Does Donald Trump actually understand what he’s done?
Responding to critics of his agreement with Iran, the U.S. president called them “fools,” and either “jealous or bad people,” because “the stock market just hit A RECORD HIGH, and oil prices are tumbling down.”
So the economy is all that matters in a struggle to neutralize a fanatical Islamic revolutionary regime that puts its weapons where its mouth is when it screams “Death to America”?
At the G7 meeting in France this week, Trump’s upbeat mood suggested that he really believed his own statements casting his Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) ceasefire terms as Tehran’s surrender.
But the exact opposite is the case. He has surrendered America to Iran.
He himself admitted that he stopped the war because of the threat of economic catastrophe if it continued. That was because of the oil shock caused by Iran seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump was therefore signaling that America was powerless to defeat the regime. At a stroke, he turned the United States into a paper tiger, seen to be unwilling to do what it takes to fight a war until victory.
He thus ensured that Tehran will have the upper hand in everything that now follows in the negotiations for a final “deal.” It will be able to run rings round the Americans over the proposed “online blending” of the enriched uranium Trump once pledged to destroy, the destruction of centrifuges, disarmament verification or anything else.
Rather than ushering in an economic nirvana, Trump has given Iran the ability to take the world economy permanently hostage. After the MoU’s 60-day negotiation period, there’s nothing to stop it from continuing its protection racket on the Strait of Hormuz by charging ships for selective safe transit.
As U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded, Iran now retains the ability to close the Strait whenever it chooses, leaving the Islamic Republic with the capacity to trigger significant economic disruption at any time.
The MoU makes zero reference to destroying Iran’s ballistic missiles or its support for terrorist proxies. On the all-important goal of destroying forever the regime’s ability to get the bomb, there’s only a vague statement that Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.”
That’s precisely what it said for four decades while racing to develop them. It was shown to have repeatedly lied through its teeth. The idea that anyone should believe a word the regime ever says is an insult to the intelligence.
Even more astoundingly, Tehran will receive vast financial benefits before it even starts discussing any substantive issues. The U.S. Treasury will immediately issue waivers for “the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives and all associated services including banking, transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.”
It will also immediately “make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” And eventually, the regime will be handed at least $300 billion for “reconstruction and economic development.”
All this money will go straight into financing Hezbollah, the Houthis, other proxy militias, global terrorism, missile production, a resumed nuclear program, the further oppression of the Iranian people, and a reinvigorated war to destroy Israel and America.
This empowerment will drive the Gulf states back to making nice with Tehran. It will also hugely incentivize Hezbollah and Hamas to step up their attacks.
Hamas is already openly calling to escalate against Israel, signaling that it will now move its war of extermination against the Jewish state from the Gaza Strip to the “West Bank”—in other words, another “intifada” targeting Israeli civilians.
What’s so extraordinary is that the war Trump waged with Israel against the Islamic Republic clocked up unprecedented achievements. It liquidated Iran’s leadership, decimated its missile armory, sank its navy, destroyed its air defenses and put back the immediate nuclear threat it posed by several years.
But now, he is putting all that into reverse. Moreover, his statements over the past few days have been absolutely bizarre.
Trump claimed that Iran “must have missiles to some degree” because others, like Saudi Arabia, had them. But Saudi Arabia isn’t at war against America or Israel. Rather than firing at them, as Iran has been doing, it’s been assisting them against the Tehran war-mongers.
The president’s most disturbing comments, however, concerned Israel, America’s close ally in the war. He accused the Jewish state of fighting for too long against Hezbollah in Lebanon and killing too many civilians in apartment blocks. He then suggested that Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, should handle Hezbollah instead “if Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else.”
These were monstrous comments. As in Gaza, Israel has gone to great lengths to target Hezbollah in precision attacks that minimize civilian casualties as far as possible. And al-Sharaa, whom Trump seems to admire so much, is ISIS or Al-Qaeda in a suit.
The reason for Trump’s comments was as obvious as it was appalling. Iran has threatened to scupper the deal with America unless Israel stops attacking Tehran’s key asset, Hezbollah, which is unrelenting in its attacks on northern Israel.
Washington kept Israel out of the discussion leading up to the MoU, which so undermines Israel’s security. At the same time, Trump was genuflecting to Iran’s demand that Israel stop defending itself against the regime’s proxy army trying to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
Trump signed the agreement because he found himself in a trap from which all escape options were bad. But that was because he had refused to accept Israel’s assessment that the Tehran regime needed to be brought down and that it would take a year of attrition to do so.
Having embarked on a different, shorter war, he then proceeded to undermine Israel’s carefully thought-out plan for victory, calling off its most decisive attacks at the last moment.
Looking for an off-ramp from the war to avoid political or economic collapse is rational, if regrettable. Dressing up a tactical retreat as victory to obscure the disaster caused by Trump’s own incompetence is also rational, if deplorable.
But the enormity of his capitulation to Iran, the ludicrous absurdity of his remarks and the venom against his great ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggest that something else is at work here.
It was always assumed that Trump would be careful never to go down in history as a second Barack Obama, replicating the former president’s disastrous 2015 Iran deal; nor would he ever tolerate being thought of as a sucker.
But what if Trump’s chronic narcissism makes him unable to see that’s what he’s actually become? We know from long experience that he often frames events to correspond with what he wants them to be, rather than what they actually are. What if, accordingly, he really has turned surrender into victory against Iran in his mind? What if he really believes that America has won this war?
There are possibly even darker explanations for this debacle. There are the financial connections between Iran’s ally Qatar and people in the Trump administration—not to mention the $1 trillion that Qatar has now pledged to invest in the United States, in addition to the vast sums with which it has already bought up America.
And in Tablet last April, Lee Smith suggested that the Iranian regime’s “echo chamber” influence operation in Washington, D.C., to sell Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal was actively working once again during the current war to safeguard Iran’s nuclear program. This time, however, it had a man on the inside of the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance.
Israel now faces a hideous choice between abandoning its military defense against Hezbollah’s unceasing attacks—another Israeli soldier was killed in Lebanon this week, and several others were injured—or risking the vindictive wrath of Trump.
The longtime opponents of this war may be gloating, but America’s national interest demanded—and still demands—that the Iranian regime be neutralized.
Iran’s war against the West hasn’t ended. Trump’s surrender has produced a crisis not just for Israel but America as well.
