There Is No Such Thing As A Deal With Iran
There Is No Such Thing As A Deal With Iran
We did not assemble the greatest armada the world has known to write Iran a traffic ticket.
A wildly outmatched adversary is “obliterated” by American military power yet remains stubbornly unbowed. Sound familiar?
Nixon’s deal with the North Vietnamese for “Peace with Honor” was little more than a rhetorical fig-leaf to mask our ignominious retreat and the chaos that followed. The “deal” that Nixon brokered required the communists to pull out of Laos and Cambodia. They did no such thing. Once the Yanks were gone, both countries fell to communist control along with the rest of Vietnam by 1975. Two million Cambodians died in Pol Pot’s killing fields between 1975 and 1979. So much for peace. So much for honor.
All of the points that Donald Trump repeats ad nauseam today about the scale of the American “victory” in Iran—that we have completely destroyed their navy and air force and air defenses—were equally true of Vietnam for the most of that conflict, and yet the Vietnam War ended in defeat for America, thinly disguised by an ostensible “deal.” You’ll forgive me if today I’m having feelings of déjà vu.
First, let’s be honest with ourselves: no one in the Trump administration expected six months ago to be talking about Iran, today. After Operation Midnight Hammer, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced, on June 24, 2025, that American forces had “conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program.” Webster’s defines the word “obliterate” to mean “to remove from existence, destroy utterly all trace, indication, or significance of.” Trump protested reports that cast doubt on the finality of this obliteration by denying, repeatedly, that Iran retained the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon and insisting that they could not recover that capacity for “years.” This remained the official position of the White House for months. Then came Mr. Trump’s 3 a.m. post on Truth Social on January 2, 2026.
Iran had of course recently threatened protestors who had taken to the streets in the wake of deteriorating conditions in that country, to which Mr. Trump replied: “If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters … the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
What legion of hobgoblins plagued Mr. Trump in that late hour, history will long wonder. Whatever the reason, he suddenly decided to announce an unprecedented escalation in American foreign policy toward Iran. What followed amounted to a declaration of war.
In a social media post. At 3 a.m.
Even by Mr. Trump’s standards, this was something utterly new. It was also the reddest of red lines. But then something happened that no one expected—least of all President Trump. Iran not only crossed his red line, you might say they “obliterated” it. They massacred, publicly, not one or two but tens of thousands of peaceful protestors. Suddenly the question (“What now?”) that the president had likely failed to ask his advisors before letting that 3 a.m. post rip, had to be asked. The answers the generals presumably gave him didn’t quite match the “locked and loaded” derring-do of Mr. Trump’s late-night imagination.
Mr. Trump hemmed and hawed for weeks while Iran repeatedly called his bluff, and is it any wonder why? Simply stated, we were never in any position to “rescue” the Iranian people and had no plan to do so. Iran had indeed shot and violently killed peaceful protesters, but how, exactly, could America “come to their rescue”? American attack helicopters shooting and being shot at in the skies over Tehran? Paratroopers dropping by the thousands into the Iranian desert and fanning out into city streets?
What is more remarkable than the unsatisfactory answers to these questions is the fact that exactly no one in the administration was asking them before Trump’s 3 a.m. Truth Social post. There was not one word from the Trump administration in the months between the conclusion of Operation Midnight Hammer and the January 2, 2026 post to signal that the United States was considering, much less ready to commit to, a dramatic shift in policy to intervene militarily in the internal unrest in Iran.
There was also not one word from the administration between the end of Operation Midnight Hammer and Mr. Trump’s January 2, 2026, post to suggest that Iran was anywhere close to reconstituting its theretofore “obliterated” nuclear program. For this reason, people harbor deep skepticism of Steve Witkoff’s sudden insistence, on February 21, 2026, that Iran was then “probably a week away from having industrial grade bomb making material.”
Obliteration clearly ain’t what it used to be.
In the meantime, the facts on the ground keep getting in the way of the administration narrative. On April 1, 8, 15, and 17, the White House assured America and the world that the Strait of Hormuz was fully open and ready for business, while on April 5, 7, 8, 13, and 28, the White House demanded that Iran reopen the strait. On May 16, the AP reported that the same Iran that supposedly has no navy still has “a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz” despite a U.S. naval blockade.
Suffice it to say, things have not gone to plan. As with our war against the North Vietnamese, we can boast of “obliterating” and “bombing the sh*t” out of a great many things in Iran, and Mr. Trump often does, but now as then, tactical success has not given us strategic victory. The Iranian regime remains firmly in charge. If they didn’t fully appreciate the significance of having a nuclear weapon before, they now understand acutely the need to get one. And if the regime survives, they will.
I support Donald Trump. Even if Moses had made a wrong turn after crossing the Red Sea, that wouldn’t be a reason to run back to the pharaoh. While I would sorely like to believe that we didn’t back ourselves into the present conflict on the basis of an ill-considered 3 a. m. tweet, how we got here matters much less, now, than how we get out.
We did not assemble the greatest armada the world has known to write Iran a traffic ticket. Our president made a promise to rescue the Iranian people, and that promise must mean something if America is to mean something. No matter what Pete Hegseth says, we set out to defeat the regime. Having undertaken that ostensible goal, if we now leave them in power, we will have made them immeasurably stronger in the eyes of their terrified citizens and the world.
The Iranian theocracy is not a government but a death cult bent on destroying the Jews and the west. We have seen their ilk before. We did not stop 100 miles from Berlin to offer Hitler a “deal.” There is no such thing as a deal with death, and there is no such thing as a deal with Iran. Finish what you started, Mr. President.
Image generated by ChatGPT.
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