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Trump Surrenders To Iran On Virtually Every Point

Failures

from the total-capitulation dept

Thu, Jun 18th 2026 09:29am -

Mike Masnick

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has shown over the years, it’s that he will get his most sycophantic MAGA loyalists to insist there are perfectly obvious reasons why whatever he’s about to do is absolutely necessary… and then Trump will do the opposite, and all those hangers-on will magically change their story within minutes.

The excellent reporter Laura Jedeed has been tracking all of the excuses Trump and his team have been giving for why we absolutely had to go to war with Iran, and the very top one: eliminate their ballistic missile capability. Next: eliminate their nuclear program entirely. There was also some talk of "regime change."

When Trump went to war with Iran, I watched every speech anyone in the administration gave and made a chart of every reason given for going to war"Eliminate ballistic capability" was the #1 reason given: more even than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon

— Laura Jedeed (@laurajedeed.bsky.social) 2026-06-17T21:21:49.542Z

Now that Trump has signed the surrender agreement at Versailles (the traditional place to sign a total surrender agreement), the scorecard looks like this: no eliminated missile program, no eliminated nuclear program, no regime change. Also: no actual deal.

What Trump signed is a one-page memorandum of understanding with a 60-day time limit. After that, another deal needs to happen — one that may or may not actually get signed. The thing being called a historic peace agreement is, in legal terms, a note on the back of a napkin that expires in two months.

With that established: here’s what he gave away to get it.

The US backed down on everything to get the Strait of Hormuz only partially opened, in a situation where Iran still seems likely to come out of this way stronger and way more powerful than before Trump started this illegal war. Remember, before this war, the Strait was open. So with this deal we only get partially back to where things were before the war, but with a huge draw down of US military stock, over a dozen dead US soldiers, and tons of unnecessary Iranian casualties, including a school full of young girls.

Iran retains their ballistic missiles and MAGA officials have to pretend that makes sense.

KAITLAN COLLINS: Are you okay with Iran having missiles?SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: I prefer that they not, but they have to defend themselvesCOLLINS: You think Iran needs to be able to defend itself?MARSHALL: I do, otherwise we turn this into a forever war

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-18T01:41:27.805Z

And after months of screaming about how Iran could not retain any nuclear capabilities at all, Trump is now talking about how important it is for them to retain their nuclear capabilities.

Also, remember how the Trump world insisted that Obama’s JCPOA was one of the worst deals of all time?

That’s Donald Trump tweeting in 2015 about the JCPOA:

The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don’t win anymore!

The "deal" Trump just made is a complete capitulation, a loss on every point, and way, way, way worse than what was in the JCPOA, which, in retrospect, was a genuinely good deal — carefully negotiated by actual experts — and briefly a real win for peace in the Middle East before Trump tore it up.

And remember how MAGA spent years misleadingly talking up all the money that the US supposedly "gave" Iran with the JCPOA? Or the deal Biden did to extend a Trump-era policy to unfreeze some of Iran’s frozen assets, which even Donald Trump Jr. falsely claimed was Biden "giving" Iran money?

There is now widespread reporting that this deal will unlock some $300 billion in investment for Tehran. To be precise: this isn’t the US writing a check — the deal creates the conditions for private capital to pour into the country. Trump has been pretty candid about his view on that:

“We don’t have to give them anything. But some people may want to invest. Like, what are you going to do to say ‘you can never ever invest in a country,’ I mean, it’s pretty tough.”

So: MAGA spent years insisting that financial flows to Iran — even unfreezing Iran’s own assets — would fund its military and get soldiers killed. Trump just opened Iran to hundreds of billions in new investment while leaving both the missiles and the nuclear program intact. The threat, apparently, only counts when a Democrat is president.

Obviously, ending this war is a good thing. But it never should have happened in the first...