Trump’s Iran deal: A victory lap before the victory

There is a particular kind of deal that feels triumphant on the day it is signed and corrosive on every day thereafter. The 14-point memorandum of understanding (MoU) the Trump administration concluded with Iran this week is shaping up to be exactly that species of triumph – the kind that requires applauding quickly, before anyone understands the implications.

Start with what is genuinely credible, because it is real. The president’s campaign on ending a shooting war, not managing one indefinitely, and a negotiated halt to active hostilities – one that reopens the Strait of Hormuz, lifts a naval blockade, and stops the bombing on all sides – is not nothing. Wars that end through exhaustion rather than victory still end, and the alternative to this MoU was not a better deal sitting on the table; it was an open-ended military commitment with no obvious exit. Give credit where it belongs: This administration was willing to use force when diplomacy failed, and willing to negotiate once force had made its point. That sequencing – military pressure first, diplomacy second – is precisely the theory of the case this president has always offered, and on its own terms it is not unreasonable.

But this triumph also has a very obvious shortcoming. The ceasefire was negotiated without the ally that has borne the highest cost for confronting Iran for the past two decades: Israel. The talks ran through Washington, through Pakistani mediators, through Geneva and Versailles – everywhere, it seems, except Israel, the number one United States ally in the region, which has spent years absorbing Hezbollah rockets, Houthi missiles, and the slow bleed of an Iranian proxy network built to destroy it. An ally who supplied the intelligence, the targeting, and in no small part the military rationale for the February attacks on Iran that began this war is now being asked to treat as settled a document it had no hand in drafting. That is not the treatment one extends to a partner. It is the treatment one extends to a complication.

Consider the sequencing that the MOU actually contains, because the details confirm the slight. The asset unfreezing proceeds “in light of the progress of negotiations” – elastic enough to mean almost anything – while verification is pushed off to a “final agreement” still 60 days away, extendable by mutual consent. The leverage moves first, the proof follows later, if at all. Any negotiator who has dealt with Tehran across four decades could tell you which half of that sequence Iran will treat as binding and which half as aspirational.

Then there is the $300bn reconstruction fund – a figure unthinkable from this White House in any other context, defended on the technicality that Washington itself won’t write the cheque. That distinction will not survive contact with reality, and it will least survive contact with an Israeli government watching billions flow towards the regime that arms Hezbollah on its northern border and the Houthis on its southern approaches. The administration that built its critique of the Obama-era deal around the danger of flooding the regime with cash now finds itself the architect of a far larger flood – one Israel will be left to absorb the consequences of, with no seat at the table that decided it.