War and Consequences

The memorandum of understanding that the United States signed with Iran is, on first reading, a capitulation masquerading as an agreement. It opens the prospect of an Iran flush with money from the release of its assets, oil revenues, and even development investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The deal might even allow Iran to monetize its geographic position at the Strait of Hormuz by levying fees or tolls. That it betrays Israel, an ally who fought alongside the United States for a month but is shut out from the negotiations and is not even mentioned in the document, is par for the course for this administration.Possibly J. D. Vance, who has made clear his sympathies with the hard-right isolationists of MAGA, will pull off a final deal more palatable than this initial memorandum. Given the administration’s abysmal track record in negotiating with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, though, one may reasonably doubt it. One should also not assume that any kind of permanent deal will result from the present negotiations: The Iranians have overplayed their hand before, and may do so again, although it is a poor kind of statesmanship whose success depends on the folly of one’s enemies. At best, however, we will have an even worse version of the justly maligned Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by the Obama administration—an arrangement that gave the Iranians money in return for postponing their nuclear program by a few years, left their sponsorship of terror groups and proxies untouched, and allowed a poisonous regime to fester.[Brynn Tannehill: America’s big mistake in Iran]That does not mean, however, that the recently—perhaps temporarily—concluded war has not had profound consequences and revealed important truths.The level of destruction inflicted on Iran by a month of American and Israeli air strikes still remains obscure in some respects. Clearly, the Iranian air-defense system was largely eliminated, as was its air force