The Iran War Is Ending. Everybody Lost.
Trump lost the country. The U.S. lost a half-hearted war. Israel lost an ally. The Middle East lost the illusion of security. Asia lost growth. Global trade lost a dependable artery.
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In February, the U.S. and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, striking hundreds of military targets and killing thousands of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including Supreme Leader Khamenei. The White House and its defenders called their campaign a clear and unalloyed success, the latest display of a decapitation strategy that had already included Trump’s kidnapping of the Venezuelan president. If all went well, some commentators predicted, we were looking at a new paradigm for American power.
But four months later, it hasn’t turned out that way.
The Iranian regime survived, with the Revolutionary Guard continually finding new leaders to elevate, like some giant bottomless theocratic Pez dispenser. Then, Iran struck back, closing the Strait of Hormuz with mines, drones, and missiles, and striking the industrial infrastructure of neighboring countries. The war became a quagmire, and its stated purpose became a moving target. While Trump claimed the strikes were about regime change and stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the attacks were mostly about getting ahead of an expected Iranian retaliation to an Israeli strike (which made it sound eerily like the U.S. had been dragged into a war by another country’s foreign policy). Other officials said no, this was about reducing Iran’s regional power, or seizing its natural resources.
Last week, Trump signed a framework to end the war that achieves none of these goals. Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called it “a bundle of American inducements so lopsided that it reads as if Tehran wrote the plan unilaterally.” Iran got military and economic concessions—and de facto acknowledgment of its control over the Strait of Hormuz—in exchange for a promise to stop pursuing nuclear weapons; a promise it has made before, and ignored. Ongoing negotiations over nuclear nonproliferation may improve the final deal, but for now, the president has put his signature to something quite close to a surrender document.
The deepest irony is that Trump famously blasted Barack Obama’s multinational agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, calling it the worst deal ever negotiated. But many experts say this deal is even weaker. The Obama deal offered Iran relief from nuclear-related sanctions and access to frozen assets in exchange for strict limits on its nuclear program, including caps on uranium enrichment. Trump’s new framework similarly seeks to “give back” money to Iran without a clear pathway toward enforcing caps on uranium enrichment. (Again, I will report if this changes in the coming week.) Even worse, Trump’s framework leaves Iran in possession of something it didn’t have before: effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas.
In today’s interview with Sadjadpour, we talk about how the Iran War made losers of everyone:
America—and its case for war—is a loser: A war started to change the Iranian regime—or help the Iranian people, or conclusively deny Iran a nuclear weapon, or take out all of its missile/drone capabilities—has ended with the U.S. signing a ceasefire framework that achieved none of its original goals.
MAGA is a loser: Trump’s war of choice led to higher inflation, the president’s worst-ever approval rating, and a lot of pissed off right-wing politicians and commentators, including Tucker Carlson, the top-rated news podcaster, who now says he will be leaving the Republican Party.
White House unity is a loser: It’s as if this war was started and ended by two entirely different administrations. A war that started with Rubio making the US sound like a classic, George W. Bush-era neocon state ends with the Jacksonian isolationist JD Vance negotiating and explaining the framework with values opposite to those that justified the war, in the first place
Iran is a loser: The deal framework looks good for Iran, but the national economy is a mess, and the state of military and civilian infrastructure is pitiful.
Israel is a loser: After unsuccessfully petitioning every administration since the 1990s for help bombing Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu finally got his wish from Trump … and his hand-picked war has ended with a surrender memo so disastrous that Israeli media is accusing Trump of abandoning Israel to its ultimate enemy
Disarmament is a loser: Trump claimed in February that this war was about taking a super-weapon out of Iran’s hands (nuclear weapons), but the war ironically gave Iran a new super-weapon, which is its ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz or make money off it, like a tolled highway.
‘This War Did Not Go Well For the United States’
Derek Thompson: The president just signed a framework to end the war in Iran with negotiations to follow. What is the most important thing in the agreement, and what’s the most important thing that’s not in the agreement?
Karim Sadjadpour: Any objective observer reading this document will conclude that this war did not go well for the United States. Of the 14 main bullet points in this memorandum of understanding, really only one demands anything from Iran, which is some nuclear concessions. The rest either favor Iran or are boilerplate diplomatic language. You can tell just from that document what the outcome of the war was.
