You Can Sell MAGA A Forever War If You Make It A Civilizational War (Director's Cut)
Iran has not, in fact, been at war for 3,000 years. But there’s a reason Trump says things like that
Iran has not, in fact, been at war for 3,000 years. But there’s a reason Trump says things like that.
Edited by Zeteo
BEFORE WE GET to my latest Zeteo column, last night the U.S. and Iran reached a still-unreleased agreement, known as a memorandum of understanding, that signals an intention to end the war. Whether that intention yields the desired finality is unknown. Following a signing ceremony slated for Friday, the U.S. and Iran will enter a 60-day period of negotiations on the terms of a postwar status quo, to include all the hard work of some sort of nuclear accord. Nothing about any of this is certain, durable or even particularly clear. The actual terms under discussion have not been released. Both sides will be declaring victory, a lot, over this next week. We're in Propaganda Week, basically, and I want to be analytically cautious until we actually see what's agreed upon. All that's agreed to is to buy time. Which, as far as wars are concerned, is not nothing.
But when Donald Trump begins by exclaiming "Let the oil flow!" it means he lost the war he initiated. Despite heavy leadership losses and unfathomable civilian deaths, Iran leveraged its geography to control the Strait of Hormuz, a globally pivotal waterway, and transformed a war it did not seek into one that exposed Washington's inability to win.
Iran's position is materially stronger than it was on February 28, and the reason why Israel and the United States attacked it is because bellicose elements in both countries thought Iran was weak after the 2024 Israeli campaign of assassinations against the Iranian coalition. They thought they would collapse the Islamic Republic and transform the region into one of U.S.-backed Israeli hegemony. Instead, Iran is stronger than it has been since Trump killed Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iranian influence in post-invasion Iraq, Assadist Syria and weakened Lebanon. It isolated the core strategic differences between the U.S. and Israel and drove a wedge between them. Although it's easy to overstate how material those differences will become, right now Israel, not Iran, is widely understood as the potential spoiler for a deal desired not only in Washington, but globally.
Trump can only hope to recover at the negotiating table what he could not win on the battlefield. Yet his negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, have zero successes with Iran. There was a moment in early 2025 when it looked like Witkoff had real flexibility to pursue a real negotiation. Then Witkoff, seemingly unaware of how a decade of right-wing hostility to the 2015 Iran Deal had boxed him in, announced that the U.S. would accept Iranian uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent. He had to spend a month walking that back. The 2015 Iran Deal, known as the JCPOA, required many arduous months of highly technical negotiation. The U.S. Energy Secretary at that time was a nuclear physicist who was deeply involved in shaping the specifications necessary to verifiably impede access to weaponization. In his place are dipshits from the mirror world of real estate valuations. Iran, to keep the peace, will require a payout a literal order of magnitude greater than the sanctions relief under the JCPOA that drove a right-wing and Zionist freakout. And they still expect to throttle access to the Strait of Hormuz—which I, probably like many, was previously unaware was not actually international waters. At the risk of stating the obvious, it will be much harder in 60 days to lock in a durable regional status quo than it was to negotiate the far more limited accord of the JCPOA.
The U.S.-aligned Gulf autocracies of the Middle East have now seen that the United States will not be able to come to their defense. For the past two decades, those autocracies have resisted U.S. disengagement and rapprochement with Iran for fear of being unprotected. Now they have watched the U.S. become as engaged as ever and still not protect them. The logic of missile defense is unforgiving: If an attack is 90 percent unsuccessful, it's devastating for the country under bombardment—and Iran showed it knows what to target. No leader in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, nor in less-aligned Qatar and Oman, will ever forget how parsimonious the U.S. was with its necessarily-limited interceptor magazine.
Anyway, that's where things will stand until we can see the text up for discussion. Before we paywall the column for paying subscribers, it's time to start promoting a very special evening at the Urbane Arts Club in Brooklyn. At 7 p.m. on June 30, we're launching The Midnight Special, the new book by Colin Asher, one of my oldest and best friends, about incarceration through the lens of popular/roots music. It's an excellent book and I'm honored to be interviewing Colin about it. You should join us.