Outside the Beltway

Tired of All the Winning

Not everyone is happy with Trump's huge Iran War victory.

James Joyner · Thursday, June 18, 2026 · 7 comments

David Sanger, NYT (“Trump Demanded Iran’s ‘Unconditional Surrender.’ He Got a Surprise Instead.”):

It was less than 15 weeks ago when President Trump, at the height of his bravado about how the war with Iran would end, declared “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

When the text of the deal intended to wind down the conflict was finally released on Wednesday, read aloud paragraph by paragraph by a senior administration official who stopped to defend each section, it read nothing like a surrender document. Instead, the Iranians emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military having not only survived, but with much to celebrate.

It starts with the resumption of Tehran’s ability to reap billions of dollars in oil sales, lifting pressure on the struggling regime even as negotiators prepare to begin haggling over a far more lengthy and critical document: the one Mr. Trump insisted in an interview on Sunday will arrest Iran’s nuclear program for the next 15 or 20 years.

For a president who prizes leverage above all else, that decision is just another mystery of the war. But the wording of the “Memorandum of Understanding” also suggests that, over time, Iran may negotiate some permanent way to exercise sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. That seems in contradiction to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s declarations just a few weeks ago that anything other than the kind of free passage through the strait that the world knew before the war was “not acceptable” and “cannot happen.”

[…]

In the next few days, the details of this agreement will be picked apart. Hard-liners in Mr. Trump’s party have already been expressing objections. So have the Israelis, frozen out of the negotiations and fearful they are being forced by Mr. Trump into a cease-fire with Hezbollah that will interfere with their ability to rip apart the terror group. Historians will grapple for years about the lessons of a conflict in which the United States spent tens of billions of dollars, with 13 Americans and more than 3,000 Iranians reported to have been killed.

But it was Mr. Trump himself who offered what may be the most cleareyed answer about why he needed to end this war so fast. He didn’t want comparisons to Herbert Hoover, he told reporters at the Hotel Royal in Évian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on Wednesday.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Mr. Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.” Later he noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.

That combination — economic chaos and disrupted oil markets — is exactly what the Iranians viewed from the opening days of the war as their most potent weapon. They executed on that vision with precision, closing the strait and blowing up petrochemical facilities, desalination plants, hotels and air bases across the Gulf. And by the president’s own testimony, it worked.

Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker (“The Israeli Ultra-Hawks Who Feel Betrayed by Trump’s Iran Deal“):

On Friday, the United States and Iran plan to sign a memorandum of understanding that would, for the time being, end hostilities between the two countries. In exchange for Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before the war began—and agreeing not to develop nuclear weapons, the United States will end its blockade of Iran, end sanctions on the country, and help facilitate its reconstruction. The deal, which represents a remarkable climbdown by the Trump Administration, has been harshly criticized by both American hawks and Israelis across the political spectrum, who view it as more favorable to Iran than the 2015 nuclear deal that was negotiated by former President Barack Obama, and which was later torn up by Trump, during his first term. The current deal also presents real difficulties for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who encouraged Trump to start the conflict, and was planning to flaunt his closeness to Trump in his reëlection campaign later this year. (One poll taken after the announcement of a deal found Trump’s approval rating in Israel falling twenty points, to thirty-eight per cent.)

I recently spoke by phone with Shimon Riklin, one of the anchors of Israel’s Channel 14, which is famous for its right-wing slant and strong pro-Netanyahu line. Riklin was long known for founding Israeli settlements; he eventually became a close ally of Netanyahu’s. He has condemned Trump’s Iran deal, calling it “total surrender.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why he believes that Trump betrayed Israel, his contention that Iran is the modern world’s Nazi Germany, and whether the war should ever have been undertaken in the first place.

The conversation, which I will leave readers to peruse on their own, is a doozy.

David Horovitz, founding editor of The Times of Israel (“Trump’s deal is a catastrophic capitulation to Iran’s aggressors, leaves Israel vulnerable and constrained.”)

On March 2, the third day of the US-Israel war against Iran, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff gave an interview to Fox News in which he explained why the administration’s efforts to negotiate a deal with the regime in Tehran earlier in the year had failed.

He and Jared Kushner, Witkoff recalled, had been tasked with seeking an agreement under which Iran would halt its nuclear program, dismantle its ballistic missile program, cease its support for proxies, and eliminate its navy “so we can have freedom of the seas.”

Far from entertaining a willingness to compromise, despite having been battered in the June 2025 12-day war, said Witkoff, the Iranian negotiators bragged that their obduracy and duplicity had been paying off. On the nuclear front, they gloated, they had amassed 460 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which, Witkoff noted in his interview, could be turned into weapons-grade within 10 days.

[…]

Fast-forward three and a half months, and the US will on Friday formally sign a memorandum of understanding with Iran, already signed digitally long-distance, that resolves none of the goals of the war — none of the goals that Witkoff and Kushner attempted to resolve in their negotiated effort to avert the war.