From the vantage point of the Trump administration and Vice President J.D. Vance, my sense is they’re not really focused on the text of this MOU. I think they’re conceiving of these negotiations not as a narrow nonproliferation nuclear deal, but as a broader transformation in the US-Iran relationship, a grand bargain of sorts. I’m very skeptical they’ll be able to achieve that.
Thompson: Two points I want to dive into: One is Iran’s ability to control the Strait of Hormuz, and two is the country’s bomb-grade uranium. Starting with the Strait: what does this framework say about the degree to which Iran is no longer allowed to shut it down?
Sadjadpour: That is one of the weakest points in this memo. What it says is that for the next 60 days, while talks are being negotiated, the Strait of Hormuz should be open for business. It’s back to the status quo ante. But beyond those 60 days, there are no reassurances that the Strait returns to being an international waterway. If the outcome of this war is that Iran retains administrative control over the Strait, that’s an enormous strategic defeat for the United States. In just the last 48 hours, they’ve threatened to close the Strait if Israel attacks Lebanese Hezbollah. This is a new tool in Iran’s pocket, and they’re going to keep playing it.
How the U.S. Handed Iran a New Superweapon
Thompson: The irony is that one of the U.S.’s stated goal was to shut down Iran’s access to the super weapon of a nuclear bomb, but in trying to do that, we accidentally introduced them to this other super weapon: the ability to insert a toll booth on the Strait of Hormuz or shut it down entirely. How are the Middle Eastern countries neighboring the strait responding to a memorandum that might, after two months, give Iran the ability to tax their exports whenever it wants?
Sadjadpour: Iran’s control over the Strait is most of all an existential economic threat to its neighbors, in different ways and to different degrees. Saudi Arabia has access to both the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, so it has diverted oil through the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab. The UAE has also suffered but has alternative routes that can bypass the strait.
Arguably the country that has suffered most over the last four months is Qatar, a friend of Iran that shares an enormous natural gas field with it. There is currently no other way for Qatar to get its LNG out of the country, so it has had essentially no revenue for four months. Some would argue that’s why Qatar has been a somewhat conflicted mediator between America and Iran: it wanted any deal. Bahrain and Iraq have also been badly damaged. And of course the bulk of the energy leaving this region is destined for Asia and China in particular. China doesn’t want an outcome in which Iran dominates this trade either.
Thompson: What do you see as the most significant long-term second-order effects of Iran continuing to possess this kind of control over the Strait?
Sadjadpour: All of those countries are already making alternative plans to avoid being held hostage by Iran. We’re going to see enormous investments in post-Hormuz energy logistics: pipelines to some degree, and major investments in alternative energies. Our friend Ian Bremmer has pointed out that even though Trump is not a green-friendly president, one impact of this war a decade from now may be a surge in alternative energy usage, because of the energy crisis this invasion created.
Why Did Trump Accept Such a Weak Deal for the U.S.?
Thompson: In this deal, there’s no halting of long-range missiles, no demand to stop support for proxies in Lebanon and Iraq, and the question of Iran’s near bomb-grade uranium is left to future negotiations. Is there any coherent view of American interests that says this is a good deal?
Sadjadpour: The best way to judge this MOU is to compare it to Trump’s speech the night he launched the war. He set out very clear objectives: obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, razing Iran’s missile production, defanging Iran’s regional proxies, and opening the possibility of unseating the Iranian regime.
None of those outcomes were achieved. And he has potentially ceded the Strait of Hormuz to Iran. Our regional partners are particularly dismayed that missiles and drones aren’t even part of the negotiations. Those countries will tell you they don’t fear Iran nuking them, but Iran has launched upwards of 5,000 missile and drone attacks on its neighbors. The United States is out of Iranian missile range. They certainly are not.
Thompson: If the deal is so terrible for the U.S., why did Trump sign it?
Sadjadpour: Trump says the quiet part out loud. He said on two occasions that he didn’t want to be Herbert Hoover, that he didn’t want to be the president overseeing another economic collapse, and he feared this war was taking the United States in that direction. From the outset, I argued that the Iranian regime knew it could never defeat the United States on the battlefield, so it was going to try to defeat the United States in the living room. Spike the price of oil. Set off explosions everywhere. Make Americans turn on their televisions and see chaos, then go to fill up their cars and find that gasoline prices have doubled. That has been a successful Iranian strategy going back decades.
