From out of the horses’ mouths. “They have to be able to defend themselves,” Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall said on CNN of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ stockpile of ballistic missiles. Until a couple of weeks ago, Marshall, a MAGA diehard, had been all in on Trump ’s war. “You think that Iran needs to be able to defend itself?” his interviewer, anchor Kaitlan Collins, repeated, as if to make sure the camera was getting it all. “I do,” Marshall insisted. And anyway, short of “a forever war,” he argued, “you’re never gonna get them … surrendering everything.” In this, Marshall was only echoing the president’s own line. “Missiles are not the problem,” Donald Trump told another journalist on Wednesday. “If other countries have them,” he said, “it’s a little bit unfair for [Iran] to not have some.” All this, barely more than two months after Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization.”
For a man and a movement almost wholly constituted by lies, the signing on June 17 of a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran has been a juncture of sudden, Pauline truth. Unless they were lifted, the sanctions the U.S. had imposed on Iran would “never let them rebuild,” Trump remarked to reporters at the G7 conference on June 17. “There would be poverty. Then 91 million people would starve.” Not since then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright affirmed in 1996 that the death by starvation of half a million Iraqi children under U.S. sanctions was “worth it” has a senior official acknowledged the barbarity of U.S. policy with such frankness. Trump also spoke other, less benignly humane truths. “It’s not our money, it’s their money,” he noted, of the tens of billions in Iranian assets to be unfrozen by the U.S.; there was no choice but to “give it back.” After all, if the U.S. didn’t do so, “nobody would ever invest in the dollar again.” But the most plainspoken moment of clarity came from our former-lawyer vice president, at a press conference the following day: “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.” JD Vance was scolding the Israelis, but his icepick eyes may as well have been squinting into a mirror.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? For many Democrats in Congress, the only sin more unforgivable than starting an illegal war is trying to end one. The terms of the MOU are “disgraceful,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal fumed, an “unconditional surrender.” “One of the worst deals ever made,” according to Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth. The House minority whip, Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark, declared it an “outrageous betrayal” that “further emboldens Iran.” “We have capitulated to the enemy,” declared New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. “Democrats will not be helping Trump send $300 billion to Iran,” tweeted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, vowing to oppose the MOU in the unlikely and irrelevant event that it comes to the Senate for a vote. JD Vance was scolding the Israelis, but his icepick eyes may as well have been squinting into a mirror. Schumer, who never tires of lambasting Trump’s lies in videos enjoyed by the Senate minority leader’s four loyal TikTok viewers, was himself being more than a little misleading. While the MOU provides for a “plan” of “at least $300 billion” for Iran’s “reconstruction and economic development,” the fund’s financing remains unspecified; Trump, Vance, and their mouthpieces insist that the money will come from other Persian Gulf states, or from corporations with interests in Iran. (In the end, it might be moot: Financial Times Middle East correspondent Abigail Hauslohner speculates that the $300 billion is “an eye-popping” figure that “we’ll never see again,” part of Trump’s pattern of “unleashing random, hyperbolic numbers.”) Nevertheless, Democratic resistance to the MOU has coalesced around the theme of a “payout” to the Iranian enemy, a kind of grand bribe. As Richard Beck wrote on the New Left Review’s blog last month, although most Democrats in Congress — with a few exceptions, like the slowly putrefying Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman — have gone through a “pantomime” of opposition to the Iran adventure, “the party leadership instinctively approves of Trump’s war, they just don’t want to support it too openly.” By contrast, the reaction of most senior Democrats to the war’s prospective end has been like that of kids when someone turns off the TV just when the movie was getting good.
