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The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump

The newly leaked Memo of Understanding to end the conflict makes it clear that the president has nothing to show for his expensive, destructive fool’s errand.

President Donald Trump mimics gunfire during an April press conference on the Iran War.

Over the weekend, with the White House transformed by the bizarre and hastily constructed UFC fight arena erected to honor both the birthday of the nation and President Donald Trump, our commander in chief began crowing about the incredible deal he had just worked out with Iran. But despite repeatedly promising to release the full text of the Memorandum of Understanding he’d endorsed—a document that supplies a temporary framework for how to negotiate the real issues at play in a more durable peace agreement—the president continued to hem and haw on the details.

On Wednesday, CNN obtained a copy of the memo. And the text of the provisional deal makes it clear why the president didn’t want this document to spend too much time out in the world before he tries to memory-hole the war entirely on Friday. It represents a humiliating strategic defeat and immediately ends the Islamic Republic’s long international isolation with virtually no concessions from Tehran whatsoever. It is an epochal surrender, and it will cause such a deafening roar from the GOP’s permanent-war wing that Trump will be forced to spend the weeks and months ahead enduring pressure to walk away.

Beltway-based Iran hawks and some Republican elected officials had spent the first part of this week clamoring for the text of the memorandum. They were perhaps hoping against hope that MAGA’s bellicose emperor wouldn’t negotiate a framework that was as bad as it sounded in the initial reports. “Will the administration lose at the negotiating table what was won on the battlefield?” asked Mark Dubowitz of the ultra-hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Unfortunately for Dubowitz and his friends, the memo was even worse than they feared. While Iran agreed to hold talks about its nuclear program, the United States was unable to extract a single concrete pledge about the shape of a deal beyond a promise not to build nuclear weapons. (What’s more, that pledge is entirely redundant, given that Iran is already a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The memo only notes in passing that issues like Tehran’s existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium and plans for future enrichment “will be adequately addressed in a final agreement.”

While US officials failed to broker any serious linkage between Iran’s nuclear program and aid resumption, Tehran achieved a linkage breakthrough of its own: Iranian negotiators tied the negotiating window to stopping Israel’s reckless bombing attacks in Lebanon. The memo calls for an “immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon”—a shocking coup for the Iranians that is now likely triggering a series of nervous breakdowns within DC’s cottage industry of hawkish think tanks. The document also includes no mention of Hezbollah, Iran’s other regional proxies, or the country’s ballistic missile program. This........

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