Backlash against the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) reached between the United States and Iran in mid-June has been swift and striking from the American right.
Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro called it “a disaster.” Rebeccah Heinrichs, a national defense expert at the Hudson Institute, said it was “worse than not having it.” Right-wing anchors and analysts who spent years excoriating former President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are now lamenting what they see as a failure on par with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Journalist and NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon went a step further. Otherwise an admirer and supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, she suggested that the agreement is not just bad for America, but actually worse than the JCPOA. Her evidence: Iran plans to charge tolls on the Strait of Hormuz. “Something they didn’t know in February,” she wrote, is that “no one will stop them.” And, unlike after the JCPOA, the regime can now claim that it faced down the U.S. military and survived.
But is this really new information? It certainly is not for the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. For decades, Iran built its strategy around the assumption of Western reluctance to fight. The JCPOA, which sought to manage the regime’s nuclear program rather than confront it, embodied that reluctance.
American timidity towards chants of “Death to America” is old news. The lack of resolve among U.S. voters for successful wars abroad has been a governing assumption among Islamists, Third Worldists and great-power rivals alike for at least 20 years. Insofar as this MoU puts more of a spotlight on that weakness, it can hardly be said to have exposed anything new.
It’s no small thing that, as of this moment, Iran can credibly declare that it stood up to and withstood the United States. But Iran also claimed victory after the JCPOA, which provided sanctions relief and allowed the regime to expand its regional dominance without constraint, all while leaving its nuclear program intact.
When that deal’s provisions were formally implemented in early 2016, Iran didn’t just tell its population it had won. By most measures, it had won.
Yes, the Strait of Hormuz remained open after the JCPOA was signed, but largely because Iran was already getting enough from the deal. Under that agreement, the Strait was very much a hostage. The regime simply had no reason to shoot the hostage while the ransom was being paid.
By contrast, the new MoU is a preliminary framework that guarantees Iran little upfront. More importantly, it follows “Operation Epic Fury,” which set out on Feb. 28 to stop Iran from assembling the architecture that would make future action against its nuclear program impossible—or at least prohibitively costly. By any reasonable measure, “Epic Fury” succeeded in that objective.
A military operation can, incidentally, highlight the limits of its strategy while also intentionally achieving its goals. But a regime that claims victory while sitting on severely degraded military capacity is in a meaningfully different position than one that claims victory with its leverage completely intact.
The propaganda win for Iran is real, and it is a genuine cause for concern. But whereas the JCPOA left Iran stronger than ever before, the current MoU follows a campaign that left the regime hobbling. And if the MoU merely stalls until more favorable conditions allow the United States to resume kinetic action, it will look even better in hindsight.
