It’s a bitter to swallow pill for those of us who have spent much of the last decade lauding President Donald Trump as the most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern Jewish state. It’s equally difficult for those who understood that his rejection of the patent nostrums of the foreign-policy establishment that was entrenched in the U.S. State Department, the media and the academy was essentially correct in almost every instance.

Yet there’s no denying that Trump’s decision to make a deal with Iran—the rogue state that he had gone to war against on Feb. 28 alongside Israel—represents a staggering defeat for the United States, Israel and himself personally. And those who have commended Trump for all the good things he did during his time in the White House should not be reluctant to say so.

Misplaced faith
The agreement, which Trump touted as “real peace” because it opened up the Strait of Hormuz, is a triumph for Tehran. The Iranians surrendered nothing except that one counter-measure to which they had resorted after it was clear that it was losing badly. What makes it all the more dismaying for Trump’s defenders is that one key criticism of his presidency has been vindicated.

The lack of precision and intellectual consistency in the president’s policy pronouncements have always been derided by his critics. But as long as Trump stuck to his instinctive distrust of the “expert” class that had guided American foreign policy for generations, that really didn’t matter. The approach that guided his decisions to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; pursue the Abraham Accords, rather than stick to futile efforts to broker peace with the Palestinians; and hit Iran hard to end its bolstering of international terrorism or give up its nuclear ambitions has led to success.

The same was true of other successes he achieved, such as securing the border that former President Joe Biden had left undefended, allowing millions of illegal immigrants to flood the country; toppling Nicolás Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela; or forcing elite American universities to stop tolerating and encouraging campus antisemitism because of their woke DEI policies.

So long as that was true, the president’s braggadocio and wild social-media posts filled with hyperbolic threats and boasts were merely a matter of style and manners.

But the failure in Iran can be traced back to the chaos that always lay underneath everything he did. Trump could have stuck to a principled stand on Iran, despite setbacks and problems, until victory. Launching a war with all of its unpredictable outcomes and variables was not the same as issuing executive orders or posting on social media. He lacked the ability to stand his ground because his mindset tends to seek immediate gratification and quick victories. Trump is a strong man, but his unpredictability and belief in his genius in deal-making were not enough to sustain him when things got difficult.

That left him vulnerable to the influence of those—like Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, and adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner—whose approach to Iran resembled that of members of past Democratic administrations.

A man with a coherent set of foreign-policy principles, as opposed to one with an unquenchable desire for short-term triumphs, might have understood that Witkoff, Kushner and Vance were leading him toward the same misguided stand on Iran as Obama.

His devoted MAGA fans refused to believe it. They repeatedly chided anyone who expressed fears that he was on track to surrender the gains that the war had achieved, as not understanding his subtle strategy. They said any indication that he might mimic Obama’s betrayal of the West on Iran was simply a matter of Trump playing three-dimensional chess while deceiving and trolling his critics. So deep is their faith in him that some will keep on insisting on this long after it’s become obvious that they have been deceived. 

But their faith in his judgement is misplaced. Rather than endure more months of criticism, high oil prices and sinking popularity ratings in pursuit of the goals on which he had staked so much American blood and treasure, Trump has simply folded on one of the key foreign policy priorities since he entered politics in 2015.

Repeating Obama’s blunder
Trump’s claims notwithstanding, Iran’s nuclear ambitions have not been snuffed out. The pact leaves open the possibility that they can keep their remaining nuclear material. The promises they have made about not seeking nuclear weapons are merely recycled lies with which they had fooled the president’s predecessors. They are no more trustworthy than those in President Barack Obama’s dangerously weak 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Trump had rightly derided as worthless for the past 10 years. Indeed, though Trump’s proposed terms for ending Iran’s nuclear program are somewhat tougher than Obama’s, both rely on Tehran, which is to say, they are equally meaningless.

Why, after so much bellicose rhetoric as well as tangible military success in the war, did Trump ultimately fold, handing both his domestic critics and his Iranian antagonists such a victory?

The United States and Israel had inflicted devastating losses on Iran’s military, as well as its missile and nuclear programs, along with much of the country’s infrastructure, with which it had threatened the region. But Iran did have the power—via drone and missile fire—to menace shipping in the Persian Gulf, thus impacting the price of oil.

Thanks to the energy independence that Trump’s policies had helped achieve, Americans felt the impact of that problem less than most other people around the world. Yet it still led to higher gas prices at the pump in the United States. Given that Trump had not made a compelling case for war to the American people, that fact increased the conflict’s unpopularity, exacerbating the Republican Party’s deficit in the polls about the outcome of this fall’s midterm elections.

That created enormous pressure—amplified by the neo-isolationists within his administration, led by Vice President JD Vance, who were already opposed to his tough policy on Iran—to end the war without achieving any of its initial goals. Though not explicitly stated, the point of starting the war was to make Iran surrender its nuclear material, as well as its ballistic missiles and its decades-long policy of fomenting terror around the region. Washington had rightly left its intentions about overthrowing the Islamist regime vague, hoping that the pounding Tehran’s forces had taken, coupled with the elimination of much of its leadership, would lead to that result or force the slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s successors to give in to American demands.

Folding under pressure
The president could have kept striking Iran until it bowed to his will. Or, once he agreed to a loose ceasefire in April could have kept enforcing a blockade on Iran’s ports, which was doing far more damage to its economy than the spike in oil prices was having on the West, until Tehran gave up or the regime imploded.

But he didn’t do either of those things. He folded under pressure and abandoned the gains that Washington and Jerusalem had achieved.

Even worse, he accepted Iran’s premise that an end to the fighting must also cover Jerusalem’s efforts to force the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon to stop firing on northern Israel and cede power in Beirut. That also led to Trump’s much-publicized abusive comments about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his erstwhile faithful partner in the war, about his temerity in prioritizing the defense of his people over the president’s pursuit of diplomacy with Iran.

