Iran Deal?
It's such a great document they don't want you to see it...
When I (like many others) predicted a deal between the US and Iran, one of the biggest challenges was figuring out how a deal that was acceptable to Iran (which had strategically won the war, despite US success in conventional military conflicts) would avoid looking like a total failure for Trump. My best guess was that it would include a commitment by Iran not to further enrich uranium for ten years, or some similar sound-bite that would give Trump room to claim that he’d achieved his main goal.
It looks like Iran wasn’t willing to give that, so the alternative is that the US signed an memorandum of understanding (essentially an agreement on a framework for negotiations) that they said was a huge success but that they wouldn’t release the text until Friday and that when you saw the text you shouldn’t pay too much attention to it because it’s written to look really good for Iran but they’ve got secret backchannel deals in place so it isn’t.
I’m not joking. CNN quotes an administration official as saying, “People shouldn’t read too much into the language of the MOU,” because it’s a political document. “What’s more important than the actual document is the understandings we have with each other,” explaining that the Trump team had come up with “language that allows (Iran) to say what they need to say for their domestic politics.”
This is hardly credible. For one thing, Iran’s regime isn’t the one facing November midterms; they’re the ones that recently put down protests with brutal violence. Other than tension between rival factions, Iran doesn’t need to “sell” a bad deal to their domestic political base. Trump does.
On top of that, the claims of the administration don’t match with the plain text of the document (at least as reported). For example, the administration claims that sanctions relief is tied to tangible proof that Iran is abandoning its nuclear program…but the MOU states that the US will immediately issue sanctions waivers covering Iranian sales of oil, petrochemicals, etc. This looks like a fig leaf; sanctions remain in place until Iran agrees to the next-stage deal, but in the meantime they are turned off so Iran can sell oil and other products at full market prices and without restriction.
Put another way, the Trump administration insists that Iran is only benefitting to the extent they comply, that they "only access any benefits of the MOU if they abide by all of the points they agreed to," including not developing a nuclear weapon. But this is disproved by the MOU itself, which says that Iran will get immediate sanctions relief as soon as the deal is signed.
The dynamics of all this are highly-favorable to Iran. The US and Trump have lost significant global and regional capability. They went to war with a far weaker power and were unable to contend with Iran’s asymmetric warfare; we were unable to protect our bases and Gulf allies from attack and could not keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
Put another way — this deal looks bad, because it is. That shouldn’t surprise us; the losing side in a war generally gets a bad deal out of it.
Because Trump did lose this war. Battlefield superiority isn’t what decides who wins; accomplishing strategic objectives does. Iran was able to put the global economy into a chokehold and Trump had no military solution. Our own intelligence reports as well as direct evidence on the ground show that although Iran’s military was damaged it remains fully capable of closing down the Strait to commercial traffic and damaging regional infrastructure.
As a result, Trump was forced to make a deal on Iran’s terms, which is why it includes major concessions to Iran and nothing from Iran that we didn’t have before the war (e.g. a promise never to build or acquire a nuclear weapon). The spin machine will be working at full speed to sell this as a great victory, but even Republicans are balking at calling this a win. (Ironically, praise for the deal will come mainly from other G7 nations, whose priority is an end to the violence and reopening the Strait. They didn’t want the war to begin with and are happy to have it over, regardless of whether the US accomplished its stated goals.)
It will be interesting to see what comes next. The 60-day deadline is neither realistic (the JCPOA took years to negotiate) nor a deadline, since it explicitly states that it can be extended by mutual agreement. The most likely outcome over the short term is that Iran will not make any nuclear moves, Trump will claim the negotiations are going well, and we will settle in to an environment where negotiations are ongoing. Israel remains a wild card; their leadership do not seem happy about this outcome, and they seem largely to have been left out of the deal. Given that the deal includes an end to hostilities in Lebanon, where Israel is in serious conflict with Hezbollah, it seems likely that both sides will have grounds to claim that the other isn’t abiding by the cease-fire.