The newly leaked Memo of Understanding to end the conflict makes it clear that the president has nothing to show for his expensive, destructive fool’s errand.
President Donald Trump mimics gunfire during an April press conference on the Iran War.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Over the weekend, with the White House transformed by the bizarre and hastily constructed UFC fight arena erected to honor both the birthday of the nation and President Donald Trump, our commander in chief began crowing about the incredible deal he had just worked out with Iran. But despite repeatedly promising to release the full text of the Memorandum of Understanding he’d endorsed—a document that supplies a temporary framework for how to negotiate the real issues at play in a more durable peace agreement—the president continued to hem and haw on the details.
On Wednesday, CNN obtained a copy of the memo. And the text of the provisional deal makes it clear why the president didn’t want this document to spend too much time out in the world before he tries to memory-hole the war entirely on Friday. It represents a humiliating strategic defeat and immediately ends the Islamic Republic’s long international isolation with virtually no concessions from Tehran whatsoever. It is an epochal surrender, and it will cause such a deafening roar from the GOP’s permanent-war wing that Trump will be forced to spend the weeks and months ahead enduring pressure to walk away.
Beltway-based Iran hawks and some Republican elected officials had spent the first part of this week clamoring for the text of the memorandum. They were perhaps hoping against hope that MAGA’s bellicose emperor wouldn’t negotiate a framework that was as bad as it sounded in the initial reports. “Will the administration lose at the negotiating table what was won on the battlefield?” asked Mark Dubowitz of the ultra-hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Unfortunately for Dubowitz and his friends, the memo was even worse than they feared. While Iran agreed to hold talks about its nuclear program, the United States was unable to extract a single concrete pledge about the shape of a deal beyond a promise not to build nuclear weapons. (What’s more, that pledge is entirely redundant, given that Iran is already a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The memo only notes in passing that issues like Tehran’s existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium and plans for future enrichment “will be adequately addressed in a final agreement.”
While US officials failed to broker any serious linkage between Iran’s nuclear program and aid resumption, Tehran achieved a linkage breakthrough of its own: Iranian negotiators tied the negotiating window to stopping Israel’s reckless bombing attacks in Lebanon. The memo calls for an “immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon”—a shocking coup for the Iranians that is now likely triggering a series of nervous breakdowns within DC’s cottage industry of hawkish think tanks. The document also includes no mention of Hezbollah, Iran’s other regional proxies, or the country’s ballistic missile program. This latter omission would seem to leave the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps free to fine-tune its ballistic missile arsenal at its leisure for as long as it takes to negotiate a binding agreement.
The memorandum also appears to immediately dismantle, or at least suspend, the existing US sanctions regime. It says that “immediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding” the Treasury Department will issue waivers for Iran’s oil and petrochemical industries, as well as for “all related services, including banking, insurance, transportation, and the like.” It further promises that “frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be released and made fully available” before any comprehensive settlement is signed. The lack of any language pertaining to Iran’s rumored plans to install a permanent toll for commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz is a de facto surrender to the country’s plan to charge “service fees” notionally akin to a maritime credit-card processing charge.
There is no way to describe this memorandum other than as the ratification of America’s most significant strategic defeat since Vietnam. Iran has managed to register this astonishing victory in less than four months. The document calls for a final agreement to be reached in a “maximum” of 60 days but also says that period can be “extendable by mutual consent.” As has been obvious for weeks now, Trump was trying to push the most difficult issues beyond the US midterm elections, effectively walking away from the occasionless, pointless war that he started. Trump would be falling back on his standard MO: declare himself a winner in a completely self-engineered defeat, and leave it to others to sort through the fallout.
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