The damage inflicted on Iran during the first two months of fighting was real and set back its ability to spread mayhem throughout the region. It will take years for it to rebuild its military and reconstitute its nuclear and missile threats.

And there is always the possibility that Trump could reverse course and resume the attacks once it becomes clear that Iran is simply retooling its infrastructure of terror and aggression.

But does anyone in Washington and Jerusalem, and elsewhere in the West—and most importantly, in Tehran—seriously believe he will do that now that he’s declared that this accord has resolved all of the world’s concerns about Iran? The Iranians know that he has had enough of the fighting; that made them even more intransigent. As they did during the negotiations with Obama and his envoys, they had his measure and acted accordingly.

Trump has now made the same mistake as Obama by relaxing sanctions and even unfreezing billions of Iranian funds held by the United States and its allies. As Lee Smith aptly noted in Tablet magazine, the transfer of $20 billion in frozen assets by the United Arab Emirates, with $3 billion already delivered to Tehran, perhaps in cash stacked on wooden pallets like those sent by the 44th president to pay off the Islamist terrorists a decade ago, is key to understanding what has just happened.

The money that Trump’s surrender will make available to the Iranian government will prop it up, and likely ensure both its longevity and its ability to sustain its Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist allies in Lebanon and Gaza.

The consequences of surrender
The oil may now flow, as the president trumpeted on Truth Social, through the Straits of Hormuz, and gas prices may decline. But the flow of cash to Iran is a guarantee that its regime will go on fomenting terror and war in the future, even after Trump leaves office in January 2029. As Obama did with his signature foreign-policy “achievement,” he has left a dangerous problem for his successors to solve that will be far worse and much harder to eliminate than it would have been for him had he not surrendered.

Iran’s tyrants can, with justice, say that it survived a fearsome assault by the United States and Israel, and ultimately forced a superpower to give up. Still, it will take time for it to get back to where it was on Oct. 6, 2023, before the confident launching of the cruel war on Israel launched by its “resistant front” with the atrocities of Oct. 7. The losses sustained by the Iranian regime, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, during the fighting that took place during the last 33 months were real. All are far weaker than they were then.

But there is also no doubt that Iran’s prospects have improved since the start of the year, when it seemed as if the regime that had murdered tens of thousands of its citizens who protested its tyrannical rule was on its last legs.

By threatening to topple the Islamist terrorists but failing to make good on those threats, Trump did terrible damage to his standing throughout the world, as well as that of the United States. Much like Obama’s going back on his talk of taking action against the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria if it crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons on its people, Trump has shown the Middle East that he, too, can be cowed into backing down. The American and Israeli attacks had shown Iran’s military weakness, but Tehran can now, as it did previously, claim to be the “strong horse” of the region that won’t reverse course in the face of Western attacks.

The deal with Iran is also a blow to the U.S.-Israel alliance.

The months of close cooperation between the two nations’ militaries had demonstrated just how powerful and important the bond between Washington and Jerusalem had become. By ending the war without achieving its goals and chiding the Israelis to stop defending themselves, Trump has sent the world a message that while not completely left on its own, the Jewish state has been put in a precarious position. His hyperbolic and inaccurate statements—“If it were not for me, there would be no Israel right now”—could be excused while he was actually supporting Israel, though now that he is undermining its security in this manner, they leave a bitter taste in the mouths of friends of the Jewish state.

A lost opportunity
The interests of the two nations aren’t identical, though they do mostly overlap. And Israel isn’t giving up and will continue to do what it must to defend itself. However, an opportunity to transform the region by defeating Tehran has been lost. And that will make future conflicts—that Trump’s deal, like Obama’s, will help foment—even more bloody and dangerous for the Jewish state, as well as moderate Arab states that must continue to fear what Iran will do in the years to come.

Domestically, Trump’s decision also strengthens the wing of his party that was soft on Iran and uninterested in defending Western interests in the Middle East. And those in the Democratic Party who no longer support Israel and opposed efforts to forestall the Iranian threat that Obama had encouraged have also been handed a victory. They can say that Trump wasted American lives and vast amounts of scarce military assets only to accept the same humiliation that Obama achieved without firing a single shot.

Vance, whose 2028 presidential prospects seemed on the wane in recent months, is a major beneficiary of this decision. His claim on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that every conflict, including World War II, ended in negotiation illustrated his lack of understanding of both the war and history. That absurd statement puts him on Trump’s side in the current foreign-policy debate, which strengthens his chances of being the president’s successor and next leader of the GOP.

Trump may remain a better guardian of American security, as well as a more reliable friend of Israel and the Jewish people than his Democratic predecessors. But sadly, his war on Iran will now be spoken of with the same derision that he had used to describe the failed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though that needn’t have happened had Trump been a man of stronger convictions and headed a less chaotic administration.

The fact that stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions and terrorism was as much in America’s interests as that of any other country will be forgotten and even downplayed by many of the president’s supporters. And the growing antisemitic movement on both the left and the right will pick up, and endlessly repeat the false narrative that it was Israel that led the United States to pursue a conflict that couldn’t be won.

We should not lose faith in Israel’s ultimate victory over the evil ideology that governs Iran and animates its terrorist allies. It is a more formidable nation than it was before Oct. 7, and will—no matter who leads it in the coming years—do what it must to defend itself. Yet, like the failure to eliminate Hamas in Gaza after Oct. 7, Trump’s decision to breathe new life into the Tehran regime will mean that more wars will have to be fought in the coming years to achieve that necessary goal. That’s a tragedy that could have been averted had Trump proved to be wiser and more steadfast than he turned out to be.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.