Trump Lost the Iran War

Trump has virtually agreed to end to the war with Iran that he and Israel launched on the last day of February, asserting that he has negotiated some kind of historic victory even as American negotiators admit they have mostly just agreed to keep discussing a peace deal that isn’t complete yet, and Israel is reportedly “alarmed” by it. JD Vance is on TV claiming that the “Iranian nuclear program has been completely destroyed” and saying this Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is an upgrade on Iran’s previous deal with President Obama. Like every syllable ever uttered by these gelatinous cretins, this is all transparent horseshit. You can tell this is transparent horseshit just by the numbered bullet points in the leaked MOU. All the stuff up front is about unfucking the thing Trump fucked, the Strait of Hormuz. 

“Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States Lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity;” writes the MOU in bullet point number four. “The traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.”

The first three agreements are diplomatic throat clearing about ending the war, respecting sovereignty and a truly hilarious and meaningless Trumpian sentence that says they will “undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent,” so four stands out as the first concrete U.S. ask and thus looks like Trump’s highest priority. Five is also about how Iran can go back to making lots of money on the Strait, while six promises $300 billion to Iran from Gulf states to meet their demand for war reparations that JD Vance says will be used as a carrot to try to get Iran to agree to their nuclear demands. Sounds like they’ve got everything figured out! I’ll now take a big sip of Iran war hawk coffee and see what else Iran gets out of the deal.

“The United States commits to ending, on a schedule to be agreed upon as part of the final agreement, all types of sanctions currently facing the Islamic Republic of Iran,” writes bullet point number seven, sending chills down Dick Cheney’s spine amidst the raging heat of the tenth circle of hell. Let’s check in with the living Iran hawks to see what they think of complete and total sanctions relief for the boogeyman in their closets, all in return for letting the boogeyman do what they were doing on February 27th.

remarkable scenes on Hannity last night as the normally Trump-friendly Gen. Jack Keane criticized the administration for being an unreliable narrator, urged Trump to release the text of the Iran deal, and noted it may still end up leaving a path for Iran to get a nuke

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 16, 2026 at 12:58 PM

This is a big fat L. Full-blown capitulation. This is Trump saying uncle and proving to the entire world that Iran doesn’t need a nuclear weapon, they already have something better and far cheaper that no country can take from them without a successful full-scale ground invasion. All they have to do is mine a 19-mile-wide stretch of the sea, lob some drones, missiles and armed speedboats in there, and blamo: worldwide shipping costs have fundamentally shifted for the rest of our lives, and the president of the United States is giving you full-scale sanctions relief up front and calling you daddy. The Strait of Hormuz is such a powerful economic superweapon and Trump and his team of real estate fraudsters are such dismal negotiators that the only concrete thing the United States was able to get out of Iran in this MOU is going back to February 27th when it was open.

Except Iran still reportedly gets to toll the strait, but don’t worry, we’re not calling them tolls anymore, they’re fees now. Also, they pinky promise to “never produce nuclear weapons” for now, and number eight of the MOU states that “the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran’s nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement.” This is an absolute joke, proof that Trump’s vaunted negotiation strategy can get dog walked by Iran’s third and fourth-stringers, and the only reason this MOU exists is because Trump has reached the maximum economic pain that he’s willing to withstand, and everything else is clearly a secondary consideration to making that stop.

Obama’s Iran deal, the JCPOA, has long been derided as weak by Republicans and other assorted Iran war hawks who preferred we do Trump and Israel’s war with Iran over painstaking diplomacy, but if you gave them the choice between Trump’s MOU or the JCPOA, there’s no question which option they’d take. 

Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran dismantled over 13,000 centrifuges and placed them in monitored storage, then shipped 98% of its low-enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It agreed to cap uranium enrichment for 15 years well below the 90% level required to build nuclear weapons, and for 15 years, it confined all uranium enrichment to the Natanz site, the one Trump bombed in 2025 when he said he got rid of their nuclear program before he launched a war in 2026, saying he was trying to rid Iran of their nuclear program. And sanctions relief was backloaded in the JCPOA, not frontloaded like the “schedule” wording suggests in Trump’s deal, meaning that Iran had to hit JCPOA targets before the U.S. Treasury lifted sanctions. That, plus an open and untolled Strait of Hormuz, was the pre-war status quo that Trump and Israel blew up because they are world-historic idiots who think they are invincible and that hubris doesn’t exist.

