Now, the main event…

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a short, victorious war—an excursion, if you will—to topple the ayatollahs, or get rid of Iran’s nuclear program, or deplete its missile stockpile—or whatever combination of those goals. It was supposed to end, President Trump said, with Iran’s unconditional surrender. But all that quickly unraveled as a reconstituted, even more hard-line regime discovered a new point of leverage, one just as potent as nukes: the Strait of Hormuz. Withering U.S. and Israeli strikes may have dented Iranian military infrastructure, but they proved powerless to stop Tehran from taking hostage the world’s energy supply.

Trump, who grew bored by this impossible problem set, wanted out. A ceasefire didn’t alleviate the economic strain as Iran continued to blockade the strait, and it didn’t escape the president’s attention that every report of a potential deal to end the conflict sent the stock market soaring. Some form of capitulation became inevitable. On Sunday, the White House and the Iranians, along with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who facilitated the negotiations, announced that a deal had finally been reached.

It was supposed to be signed at a ceremony in Switzerland on Friday, providing the president an easily digestible image for the American voter: The war was over and life could go back to normal. It would be a nice bookend to the excursion—something Trump could spin as a win, and a badly needed one ahead of the fast-approaching November midterms. But then people in Washington started asking questions: What was in the document, and why couldn’t we see it? Within a few hours, the purported deal of the century had been downgraded to a memorandum of understanding that extended the ceasefire by 60 days and punted on the big issues.

By Tuesday, the recriminations were flying. Bari Weiss’s Free Press published an editorial demanding that the president release the text of the deal, echoing calls from other Trump allies. Leaked versions of the M.O.U. began to appear in Bloomberg, Axios, and the Times, all pointing to a total victory for Iran: Among other provisions, the U.S. would even go to the U.N. Security Council to repeal the decades-old sanctions on Iran. Much of foreign policy Washington melted down in apoplectic rage. Barak Ravid, the ubiquitous and sometimes unreliable chronicler of the Iran conflict, reported that the White House was considering moving up the signing ceremony.

The White House, having lost control of the narrative—and instead of just releasing the document—hastily arranged a call with reporters on Wednesday night to provide a readout of the M.O.U. The following morning, Washington awoke to news that the original signing ceremony had been called off. Instead, Trump had quickly signed the deal in the middle of a dinner with Emmanuel Macron at Versailles—a place inextricably linked, for those who know their history, to another treaty ending a pointless, ruinous war, only to lay the groundwork for another that was far, far worse.

Trump has long claimed to be a master dealmaker, but he is a showman first, and by both metrics this M.O.U. is a failure. The spectacle Trump planned for his 80th birthday—a gladiatorial UFC fight on the White House lawn and punctuated by a military flyover, an image that seemed designed for Trump rally merch—went off without a hitch. But the theater of the U.S.–Iran negotiations, choreographed to dress up Trump’s failure to achieve any of his stated goals, was far less thought out. This production didn’t even make it to opening night.

It’s hard to remember Washington being angrier—and angrier on a bipartisan basis. Democrats are mostly glad that the war is over, but are loath to give Trump credit for putting out a fire he started, seemingly for naught. Republican hawks are fuming that the JCPOA—a.k.a. Obama’s Iran deal that they so hated—suddenly looks like an incredible bargain in retrospect. On top of that, Trump threw Israel under the bus by including Lebanon in the deal. “People are incandescently angry,” said Danielle Pletka, an expert on Israel and the Middle East at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “I mean, what the fuck?”

Among the concessions in the M.O.U., the U.S. committed to lift sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil, unfreeze up to $25 billion in Iranian assets, and set up a $300 billion reconstruction fund to help the regime rebuild. And while J.D. Vance has pushed the talking point that these rewards are contingent on Tehran’s behavior, Iranian oil tankers are already on their way out of the Gulf. The regime will soon be far richer, with even more resources available to help it survive the next 47 years.