Marshall’s sudden embrace of Iranian self-defense aside, some formerly loyal Republicans are also joining Democrats’ brave stand against peace. Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the MOU “completely out of step with the president’s goals.” The deal is “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” said Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, declaring that “Reagan is rolling over in his grave.” (Reagan’s record in Iran was famously untarnished by any foreign policy blunders.) And in a speech act of almost sublime cravenness, South Carolina Sen. and Iran uber-hawk Lindsey Graham has insisted that the MOU must be approved by Congress; naturally, Graham raised less than no objection when Trump launched the war without congressional consent. “Let’s try a diplomatic solution,” Graham said stiffly on “Face the Nation” on June 21, as if someone had kicked his leg under the table. “I think it’s going to fail,” he added.
There’s no question that Iran would gain vastly by the deal. The generosity of the agreement — one wants to say its humanity — is remarkable. An “immediate and permanent” cessation of hostilities, “including in Lebanon,” whose “territorial integrity and sovereignty” are to be respected; the end of the U.S. naval blockade and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz; a U.S. commitment to “terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic”; a pledge by Iran not to “procure or develop nuclear weapons”; the unfreezing of Iranian assets; and immediate sanctions relief for Iranian fossil fuel exports, along with “all associated services” — this last granting Iran permanent permission to sell its oil for U.S. dollars for the first time in decades. (When Trump posted “Let the oil flow!” on June 14, he said perhaps more than he meant to.) An agreement, in so many words, to begin treating Iran like a normal country, inhabited and governed by human beings. As the historian Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet writes, “for a country facing repeated foreign interference, military incursions, and frontier insecurity,” the memorandum’s terms “represent an extraordinary achievement” — “if upheld.” An “if” as wide as the Persian Gulf. * * * “This agreement has the support of all the— ” Marshall quickly caught and corrected himself in the CNN interview, a smirk flashing across his fleshy face. “ Most of the countries of the Middle East.” The signing of the memorandum has given a new, dismal depth to the idea of the “Israel exception.” Senior members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet have panned the deal and insisted that Israel is unbound by “the termination of military operations” in Lebanon specified in the agreement’s first sentence; National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has declared that “all of Lebanon must burn.” Netanyahu himself has avoided criticizing the deal or Trump directly, but the proof is in the bombs. Since the MOU’s notional ceasefire notionally began, Israel has killed scores of people in dozens of attacks across southern Lebanon. Out of impatience, incompetence or imbecility, Trump and his lieutenants may yet tank their own deal, but only Israel is “actively working to destroy its chances,” Quincy Institute Vice President Trita Parsi notes. For Netanyahu, “peace” would be “a huge strategic defeat.”
A popular liberal Zionist narrative of the Gaza genocide has rested on a kind of vulgar electoralism, depicting the Israeli campaign as a cynical display of force meant to prop up Netanyahu’s factious far-right coalition and shield the prime minister himself from a long-delayed corruption prosecution. In the case of Gaza, such an account was incomplete at best; in Lebanon, it seems at least nearer the truth. Hamstrung in its push for regime change — or better yet, civil war — in Iran, and absent anything resembling an Oct. 7-style threat from Hezbollah, Israel’s bombardment of half the country proceeds purely in order to prolong the war, sabotage the deal and salvage the last scraps of Netanyahu’s political career. On this score, too, Trump let drop one of the veils of pretense that normally shroud U.S.-Israel relations: The Hezbollah drone sorties that provided the pretext for one of Israel’s recent murderous attacks on Beirut were, he groused, “very small and meaningless,” with no casualties. Still, it seems that scores, hundreds or thousands more people must suffer and die at the hands of a man Trump recently called “fucking crazy” as part of a desperate move in the electoral chess match of an apartheid democracy. The signing of the memorandum has given a new, dismal depth to the idea of the “Israel exception.” Netanyahu’s murderous gambit has had some effect abroad — with negotiations in Switzerland barely begun, Iran has already reclosed the strait, while Trump has resumed threatening Tehran — but it’s less clear that it will work at home. The Israeli opposition’s assorted genocidaires-in-waiting have pounced on the deal and on Netanyahu’s leadership, in terms nearly identical to those of their U.S. counterparts. Yair Lapid called the MOU “an absolute failure”; Naftali Bennett denounced the government as “incapable”; Avigdor Lieberman likened the agreement to “treason.” The Times of Israel reported that as details of the MOU emerged, Netanyahu’s Likud party hastily canceled an ad campaign for the country’s upcoming elections that would have touted the prime minister’s friendship with Trump. And for their part, Trump administration officials are said to already be in contact with Bennett and Gali Eisenkot, favorites to replace Netanyahu in the country’s upcoming elections.
