Bill Tallen

Have we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory? Outrage over the recently signed MOU with Iran began early, before anyone had even seen the text of the agreement. People who regularly proclaim their distrust of the media swallowed the media spin, and that spin is real, and very negative toward anything President Trump does. There are some likely outcomes, some positive ones if everyone is good on their word, and some inevitable ones. Let’s unpack it. By the time you read this, we’ll be on the 60-day path that the MOU establishes, and there will have been early signs of how it’s going to hold up.

First, it’s a Memorandum of Understanding, not a binding treaty. In essence, it is just another extension of the cease fire, this time with commitments by both sides that might or might not be honored, and — this is important — are conditional to the other side’s good faith and performance. It is in no way a final “deal” ending the war.

The U.S. has made three major concessions in this MOU. Whether we got equivalent value in return remains to be seen.

We committed to lifting our naval blockade. That is the biggest source of leverage we have had on Iran since April. Sustained long enough, it would have brought the regime to its knees. That pressure will now be removed, but the MOU gives us 30 days to end the blockade, and if Iran does not meet its own commitments, that can be stopped and the blockade reimposed on short notice.

We betrayed promises to the Iranian people, to deliver them from the regime’s tyranny. This is worse than Obama’s abandonment of them in 2009, because 30,000 to 40,000 of them were murdered by their government in January and February. Don’t look away when it resumes. History will judge us. 

Last and perhaps most important is acceptance — for the moment — of Iran’s promise to give up its nuclear weapons through future negotiations. I don’t trust them to do this and I expect them to use every delay and every bit of financial relief they receive to reconstitute and resume that program. For the present though — and again, without U.S. or allied troops on the ground — this may be the best we can get. We had better be preternaturally vigilant. 

Beyond these three points are several that are less galling. Economic sanctions — both U.N. and unilateral American sanctions — have restrained Iran’s bad behavior on nuclear weapons and through their terrorist proxies for many years, and sanctions are now to be lifted. But this too will not happen immediately and can be conditioned to Iran’s good behavior on other points of the MOU.

Frozen Iranian assets held by America and by other nodes of the global banking system for years are to be released in stages, but the timing and method has to be determined in future negotiations. It’s neither certain nor immediate.

What critics bemoan as a $300 billion payout from the U.S. to Iran is not that. The MOU says that a fund will be constituted by further negotiations over the next 60 days, but the funds will be contributed by Middle Eastern neighbor states. Their contribution to our war effort has been tepid and self-interested, so now they’re getting stuck with the bill for this $300 billion aid package. Whether they’ll pay is an open question.

A disturbing component of the MOU is that it demands a cease fire in Lebanon between Israel and Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah. The formal signing of the deal in Switzerland was even canceled when Israel said “nope,” as well they should. But that rough spot has been overcome after some arm-twisting resulted in a direct cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah. I wouldn’t bet on that lasting, and if it fails, the whole MOU will be at risk.

Probably the most important provision is the Iranian agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic. This will, although not instantaneously, restore the flow of Middle East oil to markets and bring prices down, which is very important to the U.S. and to every global consumer of oil and petroleum products. The world would deal with the devil to maintain the flow of oil, and U.S. unwillingness to commit ground troops on the coasts of the Strait has kept that out of reach through military means.

We are yielding, of apparent necessity, to domestic and global economic and political pressure. Nothing will be solved, due to the nature of the adversary. We have not given up much in this MOU, which looks quite fragile and may not last anyway. Either way, in the long run all this will have been just a very expensive new episode of kicking the can down the road.

I recently stumbled across this Ernest Hemingway quote. It’s from his “Notes on the Next War” and is chilling and, I’m afraid, prophetic:

“Not this August, nor this September; you have this year to do as you like. Not next August, nor next September; that is still too soon ... But the year after that or the year after that they fight.”