Why Any Plausible Iran Deal Is a Humiliation for Trump
Key takeaways
- On Sunday, I spoke by phone with Danny Citrinowicz, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, and an expert on the Middle East.
- How would you characterize the contours of this potential deal, and is there any way to spin it as something other than a humiliating failure for the U.S.?
- Trump had to choose between a bad option and a worse one, and it seems like, even though we don’t know what will happen in any deal, or if there will even be one, that he has chosen the very bad one.
Photograph by Arash Khamooshi / Polaris / NYT / Redux Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Over the weekend, President Donald Trump announced that the United States and Iran were close to a deal that would end the war that the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran in late February, and which has killed thousands of people in Iran. (Thousands of civilians have also been killed by the connected Israeli campaign in Lebanon.) The terms of the discussed deal are not yet known, but media reports suggest that in return for Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz—the closing of which has led to a global economic crisis—the United States would end its blockade of Iran, and Iran would agree to give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
On Sunday, I spoke by phone with Danny Citrinowicz, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, and an expert on the Middle East. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Iranian hard-liners have been strengthened by this war; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s miscalculations and potential political vulnerabilities; and why Trump pulling out of President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was one of the greatest blunders of the twenty-first century.
How would you characterize the contours of this potential deal, and is there any way to spin it as something other than a humiliating failure for the U.S.?