The rift between the Israeli and U.S. governments is incipient but real, and Trump has cannily allowed Vance to be its voice. (Trump said last week that if the Iran deal “works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t … I’m blaming JD.”) “Anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality,” Vance chided at a press conference on June 18, pointing out that the country relies on the U.S. for “two-thirds of its defensive weapons.” Vance almost taunted Israel with its near-pariah status: Trump, he insisted, “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment.” 1 It remains to be seen whether Vance is really, as Parsi has argued, “changing the entire paradigm” of U.S.-Israel relations. But rhetorical limits have been breached that under President Joe Biden and his predecessors remained sacred. Vance suggested in a recent interview that Israel is not an inviolable bulwark of U.S. power in the Middle East, but merely a “good partner,” like “the United Kingdom, or France,” whose “interests” may or may not be “aligned” with those of the U.S. For Iran, to be treated as a sovereign nation is a triumph; for Israel, to be treated as merely a sovereign nation is a humiliation. * * * A victory for humanity is almost by definition a defeat for the United States. From fantasies of overnight regime change, the U.S. has been reduced to respectful colloquies with a government it has for decades depicted as a terrorist cabal. “How on earth did Trump manage to pull off such an improbable defeat having started with such overwhelming advantage?” asks Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, feigning disbelief. By now we should know the reasons by heart: the deep roots and wide reach of the Iranian state across the country’s society, military and economy; the tactical ingenuity and resilience of Iran’s armed forces; and above all, the immovable geographic weapon of the Strait of Hormuz itself. Short of invasion or nuclear detonation, the “overwhelming advantage” will remain on one side. Tacitly or openly, officials and observers on all sides of the deal — even those who otherwise seem to inhabit different universes — acknowledge that the U.S. has lost the war. And should the war resume, as Israel hopes, the U.S. will lose again. “You can’t kill your way out of … every national security problem”; but you can sure as hell die trying. A victory for humanity is almost by definition a defeat for the United States. Yet one of the privileges of hegemony, even a diminished and degraded one, is that you can lose over and over and still stay on top. The power to remove sanctions is also the power to restore them; the power to threaten or discipline an ally is also the power to draw them closer. One thinks back to that passing moment in Trump’s G7 conference, and the prospect that “nobody would ever invest in the dollar again.” In fact, the dollar’s value is at its highest in more than a year; the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was a boon to U.S. oil companies, which enjoyed rapid price rises and bumper exports; both the S&P 500 and NASDAQ indexes recently hit all-time highs. And even as it crumbles in Iran, American power rages unchecked in Latin America, where one socialist government has been decapitated and defanged, while another is being strangled by sanctions; since Trump’s second inauguration, the U.S. military has killed more than 200 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific for the crime of being on a boat.
