Who surrendered in the war? President Trump or Iran

It was less than 15 weeks ago when President Trump, at the height of his bravado about how the war with Iran would end, declared, “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”
When the text of the deal intended to wind down the conflict was finally released on Wednesday, read aloud paragraph by paragraph by a senior administration official who stopped to defend each section, it read nothing like a surrender document. Instead, the Iranians emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military having not only survived, but with much to celebrate.
For a president who prizes leverage above all else, that decision is just another mystery of the war. But the wording of the “Memorandum of Understanding” also suggests that, over time, Iran may negotiate some permanent way to exercise sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. That seems in contradiction to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s declarations just a few weeks ago that anything other than the kind of free passage through the strait that the world knew before the war was “not acceptable” and “cannot happen.”
And the memorandum, signed on Wednesday evening by Iran’s president and Trump, describes a pathway in which Iran could begin receiving billions of dollars in assets that have been frozen for years. Trump insists the money will only be released in return for “good behaviour.” But it is essentially the same concession that Barack Obama made 11 years ago, and Trump has savaged ever since.
As Trump reminds reporters — often angrily — the United States did have many accomplishments on the battlefield: It sank Iran’s less-than-impressive navy, wiped out its small air force, destroyed much of Iran’s defence industrial base and demolished some of its missile emplacements and mobile launchers. But that was not Trump’s goal. As he said at the opening of the campaign, he sought the total destruction of the nuclear and missile programmes, the fall of the regime and, as he suggested later on, American control of the country’s oil industry.
In the next few days, the details of this agreement will be picked apart. Hard-liners in Trump’s party have already been expressing objections. So have the Israelis, frozen out of the negotiations and fearful they are being forced by Trump into a cease-fire with Hezbollah that will interfere with their ability to rip apart the terror group. Historians will grapple for years about the lessons of a conflict in which the United States spent tens of billions of dollars, with 13 Americans and more than 3,000 Iranians reported to have been killed.
He didn’t want comparisons to Herbert Hoover, he told reporters at the Hotel Royal in Évian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on Wednesday.
“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.”
That combination — economic chaos and disrupted oil markets — is exactly what the Iranians viewed from the opening days of the war as their most potent weapon. They executed on that vision with precision, closing the strait and blowing up petrochemical facilities, desalination plants, hotels and air bases across the Gulf. And by the president’s own testimony, it worked.
If that was Phase 1 of Iran’s strategy, history suggests Phase 2 may be one of delay and more delay. In past negotiations, the Iranians refined the art of arguing over every paragraph, throwing in new obstacles to inspections or reinterpreting the meaning of “nuclear research” to embrace continued uranium enrichment. Few were more skilled at this process, former American negotiators say, than Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and a veteran of past talks.
Senior members of the Obama administration, having absorbed years of critiques from Trump about the shortcomings and loopholes in the agreement struck in 2015, saw their moment to exact a measure of retribution.
“The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening the Strait of Hormuz — which was open before the war started,” former Secretary of State Antony J Blinken wrote online on Wednesday.
While some Republicans expressed cautious optimism that Trump’s peace-through-negotiation strategy may yet work, a good number of Iran hard-liners and America First adherents could not bring themselves to repeat the talking points in support of the accord that were being emailed by members of the administration. Among the most outspoken were those protected by impending retirement.
“Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who lost a primary last month after Trump targeted him for defeat, wrote on social media. He said that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “were not curbed” and that the war had taught the Iranians that they had more leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and the world economy than they knew. Cassidy termed the war “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”