The US ‘deal’ with Iran is a humiliation. This outcome reveals not just Trump’s incompetence but flaws in the system that allowed him to rise to power.

In promoting his ‘deal’ with Iran, US President Donald Trump has tried to dress up a humiliating defeat as a victory. While it’s tempting to blame this outcome on incompetent leadership, it stems more from the policies and institutions that have allowed entertainers and profiteers to rise to power.

America has capitulated to Iran. The ‘memorandum of understanding’ signed by the two sides specifies terms that spell victory for the Islamic Republic and humiliation for President Donald Trump and the United States. War, as some people apparently needed to learn, is not about the pleasure one takes in watching things blow up. It is politics by other means. And as Iran has just demonstrated, winning means changing the enemy’s politics so that they are forced to surrender.

From the beginning, the unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran put Trump’s incompetence on display for all to see. Instead of trying to understand how the Iranian leadership thinks and operates, Trump, US Secretary of ‘War’, Pete Hegseth, and other US officials treated them as stooges who would immediately submit as soon as the bombs started falling.

With no strategy of its own, it did not occur to the........

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