According to the official text, read aloud to reporters, including The Times of Israel’s Jacob Magid, by a senior US official during a phone briefing on Wednesday, the 14-point MOU potentially grants the regime hundreds of billions of dollars — which it will doubtless utilize to help keep its restive population in line, to massively fund Hezbollah, Hamas and its other terrorist proxies, and to spend as needed on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The MOU provides for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — the vital waterway Iran seized and leveraged to push Trump into this deal — but with no long-term commitment by the regime to keep it open and toll-free.

And it pushes the entire subject of Iran’s rogue nuclear program into a 60-day negotiation period, during which the regime can be relied upon to be as uncompromising and dismissive as its negotiators were when facing Witkoff and Kushner in January.

Incredibly, the MOU already rewards the regime for its intransigence: It states that Iran’s “nuclear needs” will be addressed if a framework for doing so is agreed; the US negotiators apparently could not even persuade the regime to include the words “peaceful” or “civilian,” to at least keep up the pretense that it has legitimate nuclear requirements.

[…]

The danger now, as realistically seen by Israel, is that they will use the 60-day “status quo” to accelerate toward nuclear breakout.

And yet, the same US administration negotiators who recoiled in horror at Iran’s obduracy in January have now yielded to it in June.

The deal manifestly empowers and finances a mass-murdering regime. It elevates the Islamic Republic to a regional powerhouse. It abandons the Iranian people to whom Trump promised that help was on its way.

And it directly endangers and constrains Israel, with terminology that binds Israel to a ceasefire it had no part in negotiating: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, and their allies in the current war, by signing this Memorandum of Understanding, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. (italics added).”

[…]

The war was lost through inadequate strategic planning by the US and Israel, and subsequent US presidential weakness. Trump’s capitulation is a betrayal of the Iranian citizenry. It will come back to bite America. It leaves Israel more vulnerable than before the war began, with a new US-Iran ceasefire agreement that aims to deny Israel the freedom to protect and defend itself.

The terms that the regime held out for and won indeed show its leaders to be “very rational people.” The same, with dire implications for the security of Israel and its people, cannot be said of Trump.

NYT (“Trump’s Deal With Iran Opens New Rifts in G.O.P.“):

President Trump’s agreement with Iran opened new fissures in his party on Wednesday, with Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond questioning whether his administration had secured adequate concessions from Iranian leaders after months of a costly and unpopular war.

[…]

“Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who lost in a primary last month after Mr. Trump targeted him for defeat, wrote on social media. He said that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “were not curbed” and that the country had learned that it could leverage the Strait of Hormuz, the oil shipping corridor that has been closed during the war and is set to reopen under the deal, to extract concessions.

The war, Mr. Cassidy said, was “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

[…]

At the start of the conflict, Mr. Trump angered some “America First” isolationists within the Make America Great Again movement who felt he was breaking his promise of starting “no new wars.” Now, as he tries to bring an end to the fighting, he is facing pushback from more traditional conservatives who wonder if he has struck a deal that will ultimately be better than the one President Barack Obama reached with Iran a decade ago. (Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of that framework in 2018.)

[…]

“Is it giving $300 billion to the Iranian ayatollah?” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, asked on his podcast. “I hope not. I pray not,” he said, even as he praised Mr. Trump’s decision to take the United States to war, saying the president had “utterly destroyed the Iranian military.”

Some of the most vocal criticism came from Republicans who have been pushed to the margins of the party by Mr. Trump. Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who is retiring, said there was “a lot of work to be done to convince me that we’re on the right path.”

[…]

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who was once one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters but has since broken with him, criticized the president in a video on social media for what she called a “totally unnecessary” war.

“This, apparently, is what winning looks like,” Ms. Greene said, sarcastically.

Nikki Haley, who served as U.N. ambassador in Mr. Trump’s first administration and lost to him in the 2024 Republican presidential race, wrote on social media that “Hitting Iran’s nuclear and missile sites was the right move.”

But she added: “It’s a huge mistake to pay to rebuild the threat we just destroyed.”

Pushback has also shown up in other settings.

On Wednesday morning, the front page of The New York Post offered a critical view of the administration. “Trump devastated Iran, now he hits them with a … LOVEBOMB,” the right-leaning tabloid’s front page blared, above an image of a burning American flag and text saying that Mr. Trump’s deal showered Iran’s leaders with “cash — and no sanctions.”

Mark Levin, who hosts a Fox News program, said he found “much to be concerned about” in the agreement and wanted to see it amended.

Mr. Trump attacked critics of the deal on Wednesday, calling them “stupid and bad people,” and declared that he had the support of the international community. He said carrying on the war would have “satisfied a group of 10 percent of the people,” but would have “been the wrong thing to do.”

“There are some people, some writers, that I thought were friends of mine, but I don’t want them as friends anymore,” the president said of his critics as he addressed reporters at the Group of 7 summit in France.

Everyone’s a critic these days, it seems. I suppose Trump is heeding the advice of the late Rick Nelson, “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”