Iran

Compromise With Iran Isn't 'Surrender'

Hawks don’t understand what diplomacy is: Both sides give something up and both sides get something in return.

Matthew Petti | 6.19.2026 4:19 PM

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The United States has gotten used to specific ways of ending wars. Sometimes the U.S. military decisively forces the enemy state to surrender, imposes a new political order, and gets it to stick, as in Germany and Japan in the 1940s or Panama in the 1990s. Other times, rebels wear down U.S. resources and willpower before decisively kicking out U.S. forces, as in Vietnam in 1975 or Afghanistan in 2021.

But the Iran war is ending with something quite unfamiliar to Washington: compromise. The United States and Iran were unable to defeat each other in the first round, and, staring at an unacceptably costly escalation, they came to the table. While a final deal hasn't been agreed to, the ceasefire memorandum commits both sides to giving things up, with the U.S. promising to lift all economic sanctions if Iran negotiates away its nuclear program.

Big parts of Washington are not taking it well, with Republicans and Democrats alike calling the peace a "blunder" or even a "surrender." It's one thing to object to specific terms of the truce. The U.S. may be promising too much and demanding too little at the outset. But some criticisms would apply to any kind of two-sided deal with a former enemy. For hawks, failure to secure the enemy's surrender is itself a form of U.S. "surrender." Simply put, hawks have forgotten how to make peace.

Conservative journalist and presidential confidante Mark Levin claims that the memorandum makes the mistake of "trying to incentivize the behavior of 7th century barbaric Islamists with promises of money" and that "the West is being conquered" by agreeing to stop the war........

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