Almost immediately, the two parties declared different understandings of what the MOU means. Trump called it proof of American victory and said that the Islamic Republic is “finished.” The Islamic Republic’s chief negotiator, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, called the MOU “a declaration of America’s defeat.”

Despite the regime’s subversion of states across the Middle East, and its recent massacre of thousands of protesters and the arrest and torture of thousands more, the Trump administration has offered the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism an economic lifeline by lifting sanctions and unfreezing cash. American and Iranian leaders immediately disagreed about that, too.

Trump said that the U.S. Treasury Department would release Iranian funds “into escrow, controlled by the USA,” and ensure they were spent on medical supplies and corn, wheat, and soybeans from “our great American farmers.” Vice President JD Vance said that Qatar will supervise the purchase of these American exports from frozen Iranian assets held outside the U.S. But Ali Bahreini, Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, said “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets.” An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said that Iran, whose major sources of imported food include Brazil, India, Turkey, and the European Union, would make its purchases on the basis of “prices and quality” rather than “enriching American farmers.”

“Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation,” Trump said of the JCPOA. The MOU already grants American recognition to Iran as the suzerain of the Strait of Hormuz and preserves Iran’s foothold on the Mediterranean by protecting Hezbollah from Israel. It already rolls back 40 years of sanctions and allows Iran to sell oil on the open market from day one. Above all, it recognizes the murderous fanatics of the Iranian regime as Iran’s legitimate rulers. Why has the Trump administration agreed to this from a position of military strength?

Regime unchanged

The reality of the current position lies somewhere between the American and Iranian claims. Despite 40 days of American and Israeli bombing after Feb. 28 — and the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the senior leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — the Islamic Republic is not finished. Its regime has suffered a devastating military defeat, but it has survived. Trump’s mouth ran beyond his military’s capacity in the war’s early weeks, leading him to call for Iran’s people to “take over your country” and endorse regime change in Iran. But only the faces of Iran’s tyrants changed.

The regime’s hammering is a kind of strategic victory for the U.S. A new way of war has crystallized since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza attacked Israel. In the Iran war, the U.S. and Israel deployed this digital war of drones and missiles at scale for the first time. The American military demonstrated its mastery of this multispectrum technological battlefield by dismembering the elements of the Iranian regime and decapitating its political leadership.

Still, the regime’s survival is widely perceived as a strategic defeat for the U.S., and for good reason. The Hydra-headed Guard and its clerical partners sprouted new leadership. Destroying the regime’s command-and-control nodes disabled its ability to defend its borders, but its internal mechanisms of repression survived at the regional and local levels. The Iranian proxies of the “Axis of Resistance” are battered but still in the field: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias and cells in Iraq, Hamas in the rubble of Gaza, and the Palestinian-run cities of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank.

Three political constraints shaped this outcome. First, the American public has a sensible distrust of “boots on the ground” in the Middle East, and so does Trump. Second, the administration knew in February that it would need to pivot from the Persian Gulf to the November midterm elections, so it needed gas prices to come down. Third, seizing the Strait of Hormuz might nullify Iran’s strongest card, but it would also send gas prices up and even trigger a global recession. These, too, are matters of national interest, especially in a democracy.

A fourth constraint is the shortfall in precision munitions. An April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies counted Operation Epic Fury’s expenditure of seven “critical munitions.” By the 40-day mark, more than a third of the estimated prewar inventory of 3,000-plus ship-launched Tomahawk missiles had been fired. More than a quarter of the 4,000-plus Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs), and as many as 70 of 90 artillery-launched Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs), had been used. Among anti-missile defenses, as many as 290 of the prewar stock of 360 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) were used, and possibly more than half of the stocks of Patriot missile interceptors.

