{"id":354,"date":"2026-06-17T18:11:41","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T18:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=354"},"modified":"2026-06-17T18:11:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T18:11:41","slug":"the-framework-for-the-iran-peace-deal-means-total-humiliation-for-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=354","title":{"rendered":"The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Over the weekend, with the White House transformed by the bizarre and hastily constructed UFC fight arena erected to honor both the birthday of the nation and President Donald Trump, our commander in chief began crowing about the incredible deal he had just worked out with Iran. But despite repeatedly promising to release the full text of the Memorandum of Understanding he\u2019d endorsed\u2014a document that supplies a temporary framework for how to negotiate the real issues at play in a more durable peace agreement\u2014the president continued to hem and haw on the details.<\/p>\n

Read more Claire Valdez Is Making All the Right Enemies<\/a><\/p>\n

On Wednesday, CNN obtained a copy of the memo. And the text of the provisional deal makes it clear why the president didn\u2019t want this document to spend too much time out in the world before he tries to memory-hole the war entirely on Friday. It represents a humiliating strategic defeat and immediately ends the Islamic Republic\u2019s long international isolation with virtually no concessions from Tehran whatsoever. It is an epochal surrender, and it will cause such a deafening roar from the GOP\u2019s permanent-war wing that Trump will be forced to spend the weeks and months ahead enduring pressure to walk away.<\/p>\n

Beltway-based Iran hawks and some Republican elected officials had spent the first part of this week clamoring for the text of the memorandum. They were perhaps hoping against hope that MAGA\u2019s bellicose emperor wouldn\u2019t negotiate a framework that was as bad as it sounded in the initial reports. \u201cWill the administration lose at the negotiating table what was won on the battlefield?\u201d asked Mark Dubowitz of the ultra-hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Unfortunately for Dubowitz and his friends, the memo was even worse than they feared. While Iran agreed to hold talks about its nuclear program, the United States was unable to extract a single concrete pledge about the shape of a deal beyond a promise not to build nuclear weapons. (What\u2019s more, that pledge is entirely redundant, given that Iran is already a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The memo only notes in passing that issues like Tehran\u2019s existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium and plans for future enrichment \u201cwill be adequately addressed in a final agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n

While US officials failed to broker any serious linkage between Iran\u2019s nuclear program and aid resumption, Tehran achieved a linkage breakthrough of its own: Iranian negotiators tied the negotiating window to stopping Israeli reckless bombing attacks in Lebanon. The memo calls for an \u201cimmediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon\u201d\u2014a shocking coup for the Iranians that is now likely triggering a series of nervous breakdowns within DC\u2019s cottage industry of hawkish think tanks. The document also includes no mention of Hezbollah, Iran\u2019s other regional proxies, or the country\u2019s ballistic missile program. This latter omission would seem to leave the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps free to fine-tune its ballistic missile arsenal at its leisure for as long as it takes to negotiate a binding agreement.<\/p>\n

The memorandum also appears to immediately dismantle, or at least suspend, the existing US sanctions regime. It says that \u201cimmediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding\u201d the Treasury Department will issue waivers for Iran\u2019s oil and petrochemical industries ,as well as for \u201call related services, including banking, insurance, transportation, and the like.\u201d It further promises that \u201cfrozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be released and made fully available\u201d before any comprehensive settlement is signed. The lack of any language pertaining to Iran\u2019s rumored plans to install a permanent toll for commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz is a de facto surrender to the country\u2019s plan to charge \u201cservice fees\u201d notionally akin to a maritime credit-card processing charge.<\/p>\n

There is no way to describe this memorandum other than as the ratification of America\u2019s most significant strategic defeat since Vietnam. Iran has managed to register this astonishing victory in less than four months. The document calls for a final agreement to be reached in a \u201cmaximum\u201d of 60 days but also says that period can be \u201cextendable by mutual consent.\u201d As has been obvious for weeks now, Trump was trying to push the most difficult issues beyond the US midterm elections, effectively walking away from the occasionless, pointless war that he started. Trump would be falling back on his standard MO: declare himself a winner in a completely self-engineered defeat, and leave it to others to sort through the fallout.<\/p>\n

