Foreign Policy > Iran War

There Is No Such Thing As A Deal With Iran

We did not assemble the greatest armada the world has known to write Iran a traffic ticket.

Michael C. Hurley | May 19, 2026

A wildly outmatched adversary is “obliterated” by American military power yet remains stubbornly unbowed. Sound familiar?

Nixon’s deal with the North Vietnamese for “Peace with Honor” was little more than a rhetorical fig-leaf to mask our ignominious retreat and the chaos that followed. The “deal” that Nixon brokered required the communists to pull out of Laos and Cambodia. They did no such thing. Once the Yanks were gone, both countries fell to communist control along with the rest of Vietnam by 1975. Two million Cambodians died in Pol Pot’s killing fields between 1975 and 1979. So much for peace. So much for honor.

All of the points that Donald Trump repeats ad nauseam today about the scale of the American “victory” in Iran—that we have completely destroyed their navy and air force and air defenses—were equally true of Vietnam for the most of that conflict, and yet the Vietnam War ended in defeat for America, thinly disguised by an ostensible “deal.” You’ll forgive me if today I’m having feelings of déjà vu.

First, let’s be honest with ourselves: no one in the Trump administration expected six months ago to be talking about Iran, today. After Operation Midnight Hammer, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced, on June 24, 2025, that American forces had “conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program.” Webster’s defines the word “obliterate” to mean “to remove from existence, destroy utterly all trace, indication, or significance of.” Trump protested reports that cast doubt on the finality of this obliteration by denying, repeatedly, that Iran retained........

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