Trump lost the Iran War because Iran used the Strait of Hormuz to prove that he is weak and full of bluster. This is pretty unprecedented, and all of Trump’s allies in both the United States and Israel are having a very hard time concealing their contempt for what they have long wanted and enthusiastically signed up for. I’m just sorry that John McCain wasn’t alive to finally see his dream come true. We just have to hope that his good buddy Lindsey Graham is equally enthralled with finally getting what he wants. Trump’s standing in Israel has even been cratering as he has tried to restrict their bloodthirsty bombing campaign in Lebanon over the last few weeks to meet Iran’s demands, according to an Israel Hayom/Kantar poll. 

Probably because the MOU is just too good

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) June 16, 2026 at 11:04 AM

truly in awe of israeli political leadership that killed the JCPOA for this. fucking played yourself hall of fame shit.

— elias isquith (@eliasisquith.blog) June 16, 2026 at 9:42 AM

And the main thing Trump wants, for the global economy to stop being roiled by the largest energy shock in history he unleashed, and for commerce and shipping to immediately return to its pre-war levels, is not going to happen on the accelerated timeline America’s King manbaby wants. The Financial Times reported today that “Shipowners will not resume transit through the Strait of Hormuz for weeks until they are confident that the US-Iran deal is ‘material’, the head of the world’s biggest tanker operator has warned. ‘What will have to come in place is not just a simple agreement between the relevant countries,’” said chief executive of Mitsui OSK Lines, Jotaro Tamura, to the FT. “But it has to be material and translated into the real situations in the Strait of Hormuz, so that shipping lines can make themselves comfortable to go through.”

In other words: Trump can’t bullshit his way through this the way he does with the stock market. Those marks will buy a company that loses money and make it larger than fucking Amazon just because it is backed by the preeminent Nazi Ponzi schemer on planet earth, but the risk calculus is a lot different for the people transiting the Strait than it is for degenerates trading oil futures based on TruthSocial posts. Global insurance firms are also reassessing a major passage that they used to charge basically $0 to transit through and now will certainly charge more, altering the fundamental math behind global shipping. This royally fucked up situation created by Trump and Israel is a long way from being unfucked. 

Trump waged war on the Fed and Jerome Powell for over a year because he thinks the worst monetary policy mistakes of the stagflationary 1970s were actually pretty neat, and he demanded Powell drop interest rates to 1% or less, thinking like most stock market marks that that Fed controls interest rates and not the largest, most liquid market in the world. U.S. Treasury yields, the actual lever that controls your mortgage rate, have risen across the board since the war in anticipation of inflation, and Trump’s hand-picked stooge to replace Powell atop the Fed, Kevin Warsh, is going into his first meeting as Fed Chair this week talking about potential rate hikes later this year as energy inflation runs very hot and pushes headline inflation to nearly double the Fed’s target. The war against inflation would nearly be over if not for Trump.

The FT polled 47 economists in March and June of this year asking if they anticipate the Fed cutting, raising, or not changing interest rates by the end of 2026. In March, over 60% expected a cut and very few expected the Fed to raise rates, and that has been flipped around in June. I wonder what happened in between those polls!

Life comes at you fast www.ft.com/content/ee4e…

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— Jacob Weindling (@jakeweindling.bsky.social) June 16, 2026 at 10:55 AM

As the pandemic shock demonstrated, it takes time for inflation to really creep in to the economy, which has been proven yet again with Trump’s tariffs showing up in inflation figures before the war with Iran began. He has now added the inflation from the largest energy shock in history to it, plus a proportional fertilizer shock imposed on the world during the northern hemisphere’s planting season. Food inflation later this year is guaranteed because the input cost of higher fertilizer prices is already embedded in the ground our future food is growing in. All thanks to Trump’s war with Iran.

This is truly stunning. One of the biggest diplomatic, militaristic, and strategic Ls in American history. We opened the war by double tap striking a little girls’ school, made precision strikes on water facilities and committed other definitional war crimes, killed thousands across the region and injured tens of thousands more, lost at least 15 American troops, barely made a dent in Iran’s missile capabilities, and further emboldened Israel’s endless war on their neighbors, all so we could make everything more expensive for an indeterminate amount of time and install a more extremist leadership in Iran. Trump lost the Iran War, and assuming this shaky ceasefire and MOU holds, we are going to spend the coming months and quarters being constantly reminded of this unimpeachable fact.