The very difficult thing for Trump and Vance to reconcile is this: four months ago, this regime was so dangerous it required a massive US military confrontation. Four months later, that very same regime, with a slight personnel change but no change in its internal or external conduct or ambitions, is being offered massive economic concessions. I don’t think that’s easy to reconcile.
Thompson: Trump called the Obama-Iran framework one of the worst deals ever signed. Is this deal any better?
Sadjadpour: We don’t yet have a firm Trump deal, just a deal on paper. But there are a couple of distinctions and then the broader macro distinction.
Trump’s metric for success will be that he did better than the Obama nuclear deal, the JCPOA. That’s potentially sellable on one point: the JCPOA allowed Iran to enrich uranium at a very low level, and what the Trump administration is hoping for is a long-term suspension of enrichment. Trump initially said forever. That number has apparently dropped to 10 years. He may be able to achieve a few years of suspension because Iran needs to rebuild its nuclear facilities. The other point Trump has emphasized is getting the “nuclear dust,” Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, out of the country. Obama’s deal also achieved that.
But here is the big difference. Obama’s nuclear deal didn’t come on the back of a war that cost American taxpayers over $130 billion by some estimates. Trump called Obama’s deal the worst in the world because it provided Iran $1.7 billion in cash relief. The numbers now being discussed are in the tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. What they argue is that payment is conditioned on performance, but there’s already evidence that Iran has been getting billions in sanctions relief and is able to sell its oil again. There’s really no comparison. This MOU offers no significant non-proliferation upside and has cost American taxpayers significantly more, while Iran will receive significantly more economic concessions.
Thompson: It’s not just liberals who say Trump surrendered. Israelis are saying this is effectively surrender. Republican commentators like Ben Shapiro are Trump has failed. Is it too simplistic to say that Iran simply won the war?
Sadjadpour: The critique from conservative commentators and Israelis is that the United States obviously prevailed militarily and did enormous damage to Iran’s military-industrial complex, but that it was a political capitulation. One person worth noting is Ted Cruz, who will likely be a 2028 candidate. I expect a lot of those folks are going to go after JD Vance in the Republican primaries on this issue.
The Incoherence of the Trump-Vance Doctrine
Thompson: What philosophy is Vance espousing on his media tour to explain this framework, and how might it be attacked within the Republican Party?
Sadjadpour: Central to Vance’s foreign policy view seems to be the idea that America needs to get out of the Middle East and out of forever wars. He’s banking on the idea that ending this war will be popular with the American public, and he’s probably right that the public doesn’t want to be involved in Middle Eastern wars. But I suspect the public also doesn’t like to lose them against anti-American adversaries. We saw that with Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal: a large chunk of the population wanted the war ended, but the humiliation of how it ended badly damaged Biden’s support. The idea of providing an Iranian regime whose official slogan remains “death to America” with billions of dollars in incentives is not going to be terribly popular.
Trump did say on two occasions: if this deal succeeds, I’ll take credit; if it fails, I’ll blame JD Vance. The other dimension is Israel. Vance appears to be calculating that Republican primary voters are no longer as committed to the US-Israel relationship as they once were. His public comments about Israel have been extremely critical, essentially saying that America is Israel’s only ally and therefore Israel should practice gratitude. I expect that will be a line of attack from Vance’s Republican primary competitors. And I’ve heard from Democratic friends as well that the upcoming midterm elections will be a real litmus test on popular views of the US-Israel relationship.
Thompson: It almost seems like two different administrations went into and came out of this war. The administration that went in was almost neoconservative in the George W. Bush tradition: we had just knocked off the leader of Venezuela, we were feeling proud, we wanted to decapitate the leadership of Iran. The administration ending this war is an isolationist one led by Vance, so desperate to get out that it’s offering Iran tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, saying please just let us end this and open the strait. Do you think the biggest loser of this war in the short term is Israel?
Sadjadpour: That could well prove to be the case. These wars are often measured over many years if not decades, and we’re only four months in. But certainly at the moment Israel is demoralized by the outcome and by political trends in the United States. The big question is whether American public opinion, especially among younger people, has permanently shifted on Israel, or whether this is specifically tied to the person of Prime Minister Netanyahu, such that new Israeli leadership could change those perceptions.
