Outside the Beltway

Everyone’s A Critic

President Trump shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

James Joyner · Tuesday, June 16, 2026 · 6 comments

The Editorial Board of the FAILING NYT claims “President Trump Lost This War.”

The preliminary deal ending President Trump’s four-month war with Iran is welcome but brings with it hard truths. Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war. He prosecuted it recklessly and in open defiance of the law. The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.

The details of the deal are unclear, but the announced framework suggests that Mr. Trump has won few of the terms he insisted that he would. It is a humiliating comedown for him and the nation he leads.

Since the war began, he has said the United States would achieve “total and complete victory” and that Iran must agree to “unconditional surrender.” He suggested that regime change would occur. He said that Iran would be permitted “no enrichment” of uranium and that “the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried” near-bomb-grade nuclear material that it already holds.

None of this appears to be true. Iran’s hard-line government remains in place. The specifics of the nuclear agreement will apparently be negotiated over the next two months, but the terms seem likely to resemble those of a 2015 deal that President Barack Obama negotiated and that Mr. Trump canceled in 2018. He described the Obama agreement as the “worst deal ever” and said it put Iran on “a route to a nuclear weapon.” He criticized it for failing to force Iran to stop supporting terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and for loosening economic sanctions. Yet his destructive war seems likely to leave him with a similar deal.

His biggest achievement in the cease-fire framework is the expected reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping traffic, which will eventually reduce the prices of energy and other goods. That, of course, is merely a reversion to the prewar status quo. Iran closed the strait in retaliation, to damage the global economy and increase political pressure on the United States. The move worked, and Iran’s leaders now understand that they hold a powerful economic weapon.

The paper’s Iran correspondent, Yeganeh Torbati, contends, “Iran Will Enter Nuclear Talks Feeling Emboldened.”

In the days after Iran and the United States reached a preliminary agreement to pause their war, Iranian politicians, generals, and clerics from a range of political factions described the deal as a victory that showed Tehran’s resilience against a far more powerful enemy.

That is the position Iran’s leaders are pushing even though the country lost a slew of its top political and military figures, suffered a battering to its stock of ballistic missiles and was left with an economy strained even further by a naval blockade.

“Iran has taken a major step toward final victory,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament who has played a major role in negotiating the deal, wrote on social media on Monday.

As negotiators were nearing an agreement, Sadegh Amoli Larijani, chairman of a powerful appointed council that supervises the work of the government, wrote on social media on Saturday that Iranians had shown a “renewed spirit of resistance” and defeated U.S.-Israeli plans to overthrow the Islamic republic.

Some of the backslapping is most likely aimed at presenting a united front both abroad and at home, where a vocal hard-line minority has protested the agreement as a betrayal of those killed in the war.

The comments also reflect the genuine perception of Iran’s leaders, who can point to the fact that the terms of the agreement, though still not fully known, will fall far short of what President Trump had previously declared as his goals in starting the war: “total and complete victory” for the United States and “unconditional surrender” for Iran.

The style of Iran’s leadership has also changed as a result of the war. Some pragmatic figures, such as the national security official Ali Larijani, were killed, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — the military force that defends Iran’s system of clerical rule — has consolidated power. The long-term impact of those changes is still to be seen, but the shifts raise the question of how willing the military, now even more powerful, will be to make serious concessions at the negotiating table.

Even Trump’s hand-picked foreign policy team is skeptical, according to Axios (“Scoop: CIA director doubts Iran’s intentions on deal, sources say.“):

CIA Director John Ratcliffe told President Trump and other senior officials that evidence gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies raises serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concessions the U.S. is seeking in any final deal, according to three sources familiar with those discussions.

Ratcliffe isn’t the only skeptic in Trump’s top team. In internal discussions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding (MOU) announced Sunday, while Vice President Vance and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner advocated for it, according to two of the sources.