The administration’s fiscal 2027 procurement shopping list only partially restocks supplies of some of these key weapons. Delivery times for THAAD and Patriot systems are estimated at 53 and 42 months, respectively. The revival of domestic production capacity will take years. Meanwhile, CSIS notes that the American military will be competing with allies and partners, such as Ukraine and Israel, who also need to restock and expand their inventories. China remains America’s key competitor and Taiwan the critical flash point. Again, the complexities of the national interest limited the scope of the Iran war.

The question is, if the MOU is fulfilled in part or whole, would that advance the national interest? In particular, would it buttress or undermine America’s global position? 

American military power underwrites a network of alliances. The U.S. has been in the Middle East for so long that it now has relations with all the major players, and even minor ones such as Ahmed al Sharaa, the Rolex-sporting ex-jihadist head-chopper to whose tender mercies Trump may yet entrust Lebanon. Like Obama’s JCPOA, the MOU would fold the antagonists into the American-led system: Turks, Israelis, Sunni Arab princes, Iranian Shia imperialists, and now even the nuclear-armed failed state of Pakistan, with terrorist-funding, two-faced Qatar as the Casablanca where everyone’s mutual loathing can be litigated for profit.

None of America’s clients in the region wants this. Though the war has altered the context of the MOU, the MOU’s implications revive those of the JCPOA. The MOU, like the JCPOA, omits any mention of Iran’s ballistic missile program. Iran demonstrated the scale of that program during the recent war. It indiscriminately bombarded Israeli cities. It launched missiles and drones at energy infrastructure and Dubai’s financial district in the United Arab Emirates, energy sites in Kuwait and Bahrain, ports in Oman, the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar (which is the largest American base in the Middle East), and American bases in Iraq.

Trump’s own Cabinet is divided. The MOU was negotiated by Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance, who has let it be known that he never supported the war in the first place. But, as Axios reported on June 15, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe all distrust Iran’s intentions because intelligence indicates that, as a source put it, “the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal.” This is not what Vance told the nation.

“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper on June 16, “is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials, say, ‘You know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something else.’”

On June 22, Vance claimed that International Atomic Energy inspectors could be back at Iran’s nuclear sites “as soon as today.” But Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it had made “no new commitments” and had no plans to admit the inspectors. 

“If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Fortunes of war

In the summer of 416 B.C., Thucydides writes in History of the Peloponnesian War, an Athenian fleet sailed to subjugate the island of Melos, a Spartan colony. In the “Melian Dialogue,” the parley before the battle, the Athenians warned that, as they hold the balance of forces, the Melians were in no position to argue: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

But the Melians reminded the Athenians that “the fortune of war is sometimes more impartial than the disproportion of numbers might lead one to suppose.” Surrender meant the end of the Melian regime, but defiance “still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect,” especially if Athens’s rival Sparta reinforced its Melian friends. 

For the Athenians, asserting the balance of forces at Melos was also about holding the political balance at home. Athens was ruled by an oligarchy that Thucydides calls “the Few,” but rival elites were challenging the Few in the name of the people. This domestic strife made the “friendship” of the Melians more dangerous to Athens than their enmity. For if Athens’s leaders struck peace with a weaker power, the deal, the Athenians admitted, would be “an argument to our subjects of our weakness.”

This is the Trump administration’s dilemma. The mullahs and the Guard know that surrender means the end of their regime, its theocratic ambitions, and the financial rewards that it accrues while waiting for the 12th Imam and the end of time. Defiance by negotiation is their only path to survival. If China restocks Iran’s ballistic missiles and buys its oil, Iran might, as the Melians hoped of their Spartan patrons, stave off a siege. The fortunes of war are not the balance of forces. The Melians knew that for democratic Athens — balance was both foreign and domestic. The Iranian regime also reads CSIS reports. It has crushed its domestic opposition. It can wait out an 80-year-old American president facing his lame-duck twilight, and indulge the domestic ambitions of his would-be heir.

