Donald Trump Lost the Iran War, and Here’s How

After tearing up Obama’s Iran deal, Trump bombed his way into a no-win war — and then surrendered to a deal worse than the one he destroyed.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – Donald Trump failed a Kobayashi Maru test of his own making. In case you don’t speak Nerd, it’s a Star Trek thing. Every Starfleet Academy cadet is required to captain a starship in a simulation where they learn to deal with a no-win scenario. When it comes to Donald and his Iran War, it was always going to be a Kobayashi Maru situation. He was never going to win. Not ever.

Let’s recap. In 2018, he famously withdrew the United States from the 2015 Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), assuming it was a bad deal because it was brokered by Barack Obama. This kneejerk decision led directly to Iran restarting its uranium enrichment program, which led to Donald bombing Iran’s underground facilities last Summer. Despite his obviously bullshit proclamations, boasting that he “obliterated” those sites, Iran apparently maintained some capacity to enrich – another Donald Trump failure – which subsequently led to the 2026 Iran War, which then led to the deaths of American military personnel, countless Iranians, including 160 children in Minab, triggering the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and touching off a global energy crisis.

All because Donald inaccurately believed he could do better than the Black liberal. Anyone who believed he could actually do better was once again conned by the world’s most obvious bullshitter, and blood is on their hands, too.

And that’s if you believe the official explanation for why the war started.

After all, it might’ve been all about the Epstein Files, a possibility that makes the incredible death toll and colossal expense in terms of military hardware, damage to America’s alliances and reputation, and personal consumer debt even more mindblowingly horrendous.

Now there’s this ridiculous Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). By now you’ve probably seen all the cable news and social media reactions about how it’s far worse than the Obama JCPOA that Donald tore up. All those reactions are correct. The United States and its janky, trashy, declining, incompetent president lost this war, and the MOU illustrates exactly how.

The reason we are where we are, and why the terms of the MOU are so advantageous for Iran, is because Donald had no choice. Again, the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario. Iran’s control over the Strait applied economic and political pressure on him and his party, forcing him to capitulate – to ejector-seat out of this catastrophic mess he created alone. He was sandwiched between his own terrible choices and devastating prospects for both inflation and the midterms.

No matter how many bombs he dropped, Iran always had the upper hand. This is why attacking was always a mistake – it was always going to land on this outcome. And no one inside the regime was willing to make this easily predictable case to Donald because everyone from Rubio to Vance to Hegseth, and all the various other butt-smooches in between, only told the president what he wanted to hear. Donald is forever high on his own supply and mistakenly thought he couldn’t fail, and that everyone else, including Iranian leadership, was weaker than him.

Back to the MOU. By now, we all know about the document’s pledge to provide $300 billion in cash to Iran – in case there are MAGA trolls here, $300 billion is far more than the $1.7 billion in assets returned to Iran as part of the 2015 deal. By the way, the money was paid in cash because U.S. and international sanctions prevented banks from doing business with the Iranian regime. Something else Donald never mentions.

And the sanctions topic leads us to the two items in the MOU that signifies, to me, the most egregious aspect of this preliminary deal to end a lost war.

Item 7 pledges the ending of all sanctions against Iran. All of them. The original JCPOA only lifted some of the uranium enrichment-based sanctions, hence the $1.7 billion. But it left all other sanctions in place pertaining to Iran’s human rights abuses, its ballistic missile program, and its funding of terrorism. But with Donald Trump’s MOU, all those remaining sanctions disappear. I can’t fully describe how bad this is.

7 — The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal.

How can anyone frame this as anything other than a victory for Iran?

Wait, it gets worse. Item 9 of the MOU pledges that the United States will not apply new sanctions against Iran. And it allows Iran to continue whatever is left of its nuclear development.

The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

No more sanctions, and Iran can continue to develop nuclear technology.

Yes, the MOU states that Iran will not develop or purchase a nuclear weapon. But so did the original JCPOA. And until Donald tore up the document, and based on verification from on-the-ground IAEA inspectors, Iran wasn’t enriching weapons-grade uranium. But there’s nothing in the MOU that provides for inspectors, unlike the original JCPOA. Another huge win for Iran.

Look, anyone can bomb the fuck out of another country, but the point is to achieve a larger political, geographic, or economic goal. The U.S. didn’t attack the Confederate armies just to burn some gunpowder, the goal was to put down a rebellion and anything short of that goal would’ve been a loss. The U.S. didn’t nuke Japan in 1945 just to see the devastation. The goal was surrender. Duh. In the case of the Iran War, it wasn’t just about showing off our military prowess, the goal was to force Iran to its knees in order to prevent it from killing a lot of people through terrorism and, possibly, a nuke-tipped ICBM aimed at Tel Aviv.

In this case, Donald killed thousands of people, forced millions more into personal debt, and the outcome is that Iran can continue its nuclear program and enrich itself through the elimination of all sanctions – and it still controls the Strait of Hormuz and the fate of the global economy. How does this achieve any of the goals of this ludicrous war? How has Iran lost?

And you know what? There’s a very real chance this MOU falls apart before the week is out, precipitating more bombings and more economic hardship.

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