Still, the damages to military capacity and diplomatic dignity will be lasting. In this respect, Vance is again both the spearhead and the fall guy. He has been publicly snubbed by Iranian and Qatari negotiators at Lake Lucerne — in one of her withering ex cathedra tweets, Joyce Carol Oates likened Vance to a Dostoevsky character “who has been humiliated by life in his youth” and “seeks out forever afterward circumstances that … will humiliate him again” — yet he insists the summit has “laid a successful foundation” for future nuclear talks. As it rages against the dying of the imperial light, the U.S. will have to suffer more Vances and more MOUs: lame ducks posing as predators, pleas for mercy disguised as declarations of victory. * * * By now the ideological putty of Trump’s foreign policy has been remolded enough times that we shouldn’t be shocked when a MAGA senator sounds like an anti-imperial third worldist on CNN, or when a vice president channels an antisemitism-curious podcast host. Cowed, cornered and bored by their own military morass, Trump and his loyalists have lurched from a war of aggression to the extreme margins of the American diplomatic imagination, broaching the normalization of relations with a sworn U.S. enemy almost by accident. A June 22 New York Times op-ed by Robert Malley and Stephen Wertheim likened the reversal to “Nixon going to China — if Nixon had bombed China first”; but it’s more like if Nixon had crash-landed in Beijing after being shot down aboard Air Force One. 2 Trump’s atrocities move at the speed of his own whims, until they slam into a resistant reality. The story of his second presidency has been a grinding conflict between the administration’s most monstrous ambitions and the many obstacles, both popular and institutional, to their achievement. This time, perversely, it is the MOU’s sanity and decency that make it vulnerable. Peace with Iran is hugely popular; a CBS/YouGov poll last week found that 78% of Americans support an immediate end to the war. But just as the judicial institutions that have slowed or stymied Trump’s domestic agenda cannot be removed overnight, a national security state and congressional consensus that have been built for decades on hostility toward Iran won’t be capsized by a single short document. Trump’s atrocities move at the speed of his own whims, until they slam into a resistant reality. That document is, after all, only ink on paper. It’s fitting that “MOU” is only one letter removed from “”IOU”: While it initiates an extendable 60-day phase of negotiations, the text is really a promissory note, an agreement to seek an agreement. The intricacies of nuclear enrichment, inspections protocols, uranium disposal and much else remain to be addressed. Simon Gass, the U.K.’s lead negotiator in the talks that led to the previous nuclear agreement with Iran known as the JCPOA in 2015-16, states flatly that “60 days will not be enough” to finally “resolve the nuclear issue”; the seven-nation JCPOA, he points out, took almost two years to negotiate, and with a U.S. delegation staffed by career diplomats rather than real estate moneymen. Who would expect Trump’s patience, or attention, to last so long? Polymarket isn’t even taking bets on that one.
Iranian leaders know better than anyone that Trump’s promises are no more inherently real than his threats. A text of both legalistic specificity (with a precise timeline and conditions for “the passage of commercial vessels” through the strait) and wishful vagueness (“the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters” are punted in a single swift paragraph), it has the hallmarks of a Trump decree, addressed to the future but designed for the present, meant to soothe markets, cap gas prices and tamp Treasury yields as much as to achieve any of its stated aims.
Nevertheless, the memorandum has unleashed long-suppressed truths and opened long-closed possibilities that can’t easily be denied or forgotten. In all of this, no credit is due to the president or his henchmen. At the same press conference where he defended the terms of the Iran deal, Trump was asked about the slaughter of more than a hundred children in the U.S. strike on a girls’ school in Minab. Trump waved it away as “a long time ago”; the attack took place less than four months ago. And even as Trump projects humanitarian concern for the 91 million Iranian victims of U.S. sanctions, the 10 million people of Cuba are starving under a total U.S. economic blockade. The memorandum is a document for its moment: a time of truth without sincerity, truce without peace, reckoning without justice.
- Fittingly, there was a degree of MAGA chauvinism even in this claim. India’s Narendra Modi has formed a lasting friendship with Netanyahu possibly more unctuous — public hugs, private dinners, honorary medals, parliamentary addresses — than that of any U.S. president, and apparently unshaken by the Iran fiasco. ︎
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- Meanwhile, the MOU’s opponents can’t be faulted for inconsistency: Schumer opposed the JCPOA, too, despite its far more gradual and qualified provisions, and was one of four Senate Democrats who voted against the deal in 2015. Meanwhile, Graham’s obsession with bombing Iran is surpassed in intensity and longevity only by Netanyahu’s own; the South Carolina senator reportedly “coached” the Israeli prime minister on how to sell Trump on the war. ︎
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