There were a series of high-level meetings about the deal between Trump and his advisers in the lead-up to Sunday’s announcement. During those meetings, Trump and his team discussed intel gathered by several U.S. intelligence agencies that showed that the way Iranian officials were discussing the deal among themselves was inconsistent with what they were telling the mediators and the U.S., two sources said.

Ratcliffe and Rubio said that based on that intel, they doubted the Iranians would agree to take the nuclear steps the U.S. was seeking, according to two sources. “The intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal,” a source said.

“President Trump listens to all opinions on any given issue — but everyone understands he is the final decision-maker,” a White House official said in response to questions for this story.

Meanwhile, our old pal Benjamin Netanyahu is not on board.

NYT (“Netanyahu Says Israel Will Keep Forces in Lebanon, Despite U.S.-Iran Deal“):

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a defiant address to Israelis, suggested on Monday that he did not feel bound by the newly reached cease-fire agreement between the United States and Iran.

“The struggle has not ended,” Mr. Netanyahu declared.

Foreshadowing potential trouble for the peace deal, he said he had no intention of withdrawing his forces from neighboring Lebanon — a key demand of the Iranians during negotiations with the United States. Israeli soldiers there are fighting Hezbollah, a militant group allied with Iran.

[…]

Israelis across the political spectrum have made their dismay at the deal clear, and Mr. Netanyahu, facing a potentially tough re-election campaign later this year, appeared to be sending them a message on Monday.

“I want to make clear: We will remain in the security zones as long as required in order to defend our country,” he said.

Mr. Netanyahu is under pressure from critics who say he has subordinated their country’s security interests to the whims and will of President Trump. The Israeli prime minister has tried to simultaneously present himself as close to the American president and as independent.

“It’s a relationship of partners,” he said. The two leaders often agree and sometimes do not, he said, as “happens in the best of families.”

Even as he distanced himself from the U.S. deal, the prime minister framed the war against Iran as a victory for Israel. If Israel and the United States had not acted, he said, “Iran would already have atomic bombs” and the Israelis would be in “terrible danger of mass death.”

But he struck a different tone about the deal that was agreed to this week.

“This agreement was made by the United States, by the president of the United States,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “That’s his decision,” he said and repeated the statement for emphasis.

He added: “We have our own interests.”

The FT’s Edward Luce (“This time, Trump and Netanyahu have really fallen out“):

Put yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes. It was his 80th birthday and he was planning to cap White House festivities with his US-Iran deal. The agreement nearly unravelled, however, when Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a Sunday evening strike on Beirut. A flurry of White House calls averted Iranian retaliation. Assurances were given via mediators and the deal was saved. Trump’s late Rome-flavoured cage fight could go ahead.

But Trump was still in a foul mood. “Why did Bibi have to do a fucking attack?” he told Axios. “I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no fucking judgment. I let him know that.” The answer to Trump’s question is that his Iran deal is likely to be a political death sentence for Netanyahu. He thus has every incentive to reignite Gulf war III. He has bet his own and Israel’s future on getting Trump to bring about regime change in Iran. That bet has exploded in his face.

Wooing back Trump will be a challenge. Going by the adage “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”, the US president has grounds to feel burned by Israel’s prime minister. As does the electorate in Israel, which will have a general election by the end of October.

Netanyahu sold Trump and his own public on the idea that, after 47 years, Iran’s theocrats were finally meeting their Waterloo. All Operation Epic Fury required was some lethal targeting and the Iranian people would do the rest.

Rarely has a geopolitical roll of the dice gone so rapidly wrong. Netanyahu played on Trump’s vanity to help convince him to start this war. That same vanity will now be deaf to any future bridges Netanyahu might try to sell. The Israeli leader thus faces an unpalatable choice. Either he submits to a deal that leaves Iran considerably stronger than it was before February 28, or he breaks with the US by trying to scupper the deal. There is little scope here to split the difference. Netanyahu has the 60-day US-Iran negotiating period to figure it out.

Aside from those minor details, the war was a complete success.