immoral or wrong, but that’s the reason why the president did all of this.
The president was being told by people near him that if he had bombed Kharg Island or the South Pars gas field, it would have caused some sort of international depression.
This is President Trump being a pragmatist, but I heartily disagree with his pragmatic assessment of the situation. I’ve made that clear for months. I think it was a gigantic mistake to implement a ceasefire back in April. I think we should have bombed Kharg Island and ended the war.
Yes, it would have caused an economic shock — and then that shock would have ended, and the Iranian regime would have ended.
But President Trump didn’t want to do that. He was concerned about oil prices in the midterms.
What does that mean for what comes next? The president is deeply concerned about the country’s economic health right before the election. He believes that if the economy is doing better and oil prices are lower, then perhaps Republicans hold the House.
This means that after the midterms, President Trump may begin enforcing red lines. The president was threatening just that yesterday, saying if Iran doesn’t honor the agreement, “We’ll probably go back to bombing them until they honor it.”
The vice president says that he hopes that Iran is not lying, but he doesn’t trust anyone.
If he doesn’t trust anyone, this MOU isn’t a great idea.
The MOU is not, in fact, a deal to end the war. It is a memorandum of understanding, which is a vague term sheet.
With all of that said, I think the optics on this MOU suck. I think the president is making a huge mistake by signing this MOU, because we could have lowered gas prices without signing a comprehensive MOU.
If you wanted to bribe the Iranians to temporarily open the Strait — which is effectively what this does — we could have done it by just walking away from the Strait and letting them toll the ships, which would be the practical effect of the MOU.
My biggest problem with the memorandum of understanding is not the terms themselves, because I think the vast majority of those terms will never be implemented or come to pass.
My problem is the optics, and I hope that the Iranian optics win is temporary. Because here’s the thing: We wrecked them. We handed them one of the greatest losses in human history. We literally killed their entire leadership class, did it again, and destroyed their entire air force, navy, and ballistic missile launchers. We put their economy on life support. We blockaded all of their ships.
We projected power. It made America look strong.
And now, because of this, it looks as though we just allowed a nation without nuclear weapons, a nation of Islamic tyranny that just murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens, a nation without nuclear weapons, functional air force, functional navy, and functional ballistic missile arsenal, to call the shots.
That’s a mistake. It’s a mistake I trust the president will reverse because he’s a pragmatist.
I don’t think President Trump wants to look weak right now. He does look weak. I trust that after the midterms, he will course-correct and reestablish America’s credible threat of force. For now, however, it’s not a good look. Even if we understand the pragmatic concerns about oil prices, it just isn’t a great look.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament of Iran, a mass-murdering piece of trash, was walking around grinning ear to ear, declaring that what they wanted to achieve through military action they got through negotiation — several times over.
The Iranians believe they won the negotiation. They are grinning about it. Is that a good optics look for the United States?
The answer, of course, is no.
The MOU is just an empty piece of paper. It says that the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
That’s weird, because the Islamic Republic of Iran still chants “Death to America.” And as far as the territorial integrity of Iran, what happens when Iran initiates a gigantic terror war in the Middle East?
None of this will become a full agreement. This is most likely to end up like the Gaza peace deal. The president helped broker a deal where stage one was going to be the release of all of the hostages alive and dead, and an Israeli pullback to particular areas.
Stage two was underpants gnomes. Stage three was world peace. A bunch of stuff was supposed to happen in stage two. The Palestinians were going to moderate. Hamas was going to turn over its guns.
Garbage. None of that ever happened. We are still at stage two and we will be at stage two forever, because stage one was the whole thing.
The MOU will be the same thing. The only thing that will actually happen here is that oil will flow out of the Strait, and we will bribe them to do it, and they will toll things.
If I don’t believe that the rest of the MOU is ever going to become reality, including, for example, a $300 billion investment fund, then why bother focusing on it?
The answer is that if you do not wish for this MOU to become reality, there must be pushback against its terms.
A full deal that looks like the MOU would be a disaster. It would leave Iran permanently in control of what people have described as an “economic nuclear weapon,” the Strait, that they could close any time. It would give them hundreds of billions of dollars so they could later develop a bomb, all while allowing them to fund terrorism and rebuild their ballistic missiles.
It would be bad not just because of what Iran would do, but also because of the signal it would send to the rest of the world that a ragtag group of terrorists can push the most powerful military and the most militant president off the ball with some mines and some drones and some ugly words.
What do you think China would then do about the Taiwan Strait or Taiwan itself? What do you think an expansionist Russia would do about the Baltics?
If you would like a world where America loses its global foothold — and there are some who actively want this — then make the MOU a full deal.
I know that President Trump, as a pragmatist, is right most of the time that actions matter, but words really don’t.
But when it comes to the signals he sends to the rest of the world about America’s role in the world, there’s a basic truth.
Words do matter.