Trump in Defeat in Iran

The criticism of the Felon's "deal" with Iran continues to mount on all sides of the political spectrum as Israel endangers the memorandum of understanding ("MOU") through continued attacks on Lebanon.  The Felon - who seemingly knows little or no history - and signed the MOU at the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, the same venue where Germany surrendered after WWI.  Perhaps Macron trolled the oblivious Felon.  One columnist at the New York Times reflects on the situation as follows: 

[A] compelling column calling [the Felon's] President Trump’s truce with Iran less a deal than a debacle. I couldn’t agree more. But doesn’t it perfectly fit this presidency’s pattern? Trump blusters about restored American greatness — about our country being the “hottest” in the world, whatever that means — while making it look smaller, sillier and stupider by the day.

An second column in the Times describes the debacle in these words:

Surely something about this preliminary agreement between the United States and Iran must have felt familiar to America’s real-estate mogul president. After all, it reads like a real-estate bankruptcy filing — an act of financial capitulation.

It is a measure of how much Iran had [the Felon] Trump over a barrel, and how thoroughly it cleaned his clock, that Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told Iranian state TV after the details were announced: “The agreement is a record of U.S. failure. People will see it and judge.”

You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to see what happened here. You need to be a domestic policy expert. Trump sold out America’s ally in the war, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states for the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan. Trump knew that the food inflation and high gasoline prices triggered by this war were a prescription for a Republican wipeout in the midterms. 

The Felon, of course, is claiming "victory" even though none of the supposed objectives of the war have been realized and Iran knows that control of the Strait of Hormuz provides never ending blackmail opportunities.  Meanwhile on the home front, a Fox News polls shows the following:

Only 12% say they are getting ahead financially, most think the economy is in bad shape, more than half think President Donald Trump’s policies benefit people who have money, and their outlook on the economy is negative. . . . Some 59% of voters feel pessimistic about the economy, . . . . Forty-four percent say they’re falling behind financially. . . . . Big picture, 37% are satisfied with the direction of the country. 

Both the de facto surrender to Iran and the mess on the domestic front are the direct fault of the Felon who (i) has pushed policies and tax cuts that benefit the very wealthy while punishing the working and middle classes (e.g., safety net spending cuts) , and (ii) launched his war of choice despite warnings from experts.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's defeat:

[The Felon] President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker, diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.

The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations.

[The Felon] Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me. Trump, they said, has privately denounced Iran hawks, some of whom are among his closest allies in the Republican Party, for questioning the strength of the agreement. Within the administration, there is a divide on the deal, but Trump sided with those advocating for the war to wind down, no matter the terms, as fears mount about the economic toll on Americans and the political costs for Republicans in the midterms.

Trump’s own anger masks a desperate desire to find an off-ramp from a conflict that did not go the way he had planned, an outcome that has threatened to leave the United States—and Trump—reduced in the eyes of the world. For a decade, Trump has dominated the global stage and wielded extraordinary executive power. But now he is saddled with low poll numbers and unhappy Republicans, and he may soon have to contend with a Democratic Congress.

His evolution into a lame duck is accelerating, and the political world is poised to soon look beyond him and focus on the 2028 contenders hoping to succeed him. World leaders, who were once cowed, have begun to defy him. Trump’s defeat in Iran, and the way he lost, may hasten his irrelevance.

It’s not usually a vote of confidence for your deal when you won’t let anyone else read it. But Trump and his team have threatened to not release the Iran agreement until after it is signed in Geneva on Friday. Officials have said that the deal will extend the cease-fire over the next 60 days and that Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, allowing the U.S. to drop its naval blockade and oil to flow from the region again. Although Iran has agreed to not collect fees on the strait for the next 60 days, it has (according to Iranian state media) left open the door to doing so afterward—and the deal delays addressing Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, despite Trump having cast it as his urgent motivation for war.

The deal has also alarmed the GOP’s Iran hawks. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host who championed the case for war, posted on social media his disbelief that Trump had rebuked Netanyahu and that the agreement remained shrouded in secrecy: “I have asked for days, why can’t we, the people, see the damn MOU?’” Senator Lindsey Graham has also made his reservations known, although he has carefully avoided blaming Trump and tried to pin responsibility on Vance, who was the lead American negotiator in the early stages of the talks. Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator, went so far as to declare that “Trump has surrendered to Iran.” And Marc Thiessen, a former President George W. Bush aide with whom the White House consulted during the war, has been one of many conservative voices warning that Trump’s emerging framework looks a lot like the Obama deal.

That notion has infuriated the [Felon] president. A longtime Trump confidant told me that Trump “was incensed by the dissent”—particularly the Obama comparison—from once-loyal Republicans. Trump has reflexively tried to tear up anything associated with the former president.

In the first days, the strikes, which were pushed by Netanyahu, killed Iran’s supreme leader and inflicted extraordinary damage on its military and artillery. But Iran proved resilient, attacking its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, and plunging the world into an energy crisis. The price of gas skyrocketed globally, including in the United States. Trump’s poll numbers, already teetering, fell further, and he began looking for a way out. He tried to intimidate Iran into taking a deal, at one point vowing to destroy its “whole civilization,” but walked away from each threat, leaving him open to mockery from Tehran.

The hard-line regime in Tehran appears poised to sell oil again and receive up to $300 billion in funding from Gulf states that it could use to rebuild. Iran has tightened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz and demonstrated that it can close the waterway at will. Although Tehran has promised not to build a nuclear weapon, no enforcement mechanism has been established. And to the shock of some Iran hawks, Trump yesterday seemed to back off his previous pledge to seize the uranium, saying, “You could make the case, ‘Why are you even bothering?’ Because it’s not really valuable.”

Iran has seemingly come out of the conflict with an ability to check Israel’s freedom to strike Lebanon and potentially elsewhere; in recent days, Trump has blasted Netanyahu for endangering the cease-fire and demanded that he call off an attack on Beirut. Trump’s broadsides, including calling the prime minister “a very difficult guy,” threaten to widen a rift between the U.S. and its longtime ally in the Middle East. Despite Trump’s reprimands, Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will continue to authorize attacks that it deems necessary for self-defense.

The war has cost Trump. It has rattled the nation’s economy. The Pentagon estimated that it had spent roughly $29 billion on the conflict by mid-May, but independent experts believe that it has spent tens of billions more. The U.S. military’s munitions supply has been depleted, putting at risk its ability to defend its interests in Asia and Europe. The United States’ failure, despite its overwhelming military might, to bring Iran to its knees could encourage China, Russia, or North Korea to take aggressive action. In the eyes of many, Washington has hurt its moral standing around the globe; promises to help the Iranian people rise up went unfulfilled, and more than 170 people, mostly children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a girls’ school in the war’s first hours.

Back home, Trump is still the most powerful figure in politics. But those small acts of Republican defiance are adding up. He has had a series of losses in the courts, including in his efforts to remake the nation’s capital in his own image. Democrats are favored to capture at least one house of Congress this November, which would give them the ability to slow Trump’s agenda and open investigations into his administration. Once the midterms conclude, the race to replace Trump will begin. Although that will further diminish Trump, it is unlikely that he will go out with a whimper.