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How Trump Has Boxed Himself Out of a Face-Saving Iran Deal

By failing to absorb the lessons of Iran’s strategic victories, the White House is on course to turn the present stalemate into a disastrous quagmire.

President Donald Trump stands alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine at an April press conference on the Iran war.

The conventional wisdom today is that President Donald Trump can’t bring himself to sign off on specific aspects of an interim agreement with Iran that finally reopens the strategic Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping because cutting a deal would deeply wound his delicate pride. By this reckoning, the president is just too arrogant and delusional to countenance an agreement that looks anything like the President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018 and has railed against for years as an embarrassing capitulation.

This general assessment of Trump’s haphazard approach to an accord to end hostilities with Iran isn’t wrong, but it tends to downplay how deeply unworkable the president’s preferred exit strategy really is. Today, any return to the status quo ante in Iran—a basic framework to contain the country’s nuclear ambitions in exchange for standard economic and diplomatic concessions—isn’t really achievable. What’s more likely, amid the stalemated US offensive and shambolic overtures to broker subsidiary regional agreements to rein in Iran, is a moderately less favorable deal than the one Trump torched eight years ago, because America’s strategic position in the region is clearly in irreparable shambles.

The US and Israeli militaries have failed to produce the results they hoped for in their Plan A approach to bring the Iranian regime to heel with a massive display of air power. And the weeks-long standoff over control of the Strait of Hormuz has made it painfully clear that Tehran now possesses its own considerable leverage over the global economy. The combined effect of these setbacks has been to blow up the existing regional security architecture, which we now know was propped up by little other than systematic graft, U.S. and Israeli conventional military dominance and the willingness of both powers to act with utter impunity and contempt for international law.

To get the Strait of Hormuz open again, Trump is going to have to at least tacitly acknowledge that there can be no return to business as usual if and when the negotiators are able to work out some kind of deal. Any agreement that stands a chance of making it through the various power centers of Iran’s mysterious postwar regime will leave the country in a stronger position than it was before Trump got peer-pressured into this idiotic misadventure.

That’s because despite fanciful wishcasting from the White House and right-wing foreign policy pundits about how the health of the global economy can easily be routed around Hormuz, it will take years to build the pipelines and ports needed to decrease the waterway’s strategic importance. Pipelines and harbors can also be bombed—and we can trust that Tehran will focus its energy and creativity on keeping the strait as its chief strategic linchpin in the region. The real legacy of Trump’s misadventure in Iran is the way that the president’s boundless arrogance and indolent inability to plan or follow through on anything has served to deliver Hormuz directly into the hands of Iranian leaders as the foundation of a new era of unrivaled influence over the global economy.

After all, if a profoundly outnumbered and outgunned Iran can destroy military bases operated by the mighty United States and force Donald Trump to crawl back to the negotiating table, how can anyone be confident that thousands of miles of functionally defenseless pipelines can be secured from the same threat?

Iran’s newfound power has also inverted the negotiating dynamic in ways that go far beyond renewed passage of commercial ships through the strait. For years Republicans chided President Barack Obama for focusing narrowly on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program while leaving other elements of the regime’s regional strategy in place—including its support for Hezbollah, its ballistic missile program, and even the character of the regime........

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