This past weekend, the White House posted a triumphant message from President Trump: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!”
Within hours, Hezbollah issued its own statement. The organization that has murdered more Americans than any group outside of Al Qaeda praised Iran for its “great achievement,” declared that “there will be no return to the pre-March 2 reality,” and warned Lebanon against any effort to disarm it. The deal, Hezbollah said, was “the fruit of the legendary steadfastness, exceptional resilience and great sacrifices made by the Iranian people and their wise leadership.”
So there you have it. The people celebrating this deal are the people who killed our Marines.
Six years ago, Trump himself wrote something that cut straight to the Iranian strategic character: “Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” He was right. The tragedy is that he appears to have forgotten it, because Iran certainly has not.
Something has gone badly wrong in the past eight weeks. Not long ago, Israel was fighting alongside us against an enemy that had launched a direct ballistic missile attack on its territory, was arming and directing Hezbollah from Lebanese soil, and was racing toward a nuclear capability it had spent decades pursuing. The threat was real, the alliance was working, and the mission was clear.
Today, the mission has been quietly shelved. The deal reportedly offers Iran sanctions relief and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for commitments on its nuclear program that are, by the assessment of arms control experts, neither new nor particularly meaningful. Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile goes unaddressed. Hezbollah’s military infrastructure remains intact. Tehran’s funding of proxy forces across the region continues. Former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman called it “a catastrophe from Israel’s perspective.” A former Israeli national security adviser noted that Iran’s missiles and its support for terrorist proxies do not appear in the framework at all.
And yet the White House is celebrating.
The contrast with how Israel has been treated is something that deserves to be said plainly. When Israeli forces eliminated a senior Hezbollah commander responsible for the execution of five American soldiers, there was no statement of gratitude from Washington, no acknowledgment that an ally had just avenged American blood. What there was instead was a furious phone call in which the President reportedly screamed at Prime Minister Netanyahu, “What the hell are you doing?” and told him, per Axios, “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now.” Trump later confirmed to reporters that he was “so pissed off” and that Netanyahu “has no judgment.”
That is how we speak to the country doing our killing for us.
Only Israel has been systematically hunting down the Hezbollah commanders who murdered our Marines in Beirut in 1983, who bombed our embassy, who tortured and killed CIA station chief William Buckley, and who have spent four decades treating American lives as acceptable collateral damage. No other ally has done this. No other country has been willing to pay this price. The administration’s response to that sacrifice has been to publicly humiliate Israel’s prime minister while congratulating the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is worth understanding why. The administration wanted a deal badly enough that it was willing to pressure Israel to stop fighting in order to get one. When Israel struck Hezbollah targets in Beirut, Trump was furious not because the strikes were wrong, but because they threatened to delay the signing by a few hours. “It shook it up,” he said. “It was supposed to be now.” The priority was the deal. Not the security of an ally. Not the destruction of a terrorist infrastructure. The deal.
This is exactly the thinking that produced the 2015 nuclear agreement Trump spent years, correctly, condemning. That deal was also celebrated as historic. It also left Iran’s regional aggression untouched. It also gave Tehran access to funds it used to arm Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Trump was right to walk away from it. The question is whether what he has just signed is different in the ways that actually matter. The early evidence says no.
Nuclear experts have pointed out that Iran’s pledge not to develop a nuclear weapon is not a concession. Tehran has been making that same promise for more than fifty years. The terms governing Iran’s existing uranium stockpile are, according to reporting, still being worked out. And Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional instrument, is not merely unaddressed by this agreement. It is emboldened by it.
That sentence deserves to stand on its own. Hezbollah is emboldened. The group that killed 241 American servicemen in a single morning, that has fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, that takes its orders directly from Tehran, is now declaring victory and telling Lebanon not to disarm. It is signaling to every militia and proxy in the region that the formula works: absorb the pressure, hold the line, and let Iran negotiate your way back to relevance.
Every adversary from Tehran to Beijing to Moscow is watching this and drawing conclusions. When the United States leans on its closest ally to stand down while the enemy celebrates in the streets, the message received in hostile capitals is not that America is a responsible peacemaker. The message is that America can be waited out.
The long-term damage from that lesson is hard to overstate. Alliances are not contracts. They are built on trust, and trust requires consistency. Every ally we have, from the Baltic states to Taiwan, is watching what we are doing to Israel right now and asking whether Washington will be there when it counts, or whether they too will get the furious phone call telling them the timing is inconvenient.
And Iran has learned something more dangerous than how to survive a military campaign. It has learned that if it holds on long enough, the United States will negotiate the terms of its own retreat. It has learned that Hezbollah can murder American soldiers, absorb a season of pressure, and emerge with its weapons intact, its ideology unbroken, and a deal brokered on its behalf by the world’s most powerful nation. That lesson does not stay in Lebanon. It travels. It gets absorbed by every rogue regime and terror organization watching from the sidelines, and it shapes their calculations for the next generation.
Israel has not changed. It is still fighting. It is still hunting the men who killed our Marines and our soldiers and our diplomats. It is still the only country in the region willing to pay the full price of confronting Iranian power with something other than words. History will record what Israel did in these months. It will also record how we treated it while it did. That verdict will not be kind. And neither, in time, will be the consequences.
Daniel , You are right on all counts. I am disappointed in myself in that I truly thought that Trump wanted to make real change in the Middle East. He TACO’d big time.
In the end it all came down to Trump’s character defects, which outweighed the positives. He is his own worst enemy. The only consolation is that President Kamala would have been worse. The important question now is will Americans understand what is happening and offer more compelling (ie normal) candidates the next time around, whose actions won’t lead to mushroom clouds over American cities within the decade.