Donald Trump was desperate to end the Iran war, and for good reason too. The ‘memorandum of understanding’ signed by the US and Iran is being celebrated by the White House as a diplomatic triumph, but it looks far more like an escape route from a war that Trump didn’t know or expect would last this long and never imagined would produce these results.

The timing is revealing. On Trump’s eightieth birthday (Sunday, 14 June), Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that Washington and Tehran had agreed on a framework to end the conflict. Trump quickly confirmed the development. Trump was not ending the war because he had achieved any of his stated objectives. He was ending it because continuing the war had become strategically costly and politically dangerous besides being almost impossible to justify to his support base at home.

When the war began, Trump believed victory would come quickly. Netanyahu and his allies reportedly convinced him that Iran’s political system was fragile and nearing collapse. The key assumption was that the elimination of Iran’s Supreme Leader would trigger a collapse of the Islamic Republic. The expectation in both Washington and Jerusalem was that military pressure would create panic in the Iranian elite, stoke popular unrest, and before long bring down ‘the regime’.

That calculation proved spectacularly wrong. More than a hundred days later, said regime remains firmly in place. Far from collapsing, it appears stronger than it was before the war, before the dramatic ‘decapitation’. The war produced the exact opposite of the outcome Trump and Netanyahu had anticipated. Many Iranians who had been critical of their government rallied behind it once the country came under foreign attack. Nationalism often succeeds where ideology fails. Faced with external aggression, internal divisions narrowed and resistance became a unifying force.

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