TRUMP FINALLY HANDED IN HIS HOMEWORK…HE FLUNKED

The ill-advised military action against Iran, which turned into a hundred-day shooting war, was both started and ended by Donald Trump. He didn’t care how it started, and he obviously didn’t care how it ended.

It was a war that never should have happened. It did not have congressional approval. In fact, Congress was never consulted. Trump simply went to war, like he has done everything else in this Trump 2.0 version of his regime, because he felt like it. And in doing so, he dragged both the United States and the world into its consequences un-consulted.

Trump’s war began with war crimes and ended in surrender. Not the surrender of Iran, but the surrender of Donald Trump. However laden with Trump’s fingerprints this disaster might be, however, he, unfortunately, represents the United States as the country’s head of State. And so, Donald Trump has handed his defeat and capitulation to us, the American people and our representatives. And thanks to his hijacked GOP’s acquiescence and complicity, the defeat is ours to bear. And the shame of it in the world rests on our reluctant shoulders.   

In 2016, on taking office the first time, Trump vowed that he would tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration before him had so painstakingly negotiated along with five other nations including three allies and two rivals: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia, as well as the European Union. It was, then, a deal that had the signed consensus of the most powerful nations on earth.

Just as he had promised and eventually achieved the destruction of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obama Care, that had brought health insurance to millions of Americans who had never had it before, Trump did, in 2018, effectively tear up the JCPOA. Trump and his sycophantic MAGA-led GOP didn’t do either of these things because they were bad deals—although that was the excuse. They did it, to the cheers of their white-supremacist supporters simply because these were major achievements of the administration of the first non-white president in the history of the United States.

In both cases, Trump promised that he would replace the ACA and the JCPOA with something much better and stronger. In neither case has this promise—like so many other Trump promises—come true. Like the wanton—and also un-consulted—destruction of the historic East Wing of the White House, which Trump also ordered, all that remained where something good had stood before, was rubble. It was, in short, a unilateral pissing contest in which Obama refused to participate. Instead, the former president has sat back and watched as Trump keeps urinating on democracy and diplomacy while digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) stands as one of the most significant diplomatic achievements of the twenty-first century because it accomplished something exceedingly rare in modern geopolitics: it peacefully neutralized a major nuclear proliferation crisis through multilateral diplomacy, verifiable enforcement mechanisms, and international consensus, without firing a shot. By contrast, the newly revealed 2026 Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) negotiated under the administration of Donald Trump amounts to an extraordinary strategic retreat that delivers Iran major concessions while extracting virtually nothing that was not already achieved more effectively more than a decade earlier. In effect, it is not a diplomatic victory for the United States, but capitulation dressed as negotiation through military might.

In this sense, the JCPOA and MOU could not be more contrary in their effects and substance. While it should be pointed out that the MOU is basically a negotiation to negotiate, it will be impossible for the US under the Trump regime to achieve a better deal than the JCPOA—unless  Trump manages to get Iran to sign a carbon copy of the deal he tore up nearly a decade ago. It is, indeed, thanks to that willful and malicious action on Trump’s part that we are where we are today, since the JCPOA was working, and working well. All Trump had to do was leave it alone, or, appeal to proper diplomacy—with regional experts, attorneys, career diplomats and the secretary of state doing the negotiating, rather than Trump’s son-in-law and some real estate guy—to seek even better terms. Instead, as is his “solution” for everything, he bulldozed it.

The JCPOA succeeded because it imposed the most intrusive nuclear verification regime ever negotiated with a non-nuclear state. Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 97percent—and only started enriching beyond the limits of the Obama agreement again after Trump pulled the US out of the pact—to slash operating centrifuges by roughly two-thirds, to cap enrichment levels at 3.67 percent, to redesign the Arak reactor to prevent plutonium production, and to submit to continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agreement extended Iran’s estimated “breakout time”—the time needed to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon—from only a few months to roughly one year. Independent fact-checking organizations note that these provisions were functioning and compliance was repeatedly verified before US withdrawal.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry

This was diplomacy operating at its highest level. The agreement was not a bilateral improvisation like the MOU. It required coordination between the United States, Iran, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. At a moment of escalating regional hostility, the Obama administration, with Secretary of State John Kerry at the head of the negotiating team, demonstrated that adversaries with fundamentally opposing ideological systems could still reach enforceable agreements serving mutual security interests. Few, if any, diplomatic achievements this century can claim a similar level of complexity or effectiveness.

