Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Needlessly Terrible Iran Deal II

One of my favorite political adages of all time is “That was worse than a crime.  It was a mistake.”  It represented the response of Napoleonic era diplomat Talleyrand to his own and the Emperor’s participation in a plot to get rid of a perceived domestic enemy.  (See, e.g., here.) And it pretty well sums up my main objection to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that President Trump and Iran’s leaders signed last week.

Even worse, moreover, as implied in yesterday’s initial post on the subject, it was a completely unnecessary mistake, and one that has brought the United States well down the road toward snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Other critics have compellingly exposed the problems with each of the fourteen points comprising the document, so no need for me to repeat those individual indictments.  Instead, I’ll focus on my principal, Talleyrand-like, overall beef with the agreement.  Specifically, nothing in the MOU or in his or other officials’ subsequent remarks that’s been claimed as a benefit to U.S. interests required the agreement to accomplish.  

Instead, as I’ve argued in previous posts (e.g, here) and on X.com (most recently, here), every one of these goals could have been secured by ignoring diplomacy altogether and pressing America’s clear military advantages.  As a result, no concessions to Iran have been needed at all.  Let us count the ways.

Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon?  That objective already has been secured.  As I’ve noted many times (e.g., in the aforementioned RealityChek post, Iran’s nuclear facilities have lain buried under tons of rock since President Trump authorized last June’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” airstrikes against them.  And you know who just agreed with this assessment – and the logical follow on that there’s no rush in removing the “nuclear dust” and related equipment after all?  One Donald J. Trump, who told reporters two weeks ago “there’s no reason to” because it’s “entombed.”

Moreover, Mr. Trump stated just before the MOU was finalized that if Iran didn’t wind up agreeing to a deal, “we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their heads. I don’t like it if they don’t behave. We’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.”  So if that was the case just a few days ago, why couldn’t it remain the case now that the agreement has been signed?

And what about Iran’s agreement to re-open the Strait of Hormuz (which may or may not actually happen)?  Weren’t US concessions needed to achieve that goal?  And didn’t the president say just that, stating at a press conference at a big international summit last week that without the MOU,  “the alternative would be a world-wide depression,” and that continued fighting would have meant that the stock market “would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929,” he said. “The one President I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover”?   

Indeed he did.  But then yesterday he told Fox News that if Iran’s leaders “close it and you won’t have a country.  You won’t even make it back to your fu*king country.”  For good measure, he added, “We may take over the Strait, if we have to,  I’ll blow the sh*t out of them.” 

Which raises the question I asked about his Democratic White House predecessors in a March post:  If Mr. Trump believes that, if diplomacy fails to achieve certain goals, viable military options can succeed, why bother with the diplomacy to begin with?  If a military option is the fall-back plan, unless a president isn’t thinking straight, that surely means that it’s the plan best guaranteed to work well enough to justify whatever heightened risks it entailed. 

And it’s not difficult to imagine how the United States could restore the status quo ante in the Strait without much risk.  It could continue battering Iran’s remaining ballistic missile and drone facilities, and once that air campaign ended, respond to any subsequent Iranian attacks on Gulf shipping with strikes on the country’s oil infrastructure.  In that vein, there’s at least circumstantial evidence that a Trump-ian threat to seize Kharg Island – Iran’s main oil export hub – convinced the regime to intensify its efforts to reach the MOU.  

In fact, although the MOU is an epic mistake, precisely because it’s an own goal, it’s hardly an irreversible mistake.  After all, this presidential blunder clearly was driven by fears about the impact of rising oil prices and a Wall Street crash on Republicans’ chances in the midterms.  So it’s entirely possible that once the midterms passed, if Tehran compiled a record of violating the MOU, or whatever “final” agreement was reached, the president could feel free to scrap the diplomatic track altogether, resume decimating Iran’s military capability through the air, and end any sanctions relief.  

In other words, a thumbs-down verdict on President Trump’s Iran MOU is entirely justified.  But a similar judgment about his Iran policy writ large could be a rush to judgment.