US-Iran agreement: Trump’s deal to nowhere

I supported the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran for three basic reasons.

The first was moral: since 1979, the Islamic Republic has ruled with a brutal hand, stripping away liberty from millions of Iranians. The second was strategic: a nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat not just to the region, but to the wider world. The third was political: if the Middle East could be reordered in a way that reduced Iran’s reach, it might be possible to build something more stable in its place.

That was the theory. I am afraid that the reality now looks very different!

President Donald Trump has never been a strategist. He is a dealmaker. That distinction really matters. A strategist plans for the long term, weighs consequences, and understands that adversaries adapt. A dealmaker looks for a headline, a pause, a way to declare victory and move on. That is why his ceasefire at the end of April felt less like a triumph than an admission that the United States had hit a wall. It felt like defeat to me at the time, and with every passing week underscores that opinion.

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Since then, President Trump has talked up the prospect of a grand deal. What has emerged, though, is a much thinner arrangement: a phased framework, not a peace settlement. It would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, ease some sanctions on Iran, and create a 60-day window for further talks, particularly over the nuclear issue.

The problem here is that the central questions all remain unanswered. Iran’s regime is still in place. Its nuclear programme has not been dismantled. Its regional network has not disappeared. And the most important concessions are still to come, if they come at all. In other words, this looks less like a breakthrough than a delay. And a fail!

There are still plenty of unknowns. Will frozen Iranian funds be released all at once or in stages? How far is Tehran really prepared to go on uranium restrictions? Can either side trust the other to stick with the deal once the pressure eases? And crucially, is this the sort of arrangement that changes anything on the ground, or simply gives both sides room to claim they have moved forward?

Iran, for its part, has reason to feel it has come through this round better than expected. The regime may have lost an Ayatollah but the Islamic Republic itself has survived. That is no small thing. In the logic of Middle Eastern politics, survival is often sold as victory. Tehran can say, with some justification, that it has forced America into compromise rather than capitulation.

This leaves Trump in an awkward position. He talked in the language of overwhelming force but ended up accepting a ceasefire. He promised almighty pressure but settled for negotiation. He threatened a decisive outcome but now appears to be managing a stalemate. I believe that the result is a loss of face, not just for Washington, but for a president who built his image on the promise that bluster would be backed by action.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also exposed the limits of that approach. Global Oil prices jumped, markets reacted, and the pressure on the White House became immediate. Yet this should not have been a surprise. Iran’s leverage in the Strait has long been obvious. If the move caught Washington off guard, that speaks to a deeper failure of planning. A serious administration should not be improvising in the face of the most predictable retaliation. And yet that seems to have been what happened.

The Gulf states, meanwhile, have proven to be cautious if not timid. For all the talk of regional solidarity, they did not really line up with the force Trump might have expected. And the Western media, almost from the start, framed the conflict as another “forever war”, which made a sustained campaign politically harder to sell. Add in US domestic pressure and the looming November midterms, and the incentive for Trump to declare some kind of deal, any kind of deal, became overwhelming.

So, what has this really achieved? Not a settlement, and certainly not a transformation. It has produced a pause, a framework, and a great deal of spin. Trump’s deal looks, in the end, like a deal to nowhere. It postpones the hard questions without answering them. It gives Iran room to breathe, America room to retreat, and everyone else a reason to wonder whether all the bluster was ever going to amount to anything.

Like my Iranian friends, I feel a sense of betrayal.

Trump promised a lot here, but little has changed!

(David Vance is a political commentator and author. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)