Your first point is absolutely right: at the very beginning of this war, the people most excited about it were the most prominent supporters of Israel and the most prominent Iran hawks. Four months later, it’s exactly the opposite. Those who are now most supportive of this MOU are the most prominent apologists for the Iranian regime and the biggest critics of Israel. That is another reflection of what I called Trump’s Jackson Pollock approach to grand strategy. There’s really no coherence. He doesn’t have any fixed foreign policy principles.
Ukraine, Iran, and the Drone Era of War
Thompson: In the last week of February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, believed it had the military capability of toppling that regime in days or weeks, and found itself in a protracted war due in part to Ukraine’s drone capabilities. Four years later to the week, the US attacked Iran, believed it had the military capability of toppling that regime in days or weeks, and found itself in a protracted war due in part to Iran’s drone capabilities. Will we remember this period as the beginning of an era where drone power changed the calculus for war?
Sadjadpour: Let me start with an additional parallel between the two wars. In both cases, it was a war of choice by Russia and by the United States. For Ukraine and the Islamic Republic of Iran, it was a war of survival. For that reason, both Ukraine and Iran had 10-out-of-10 resolve. For Ukrainians, it was a national issue. For the Islamic Republic, it was regime survival: a regime that had just massacred thousands of its own citizens to stay in power, knowing that if they lost power now, it was kill or be killed.
What we saw in both wars is that weaker countries have figured out cheaper, asymmetric means to respond to a stronger military power. Iran’s military budget is something like 1% of America’s, but they figured out that with $20,000 drones, you can take the global economy hostage. They were attacking $100-million tankers filled with hundreds of millions of dollars of oil. They also inflicted enormous damage on neighboring countries, hoping that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar would tell the United States to end the war because the economic threat was existential.
The other big lesson is one I took from a Fulbright year in Beirut: building things takes decades, destroying things takes days. Countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are trying to become hubs for international transportation, finance, and technology. That requires stability, and stability is expensive and takes years to build. Instability is incredibly cheap: $20,000 drones. The positive lessons were learned from Ukraine, and America’s Gulf partners are now forging new security relationships in that spirit. The negative example, learned from Iran, is that cheap asymmetric weapons can prevent the world’s greatest military power from prevailing in wars of choice.
What Comes Next
Thompson: Help us understand what’s left to be hammered out in these negotiations and, given the prevailing winds, how you think they will be resolved.
Sadjadpour: Vance announced in Geneva that the US and Iran will commence technical discussions. The US team so far hasn’t brought technical experts to the table, and the plan on paper is to reach a technical agreement on the nuclear issue within 60 days. The likelihood of that is extremely low, given that Obama’s nuclear deal took almost two years to negotiate.
To understand how America is thinking about these negotiations, you really need to understand how President Trump is thinking about them and how they affect his internal politics and legacy. If he feels Iran is stonewalling and unwilling to make meaningful compromises because they believe they won this war, the big question is what he does. People who speak to Trump frequently offer different predictions. Some reporters who talk to him say he’s done with this war and wants to move on. Some of his aides say the opposite: that if Iran won’t give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium or suspend enrichment, he may return to a naval blockade or even bombing. Lindsey Graham has said as much.
What I can say is that Iran is not going to make it easy for Trump. I’ve spoken to people from the mediating countries who told me their negotiators have said Iran is not interested in doing any favors for Trump. They’re not trying to help him sell this deal at home. I am not optimistic we’ll see a quick resolution.
Thompson: So this could remain a quagmire, lukewarm then hot then cold, with another bombing campaign needed to get Iran back to the table? Or does the administration simply capitulate and offer what will almost universally be seen as a very bad deal?
Sadjadpour: Capitulation is certainly a possibility. People who speak to the President frequently say he’s done with this war.
The other big open question is Lebanon. The first point of the MOU is that Lebanon must be a sovereign country. Iran means Israel shouldn’t attack Lebanon. Israel means Lebanon should be sovereign and therefore Iran shouldn’t be operating Hezbollah militias that launch strikes on Israel from Lebanese soil. So long as Hezbollah keeps launching strikes on Israel, I don’t think Trump can restrain Netanyahu from responding, and then Iran will say the MOU has been violated and close the Strait again.
