President Donald Trump at “dignified transfer” of remains of US troops killed in Iran war
The very first words announcing the Trump administration’s latest “deal” to conclude its war on Iran – which will reportedly be signed on Friday – were entirely false.
“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” the president proclaimed on his Truth Social site on Sunday evening. “Congratulations to all!”
But the agreement, whose details remain entirely opaque and disputed by all parties, is far from complete – if “complete” is meant to indicate that Trump has achieved any of the objectives for which he expended hundreds of billions of dollars, at least 13 American lives, an untold number of Iranian civilian deaths, and severe damage to the world economy and this nation’s international standing.
Instead, what Iranian officials have called a “memorandum of understanding” merely extends the current ceasefire (which hasn’t actually curtailed kinetic hostilities) for two months, while the United States and Iran resume negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programs, the alleged reason for war.
No honest analyst believes that Trump or his inept negotiators will achieve more restrictions on Iran than the multilateral agreement he discarded in 2018 merely because it was achieved by his predecessor President Barack Obama. In the leaks and comments about this renewed ceasefire, what can be detected is the strong suggestion that this is in fact a far worse deal from the American standpoint – and a far more lucrative outcome for the Iranians.
Unless the Iranian news agencies are lying just as brazenly as Trump always does, the Tehran dictatorship will collect at least $24 billion in previously frozen funds during the 60-day negotiation period. The Trump administration’s response has come in the form of non-denial denials, and it now appears that those previously unavailable billions will be exchanged for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. That reopening is the only aspect of the mooted :”deal” that both sides agree will happen, and merely resolves a crisis that Trump and his Israeli partner Benjamin Netanyahu provoked when they initiated this conflict.
Of course the reopening of ship traffic in the Persian Gulf won’t actually resolve anything, because the Iranians will still be able to close the strait whenever they choose — a commercial and diplomatic superpower that they can now exercise entirely due to Trump’s blundering.
Beyond that, we have no idea how or whether Trump’s low-wattage diplomatic team will negotiate a credible agreement that restricts Iran’s nuclear development with any force, as the JCPOA did. The likelihood of such an achievement within the next two months seems vanishingly small, since the JCPOA talks required many months and skills that the Trump gang simply doesn’t possess,
But even now we can measure what Trump is doing against what Obama did: If the Iranians get $24 billion to reopen the strait, without any real restrictions on their nuclear program that will represent more than ten times the amount of money Tehran received after signing the JCPOA. In other words, Trump has sold out cheap to end this pointless war — and the rest of us will pay the price.
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