Unlike the Trump administration, the Athenians came prepared. The Athenian ships were loaded with infantry and cavalry. When the Athenians and Melians failed to reach a memorandum of understanding, the Athenians put sandals on the ground and conquered Melos. Without that land force, however, the siege of Melos might have gone differently. Even with a land force, victory was not assured. In the winter after the siege of Melos, the Athenian fleet launched a land invasion of Sicily. The Sicilian expedition failed. The blowback in Athens led to an oligarchic coup in 411 B.C., the erosion of democratic solidarity, and the ascendance of factional loyalty over the public good.

Iran, as Herodotus wrote in his Histories, is an imperial state spanning a vast area. The American expedition includes forces from the 31st and 11th Marine Expeditionary Units that could take control of the Persian Gulf by seizing Kharg Island and the bases on Iran’s coastal littoral. But the American people are tired of eastern adventures. Their oligarchy is already riven by strategic disagreement over whether to focus on the Middle East or the Far East. The draining of advanced munitions by Ukraine and Israel is weakening America’s posture in Asia. The American people are restive, and the midterm elections are looming. All this grants the Iranian regime a path to self-preservation that the Melians lacked.

When the strong do not do all they can, the weak get a chance to do their most. The Iranian regime survived the American-Israeli air assault, and like the 20-district imperial monarchy that Herodotus described, the centralized authority of the Guard projects its power internally by decentralizing its operations. Domestic constraints limited the scope of the American expedition and the campaigning season. The outcome and exit strategy, for now, is the MOU.

The Trump administration has struck the kind of deal with Iran that the Athenians at Melos saw would be “an argument to our subjects of our weakness.” Its manifold weaknesses are obvious to America’s allies and clients, and even clearer to America’s enemies. If the MOU is fulfilled, it would amount to America’s retreat from western Asia and its surrender as the guarantor of the sea-lanes that are the arteries of world trade. The blood that flows through those arteries is green, and most of it is denominated in U.S. dollars. The MOU puts America’s future in the balance.

Vance advances

The task of explaining why the MOU is a good idea falls to Vance. His promotion of the MOU is inseparable from his domestic ambition. Vance wants the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. The surprise in the selling of the MOU wasn’t that the Trump administration, like every administration since Jimmy Carter’s, has wandered into the Iranian hall of mirrors. It’s that Vance chose to justify a potentially disastrous deal by attacking Israel, America’s close ally in the war, insinuating that pro-Israel Americans act in bad faith, and erecting more straw men than an Iowa potato field.

It is not true that, as Vance claimed, “all wars end in negotiation.” It is Tucker Carlson-like to say, as Vance did, that “if everything is Jew-hatred, nothing is Jew-hatred,” so anyone who detects anti-Jewish motivations in anti-Israel politics is acting in bad faith. It is strategically destructive to affirm Hezbollah’s stake in Lebanon by creating a “deconfliction cell” with Iran, Hezbollah’s chief patron, while pressing Israel to stop fighting Hezbollah when it has Hezbollah on the back foot. It is diplomatically self-destructive to tell Israelis to shut up or risk losing America’s support. It is base innuendo to muse whether there are “people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state,” and imply that Benjamin Netanyahu might want that outcome. Even the Libyans complained about that one.

HOARSE JD VANCE IS DEPLOYED TO MAKE SURE NOTHING IS LOST IN TRANSLATION WITH IRAN DEAL

Vance certainly is trying something different. As the Athenian fleet sailed for Sicily, Athenagoras, a populist who distrusted the adventure but then got behind it, warned that while the people are more concerned about “their possessions at home” than foreign policy, political factions might exploit the situation by spreading “abominable” and false stories to “frighten the people and themselves take over the government.”

Vance is using the MOU to rally the isolationist, conspiracist, and often racist MAGA fringe to his 2028 nomination campaign, but he cannot win a presidential election that way. If the Republican nomination is contested, he won’t even win that. Apart from gambling his future on the worst elements of our digital democracy, Vance’s credentials as a statesman depend on a president who always ensures the buck stops elsewhere, and the compliance of an American enemy that, as Trump once observed, loses its wars but wins its negotiations.

Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.