A ceasefire agreement between the world’s greatest military power and its leading terrorist regime is a big blanking deal.
But ask yourself: If the “agreement,” which runs a page and a half, is so great, why hasn’t it been released?
In a cascade of criticism, leading Republicans, joining the predictable Democrats, have expressed unhappiness with President Trump’s secret deal. Their attitude ranges from deep skepticism to outright opposition.
And the media coverage, even accounting for the usual anti-Trump hostility, has been relentlessly negative.
TRUMP’S IRAN AGREEMENT RAISES A BASIC QUESTION: IS IT ACTUALLY A DEAL?
“President Trump Lost This War,” the New York Times editorial page declared yesterday.
“Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war. He prosecuted it recklessly and in open defiance of the law. The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.
The details of the deal are unclear, but the announced framework suggests that Mr. Trump has won few of the terms he insisted that he would. It is a humiliating comedown for him and the nation he leads.”
That theme emerges throughout the coverage. Washington Post foreign policy columnist David Ignatius says: “Let’s be frank: In diplomatic terms, this agreement is an exit ramp from a costly and unpopular war, not a victory parade. The deal falls far short of President Donald Trump’s early talk of regime change and unconditional surrender. Even one of Trump’s close advisers concedes: ‘It’s inconclusive right now, in the sense that you can’t say it was a huge success, and you can’t say it was a failure.’”
But what’s most striking is the Republican pushback, with some demanding that Congress must approve any peace deal.
TRUMP VOWS ‘ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCES’ IF IRAN VIOLATES AGREEMENT, RESUMES NUCLEAR AMBITIONS
Sen. Thom Tillis says the agreement is “doomed to fail” because of the lack of congressional oversight. He also criticized some remarks by Pete Hegseth. “Now we are talking about a posture where we may accept the nuclear material remaining in Iran? How does that make sense at all?”
“If you want a deal to last,” said Sen. James Lankford, “it can’t be an executive agreement.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a presidential pal, said the memorandum being described by Iran “sounds awful.”
Speaking of uranium, the longtime hawk said: “If they can enrich it anywhere at all, then it’s the same as JCPOA,” the 2015 Obama agreement that Trump canceled. Graham told Politico he is “skeptical that Iran will ever go there.”
And conservative activist Erick Erickson, who has a popular radio show, says flatly: “Trump has surrendered to Iran.”
TRUMP MAY HAVE WON A STRATEGIC PAUSE IN IRAN. NOW COMES THE HARD PART
Colby Hall, a Mediaite founding editor who has started a Substack site that includes the “morning frame,” cited this example:
“Marc Thiessen is not a Democrat. He is not even a Never Trumper. He is a Fox News contributor, a Washington Post columnist, and a foreign-policy voice close enough to Trump that his calls reportedly helped shape the president’s position on Ukraine. He has had dinner at the White House.”
Thiessen compared the $300 billion that the White House concedes Iran would receive for a reconstruction fund to “offering the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power.” The columnist “was applying the moral logic conservatives spent a decade constructing — that you don’t rebuild a hostile regime, you constrain it — to a deal signed by the president he helped elect.”
He wasn’t alone. Fox anchor Bill Hemmer called the situation “precarious. It’s tough stuff because Iran’s history is to get to that table and just drag this thing out — month after month and eventually year after year.” Hemmer asked, “about us getting suckered back into a long, stalemated negotiation.”
Many Fox critics conveniently forget the network has a large news division.
Here’s Politico: “President Donald Trump and his team are celebrating an Iran peace deal they say will end Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
“But the accord rests on commitments that Iran hasn’t actually made yet. And it may never.”
Axios reports that CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Trump and other senior officials that “evidence gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies raises serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concessions the U.S. is seeking in any final deal, according to three sources familiar with those discussions.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “both expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding.”
“Ratcliffe and Rubio said that based on that intel, they doubted the Iranians would agree to take the nuclear steps the U.S. was seeking.”
NETANYAHU’S ISRAEL GRAPPLES WITH TRUMP-IRAN DEAL AS DETAILS REMAIN UNCLEAR
That’s pretty sobering.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty sees “a well-established pattern of an administration that habitually over promises and under delivers. Vice President Vance, who apparently never wanted to start a war, now gets the job of a deal with one of the world’s most untrustworthy and treacherous regimes.”
The Dispatch says: “If the deal has in fact been finalized… the administration’s unwillingness to share the details suggests the terms are, as many have feared, tantamount to surrender. Why not transparently share something of which you are proud?”
All we really have here is an agreement to keep on talking. Maybe it will all work out in the end, but right now it seems like a distant desert mirage.
Trump is declaring the “deal” a success. But with the still-secret arrangement, it’s hard to argue that the 80-year-old president has handled this well.
Footnote: Trump over the weekend posted a picture of himself with Kim Jong Un. What did that North Korean visit and all those love letters get us last time? Yet Trump appears to be signaling he wants to try again.