Thompson: I think I have a prediction about what’s going to be in the final document. The President is powered much more by interpersonal competition and envy than by any sense of geopolitics. What he wants is to claim, numerically and objectively, that this deal is better than the one Obama signed that he called the worst deal ever. Why is it implausible that they simply get on paper a number better than Obama’s 3.5% enrichment threshold, with very little enforcement mechanism, so that Trump can brag it’s better than Obama’s deal, while Iran feels it’s so toothless that signing doesn’t even matter?
Sadjadpour: That is certainly a plausible near-term outcome. America’s Gulf partners would potentially accept it if it keeps the Strait open and ends hostilities. The Israelis will take enormous umbrage. The more interesting question is whether key senators like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz accept that outcome, or whether they’re already looking past Trump to 2028 and beginning to sharpen their knives against Vance. How will Marco Rubio react? He’s on the record opposing exactly that kind of outcome. If I had to make one prediction, it’s not a bold one: I don’t think this war or the deal that follows will be popular for any politician associated with it.
Thompson: This war forces into the open a schism that has existed in the Republican Party for years but hasn’t had a litmus test like this. Either you are of the George W. Bush neoconservative school that says America needs to flex its power to make the Middle East safe for Israel and confront Iran, or you believe America is better off embracing a Jacksonian isolationist position that puts the American consumer way above international concerns, so that the moment Iran drives up inflation for Americans, we’re out. Those are entirely different philosophies that don’t cohere when forced to answer one question: should we invade Iran and try to topple their regime?
What’s something we haven’t talked about that we should?
Sadjadpour: One of the big questions yet to be determined is how Iran regroups internally. This is a regime very good at resistance against the United States and very effective at repression, having perfected that science for 47 years. But it’s terrible at governance. It’s not a foregone conclusion that there’s been a rallying-around-the-flag effect. They’ve benefited from a surge of Iranian nationalism in the near term, but that could prove to be a sugar high six months or a year from now, when the war has concluded and the daily indignities of life return: 70% inflation, triple-digit inflation on food items. There is probably no country on earth with a greater gap between its citizens and its government than Iran.
The lesson the regime has probably taken from this war is the wrong one: that revolutionary ideology isn’t an albatross that drives the country toward war and economic malaise, but a lifesaver that kept the regime afloat amid popular uprisings. That lesson is not going to get Iran out of the morass it’s been in for years.
My long-held view is that the best parallel for this regime is the Soviet Union: not suicidal, wanting to stay in power, and therefore containable from the US perspective. But it’s also a regime incapable of putting national interests before revolutionary ideology. Vance is now testing whether Iran will rethink that ideology behind the scenes. I don’t doubt some officials may have suggested as much in private. There is no public evidence of it. If you look at the men ruling Iran now, very few of them are what you’d call pragmatists.
And Iran has probably learned a second wrong lesson: that you win concessions from the United States not by compromising, but by punching back hard, closing the Strait, and attacking your neighbors with missiles and drones. That is a dangerous lesson for them to have learned.
Everyone Lost
Thompson: Economic warfare works. That seems to be the clearest lesson of this conflict for Iran. We were demolished by one of the largest 12-hour salvos in world history, and we ended the war on terms favorable to us because we sent $20,000 drones after LNG refineries and economic infrastructure along the Gulf. It’s hard to think that “economic warfare works” is a good lesson for a country to learn if you want it to become more peaceful.
Last question. It really does feel like this is a war where everybody lost. Iran lost its Supreme Leader, thousands of Revolutionary Guards, and tens of billions in economic activity, on top of civilian deaths. The Middle Eastern countries around the strait now effectively pay a toll tax to access it. Eastern Asia won nothing. Israel is more alone than it was before February 28th. Trump’s approval rating is down. Vance has knives pointed at him. Am I right that basically everybody lost?
Sadjadpour: I wrote in The Atlantic in the very first week of the war that this appeared to be a war with no victors. Everyone loses. Over the last four months I thought perhaps there was one big winner, Vladimir Putin, who has experienced a massive cash windfall from high oil prices. But he’s not doing well in Ukraine, so he’s not a great winner either.
The reality is that whoever becomes president after Trump, Democrat or Republican, Iran under the Islamic Republic will remain an adversary. Its whole identity is premised on hostility toward the United States. In some ways, Vance is testing out the approach that many anti-war Democrats have long preferred: transform the relationship by showering Iran with economic incentives. So far, Iran has not reciprocated.