Iran, for its part, hasn’t guaranteed much in return. The M.O.U. “reiterated” that Iran will not seek a nuclear weapon, and that it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz without any tolls. But Iran has always insisted that its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes—a claim that has always strained credulity. (The use of the word “reiterate” was the giveaway.) The thorny questions of how to verify and guarantee Iran’s compliance was punted downfield, to be ironed out in the 60 days the agreement allowed for additional negotiations. As for the traffic through the Strait, the deal’s vagueness leaves open the possibility that Iran could still charge ships transiting the waterway after 60 days, and simply call them “fees” rather than “tolls.”

Moreover, the M.O.U. said nothing about Iran’s missile program, or about its regional proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—though Trump and Hezbollah provided real-time commentary. Trump, speaking from France, said it wouldn’t be fair to tell Iran it couldn’t have missiles when other countries in the region did. Anyway, what’s the big deal about a missile? “Missiles aren’t the problem,” the president said yesterday. “They hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.” (Just ask the Israelis and Gulf states that lived through Iranian missile fire this year…) Meanwhile, Reuters reported that Tehran has already promised Hezbollah a chunk of the money it would be receiving as part of the deal.

The closer critics looked, the worse the deal seemed. Other Republican hawks noted that the planned Gulf-backed reconstruction fund would run afoul of the White House’s own certification to Congress that the I.R.G.C.—a State Department–designated foreign terrorist organization—controls the Iranian construction sector and therefore cannot receive said funds. Mark Dubowitz, head of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, penned an op-ed excoriating the administration for squandering America’s leverage over Iran, while Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire had to run a detailed explanation of how the M.O.U. was and was not like the JCPOA. Even The Babylon Bee, the conservative attempt to replicate The Onion, skewered Trump. “Oh no!” they joked. “Trump Negotiates Deal with England and Now They Have the Colonies Back!”

And while D.C. was suddenly misty with nostalgia for the JCPOA, the Obama bros tried to refrain from too much public schadenfreude. “There is no victory lap,” Tommy Vietor, former Obama N.S.C. spokesman and Crooked Media co-founder, told me. “I want to kill off the mindset where it’s easier to beat the drums of war and send men and women to die than it is to negotiate a peace deal politically.” Summing up how so many across the political spectrum feel, his Crooked co-founder and Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau added, “My greatest rage is not about anything having to do with the Obama deal. I just cannot believe we, the world, were just put through this for absolutely fucking nothing.”

On the receiving end of all this bipartisan rage has been Vance, who just so happened to be on the media circuit this week promoting his new book, Communion. Ostensibly, it is about his journey to Catholicism, but such books are really about beginning a politician’s quest for the White House. But never mind what the book is about, because all anyone has been asking Vance on his incredibly ill-timed publicity tour is what he thinks about the Iran deal. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio has periodically appeared stone-faced and mute beside the president at the G7 in France, Vance has been forced to explain, over and over again, why the deal is not a total surrender—even as the president undermined his talking points in real-time.

It’s quite a reversal from the beginning of the conflict, when Vance, through a series of strategic leaks, positioned himself as a lone voice advocating against war. In the 2028 succession struggle with the more hawkish Rubio, Vance suddenly seemed on top. But all that changed this week when Vance found himself, once again, in the Kamala Harris trap: powerless to make any decisions while being asked by the president to publicly carry water for his most unpopular moves. Biden, of course, had tasked Harris with fixing the migration crisis—which, as was clear even at the time, was political murder. Vance has arguably been tasked with something far worse: to serve as the face of a disastrous resolution to a disastrous war as the president praises the Iranian leadership, and even Hamas, as perfectly nice and reasonable people.

Everyone smells blood in the water, especially Trump. “If it works out, I take the credit,” he said yesterday at a press conference in France. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D. You better be careful, J.D.!” He was joking, sure, but are Trump’s jokes ever really just jokes?

That’s all from me for this week, friends. Enjoy your holiday weekend and I’ll see you back here next week.

Julia

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