Trump’s ‘Better’ Iran Nuclear Deal Is Worse
Future presidents will have to reset confidence in the United States after this fiasco.
When President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, Barack Obama said the United States “could eventually be left with a losing choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or another war in the Middle East.”
The Trump administration scoffed at this “deal or war” dichotomy. “Pundits may gin up fear over the idea that this administration will get the United States into a war,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote in 2018, “but it is clear that Americans have a president who, while not afraid to use military power … is not eager to use it either.” Trump’s team boasted it would get a better nuclear deal and force Iran to stop threatening its neighbors and sponsoring terrorism through punishing economic sanctions alone.
The consequences of that blunder are now obvious.
Iran restarted the nuclear program Obama’s deal had frozen.
It doubled down on its support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen.
A second term Trump then started the war he said would not be needed.
That war cost 13 American service members their lives. It killed at least 1,700 civilians, including hundreds of children, in Iran.
The United States nearly exhausted stockpiles of critical munitions that will take years and tens of billions of dollars to replenish. Americans saw gas prices rise by 50%; farmers struggled to afford fertilizer; inflation went back up. Russia earned tens of billions of extra dollars from higher oil prices. The global economy was thrown into turmoil.
And when all was said and done, after eating all these costs, Trump signaled he would stop the war for a promise by Iran to return, maybe, at some point in the future, to a nuclear deal no better than the one he scrapped eight years ago.
Trump’s deal will not, by all accounts, completely or permanently end Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, relying instead on inspections to keep nuclear development below military thresholds, and it will lift sanctions and return Iran’s frozen assets — just like Obama’s did. Negotiating even that in the coming weeks will be hard, because the details of nuclear arms control are complicated, and there may be more meaningless exchanges of fire as we wait. But the end result will not come close to the “unconditional surrender” Trump demanded, because the Iranian regime now knows two things that weren’t clear a few months ago. First, Trump lacks the stomach for a long war. And second, Iran’s now proven ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz gives it new leverage over the world.
I’ll give Trump credit for avoiding the mistake made by some past U.S. presidents (see John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam) who sunk deeper into military quagmires to avoid admitting failure, hoping that a few more bombs or troops might turn the corner. The Iran-obsessed war hawks will condemn him for accepting a weak deal, and normal Americans won’t reward him for easing the pain in their wallets he should never have caused (and that will persist for a while anyway). But Trump is done with the war, humiliation be damned. Maybe, in this case, we should be thankful for his capacity to lie to himself that everything is just fine.
The people who convinced Trump to shred Obama’s deal and to start this war still haven’t learned the lesson of the past decade. It’s not that we didn’t sanction or bomb Iran hard enough. It’s that there are some things Iran’s brutal and fanatical regime will not do no matter how much pain we impose on it. We can pressure that regime into allowing meaningful international controls on its ability to produce nuclear weapons (as Obama did), but neither bombs nor sanctions will force it to give up power or the tools it believes it needs to maintain power. The only way to ensure this regime never seeks nuclear weapons or threatens its neighbors with missiles and terror is to overthrow it, and that would require marching ground troops to Tehran and occupying the country.
Of course, the United States could win that kind of total war with Iran, if we had to. But Iran was never a problem worth asking thousands of Americans to die for or tanking the global economy to permanently solve. And it’s clear now that Trump agrees it is not.
Trump never believed his own rhetoric about Iran being the world’s “number one terrorist state” that could have nuked us in “two weeks” — or the claims of GOP senators like Lindsey Graham and of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that Iran is the center of global evil. The Iran hawks persuaded him only that he could get an easy win, not that there was a truly imminent threat to America, otherwise he would not have given up when the going got tough.
If the Trump administration wants to redeem itself, it has to bear down now on all the things it was too bored to do before.
First, get the details of a diplomatic agreement right. The United States has less leverage over Iran’s leaders than before the war (now that they’ve absorbed and survived the massive military campaign we had long threatened), but they do want sanctions lifted. A deal that at least removes or dilutes Iran’s highly enriched uranium and gets international inspectors back still would be worth having.
Second, try to help the Iranian people — not with false promises of liberation you won’t keep, but by restoring broadcasting to Iran, technology to beat censorship, and help for civic groups, and by mobilizing the world to expose and condemn the regime’s brutality. A democratic revolution in Iran would be wonderful, but it can only happen if bombs aren’t falling.
Third, defend Israel when it’s actually threatened, but don’t ever again let Netanyahu use you to launch unnecessary wars to save his political skin. And if you actually want Arab states to recognize Israel, do the hard work of implementing the Gaza peace agreement, which should have been a much higher priority than a non-urgent threat from Iran.
Fourth, focus on the true existential threats to American and global security. Russia, an actual nuclear power waging a war of conquest in Europe, needs to be stopped, not empowered with sanctions waivers. China is producing munitions and high-end weapons at five to six times the rate of the United States and storing them up as we squander ours. It’s time to stop the bleeding, return military assets from the Persian Gulf to the Indo-Pacific, and reaffirm the support for Taiwan and our allies in Asia that Trump seems happy to bargain away.
It will fall to the next president to take on the task, made even harder by the fiasco with Iran, of restoring the world’s confidence in America’s decency, judgment, and sanity. Let’s hope that in the meantime, Trump is chastened by this fiasco to do less stupid shit.
Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.
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