State Department official John Negroponte made the droll comment after Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign in North Vietnam that “we bombed them into accepting our concessions.”
A similar verdict seems appropriate for President Trump’s war on Iran.
The memorandum of understanding that both parties are signing is lopsided in Iran’s favor. The main concession from the Iranians is reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but the commercial artery won’t be returning to the status quo ante. The memorandum says that Tehran will not charge fees “for 60 days,” implying that Iran will begin extracting tolls thereafter. In exchange, the U.S. is lifting its blockade on Iranian ports and agreeing to let the Iranians sell oil, a source of revenue totaling tens of billions of dollars a year.
The memorandum also says that the U.S. will unfreeze Iranian assets — good for another roughly $24 billion — “upon the implementation of this M.O.U.”; in other words, perhaps within weeks. We wonder how many proverbial pallets will be needed to deliver this cash windfall to Iran.
The agreement also contemplates the lifting of all U.S. sanctions and delivery to Iran of a $300 billion reconstruction fund raised by its neighbors, dependent on a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The terms are studiously vague, although there is a specific reference regarding the enriched uranium to “down-blending on site under the supervision of the I.A.E.A.” (which was a key part of Barack Obama’s Iran deal from which Trump rightfully withdrew in his first term). It’s all supposed to be worked out within 60 days, but that period is extendable.
This section also refers to Iran’s “nuclear needs,” presumably a euphemism for enrichment. In a lamentable press availability at the G-7 summit, President Trump explicitly said Iran should be able to enrich at low levels. This, coupled with Trump’s consistently dismissive remarks about obtaining Iran’s nuclear “dust,” suggests that Iran won’t give up enrichment or hand over its uranium, both of which have long been considered key benchmarks for setting back Iran’s program.
Meanwhile, there is no reference to Iran’s missiles, even though ending Iran’s missile threat was originally one of the U.S. war aims. At his presser, Trump pooh-poohed constraining Iran’s missile arsenal, arguing — incredibly enough — that any individual missile strike only causes limited damage. There’s similarly no direct mention of Iran’s support for regional proxies; that Obama’s JCPOA didn’t address this, either, was supposed to be one of the main criticisms of it.
Finally, the memorandum says the conflict will also end in Lebanon, an Iranian ploy to protect Hezbollah and drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel.
For all the talk of Iran’s leadership being degraded by the attacks against its top ranks, it obviously still has adept negotiators.
The enduring achievement of this war and last year’s Midnight Hammer is the large-scale destruction of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure that will take the regime years to recover from. Its defense-industrial base, including its capacity to manufacture missiles, has also taken a pounding. Once Iran cut off the flow in shipping in the strait, though, it gained enormous leverage against the U.S. At his presser, Trump made it clear how desperate he’d become to get the Iranians to agree to reopen the strait; he said that the continued closure risked global economic calamity and he didn’t want to be remembered as Herbert Hoover.
His conception of the war was beset by a lack of realism and reckless optimism. He apparently believed that taking out Ayatollah Khamenei would bring a rapid end to the Iranian regime and, by all accounts, didn’t take seriously warnings that Iran would act against the strait. When that happened, he had limited options because he thought, reasonably enough, that there was little appetite in the U.S. for a risky, protracted military campaign to reestablish freedom of navigation in the waterway.
More fundamentally, he didn’t go to Congress for authorization of the campaign and did almost nothing to make the public case for it beforehand. Thus, there was no reservoir of political support to fall back on when things didn’t go as he had hoped. His seat-of-pants governance and executive high-handedness bear much responsibility for the unsatisfactory outcome.
It may be that the lifting of sanctions and $300 billion reconstruction fund don’t happen because there’s ultimately no nuclear deal. But the Iranian regime is living to fight another day with greater control over the strait and significant financial relief, while the president of the United States is saying how impressive the regime’s leaders are. Trump has dropped all talk of the Iranian people taking back their country, when his assurances that “help is on its way” during last year’s street protests helped create the predicate for Operation Epic Fury.
Trump has said in the past that Iran has never won a war, yet never lost a negotiation. As the president and his administration now make the case for a memorandum of understanding that doesn’t meet any U.S. strategic objective, it’s impossible to say he was wrong.
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