The chances that the president, having inked this humiliating document, will decide to restart a brutally unpopular war that was destroying the GOP\u2019s odds of holding the House and Senate are slim to none\u2014at least not before November. As the president himself said on Wednesday, \u201cThe alternative to this deal was a global recession\u2026.the Strait of Hormuz would never have been opened.\u201d That political reality grants Iran\u2019s battle-hardened, hardline new leaders virtually carte blanche to do whatever they want for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n

Read more At This Year\u2019s World Cup, Make Way for Autocrats<\/a><\/p>\n

This is an outcome that is also nothing short of a long-overdue Waterloo for America\u2019s decades-long project to topple the Iranian theocracy or force it to its knees. Once Iran succeeded in keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed with minimal effort, and once the US gave up on any attempt to force it open with history\u2019s most powerful navy, Tehran realized it held all the cards, to use Trump\u2019s favorite phrase. The country\u2019s massive new leverage was sufficient not just to secure the regime\u2019s bare survival, but also to achieve the kind of breakout in regional power that the late Ayatollah Khamenei could only have dreamed of. Iran has even brought Israel to heel\u2014or at least established a deterrent sufficient to prevent Jerusalem from bombing the country at will without consequences. Shielded from military reprisals and with a promise from the United States to \u201crespect each other\u2019s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other\u2019s internal affairs,\u201d Iran is now well on the road to regional hegemony.<\/p>\n

That disaster is the unambiguous takeaway from Trump\u2019s impulsive decision to murder Iran\u2019s leadership on February 28 and launch air strikes that, as virtually every aerial bombardment expert on Earth warned, had no chance of dislodging the regime. Yet for the doyens of the Iran Hawkery Industrial Complex, war against Iran can\u2019t fail\u2014it can only be failed. The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Bret Stephens wrote that America didn\u2019t lose \u201cbecause the war, for all its costs or errors of execution, was a mistake,\u201d but rather \u201cbecause this pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt our standing in the world for years to come.\u201d Meanwhile, FDD\u2019s Clifford May wrote that \u201cIran\u2019s rulers need to believe that [Trump] will resume both the naval blockade and military operations if the coming talks are unproductive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cliff, buddy, no one on the planet believes that if this agreement indeed goes into effect Trump will resume the naval blockade or begin bombing Iran again as the midterm elections inch closer and closer. Neither Stephens, May nor anyone else in the DC armchair-combat brigade can bear to admit that America lost the war<\/em> as well as the peace and in the process exposed potentially fatal weaknesses in US global security strategy. <\/p>\n

At best, Iran proved that the mighty American military juggernaut is deeply susceptible to economic and political pressure. Even US intelligence assesses that Iran will be able to close the Strait of Hormuz whenever it pleases\u2014granting it the economic equivalent of a nuclear weapon that can actually be used. And at worst, Trump\u2019s arrogant, impulsive blunder unwittingly destroyed the basis of American global power by making it clear how vulnerable US bases are to missile and drone fire. That not only means that other countries will be more reluctant to host them\u2014a political problem\u2014but also that they are useless in an actual war against a determined, well-equipped adversary like China.<\/p>\n

This is an outcome that is un-spinnable for President Trump. He now can only be desperately hoping that the economic rebound from opening the Strait of Hormuz will make up for the unmistakable stench of failure and ineptitude that is now wafting from the White House. He is certainly skilled enough in the art of changing the subject to make that a plausible path to keeping Republican losses in November tolerable. However, he has also ripped open a fissure in the GOP, pitting Vice President JD Vance and his isolationist allies against the party\u2019s still-powerful national-security hardliners, heading into a critical election cycle with loud and angry pro-Israel hawks particularly aggrieved. He\u2019ll now have to live with the reality that for all of the horrific, long-term damage he has inflicted on the United States and its political system, the debacle in Iran may be the humiliating foundation of his legacy.<\/p>\n

Read more Why Hillary Clinton Doesn\u2019t Deserve the Black Vote<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=354\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=354\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-17T18:11:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=354#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=354\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-17T18:11:41+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=354\"},\"wordCount\":1554,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=354#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/22f18751a60160203127a590f91957c2.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=354#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=354\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=354\",\"name\":\"The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump - 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