Then came Trump’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018. The stated rationale was that the JCPOA was “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Critics argued it failed to address Iran’s ballistic missile program, regional proxy activity, and contained sunset clauses. But history has rendered a harsh verdict on that decision: abandoning the deal produced none of the promised strategic gains. Instead, Iran gradually ceased compliance, expanded uranium enrichment dramatically, deployed advanced centrifuges, restricted inspections, and moved materially closer to nuclear threshold status. Even critics of the original agreement now acknowledge that, however imperfect, the JCPOA “bought time” and successfully constrained Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Backing out of the deal gave Iran an inducement to expand its nuclear program because of the hostility emanating from Washington under the Trump regime.

The irony is profound: After spending years denouncing the JCPOA as weakness, Trump has now negotiated a memorandum that is dramatically weaker than the one he destroyed. The newly proposed  MOU commits the United States to lifting sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets (a hundred times more assets than those freed up by the Obama administration, which, at the time, drew shouts of indignation from the GOP), easing restrictions on oil exports, reducing military pressure in the Persian Gulf, and—the cruelest cut of all for Americans—providing the bloody dictatorial regime in Iran with reconstruction funding estimated at nearly three hundred billion dollars. One conservative pundit described this last as akin to “giving the Marshall Plan to Germany while the Nazis were still in power,” which is spot-on accurate more than hyperbole.   

In exchange, Iran merely reiterates, as it had already agreed in the JCPOA, that it will not pursue the creation or acquisition of nuclear weapons, and that it agrees to enter into a vague sixty-day negotiation framework for future talks. Critically, the agreement contains no durable new enforcement architecture—Trump says it isn’t necessary—leaves missile programs untouched, leaves proxy militias active, and fails to substantially dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. In other words, core strategic issues remain entirely unresolved.

The central contradiction is that Donald Trump, on a personal whim, withdrew from a functioning agreement that imposed concrete, measurable, internationally verified restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, only to re-enter negotiations eight years later offering broader concessions for weaker commitments. In strategic terms, Trump destroyed the leverage the United States once possessed, and he now appears willing to pay enormous economic and diplomatic costs simply to restore a lesser version of the status quo.

Worse still, this substantially strengthens Iran’s radical, repressive, Islamist regime itself. Think tank analysts this week warned that the draft MOU leaves Tehran in a “stronger strategic position.” To say nothing of the fact that it flies in the face of Trump’s broken promise to liberate the Iranian people through democratic regime change. Economic relief—the lifting of sanctions, the enormous injection of formerly frozen assets, and a three hundred billion-dollar reconstruction bailout—will enable the hostile Iranian regime to stabilize its domestic economy, replenish State revenues, and potentially redirect resources toward the very regional networks Washington has long opposed, including Hezbollah and broader “Axis of Resistance” alliances. Rather than weakening Iran’s regional influence, the agreement risks financing its resurgence, in detriment to US regional allies.

From a Middle East power-balance perspective, this weakens US credibility dramatically throughout the region. America’s Gulf partners are confronted with an uncomfortable reality: Washington abandoned a strong agreement for ideological reasons, pursued years of coercive pressure that failed, and, after basically losing Trump’s war, ultimately returned to negotiations from a far weaker bargaining position while granting greater concessions.

The broader lesson of all this is unmistakable. The JCPOA demonstrated disciplined statecraft: multilateral cooperation, rigorous verification, and peaceful conflict management producing measurable security gains. Trump’s MOU demonstrates the opposite, destroying a working framework, squandering leverage through maximalist rhetoric, and then settling for substantially worse terms while irrationally proclaiming “victory”.

In the end, history will not only judge the JCPOA as a highly successful nuclear agreement, but also as a case study for how diplomacy can solve problems that war cannot. Meanwhile, it will judge Trump’s MOU as proof that ideological grandstanding, delusional thinking and a might-makes-right foreign policy can destroy strategic advantage. It also shows that the neighborhood bully’s loud-mouthed promises of “strength” by brute force nearly always end in whimpering surrender.