You know, I want you to think about something with me for a moment. Just yesterday, Donald Trump posted five words on Truth Social that most people scrolled right past. He said, “The deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete.” Now, that is a big statement. That is the kind of statement that changes the trajectory of an entire region, maybe the world.
And I think most Americans heard it and thought, “Well, good. That’s great. The war is over. We can move on.” But here’s the honest truth. If you stop there, you miss the whole story. Because this deal didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of a series of choices, some of them very deliberate, some of them reckless, that cost this country enormously.
And I’m not just talking about money, though we’ll get to that. I’m talking about credibility. I’m talking about American lives. I’m talking about a diplomatic architecture that took decades to build and that was dismantled in a matter of months. Now look, I want to be fair. Anytime the shooting stops, anytime young men and women in uniform get to come home, that is something to be grateful for. I mean that sincerely.
But gratitude for a ceasefire doesn’t mean we stop asking the hard questions. And the hardest question of all is this. Did we need to be here in the first place? Because I’ll tell you, when I look at where we started and where we’ve ended up, the answer is deeply troubling. And we’ll come back to that comparison in a moment because it matters more than anything else in this conversation.
Let me tell you something most folks don’t remember or maybe never knew. Back in 2015, the United States along with five other world powers negotiated what was called the joint comprehensive plan of action, the JCPOA. Now, was it a perfect deal? No. I’ve been in enough negotiations to know that perfect deals don’t exist.
But here’s what it did. It capped Iran’s uranium enrichment. It reduced their centrifuges. It put international inspectors on the ground with real access. And it did all of that without a single American soldier firing a single shot. Not one casualty, not one dollar spent on military operations. Then in 2018, President Trump pulled the United States out of that agreement.
He said he’d get a better deal. And what followed was years of what they called maximum pressure, sanctions, isolation, confrontation. And you know what happened? Iran didn’t come to the table with a better offer. They started enriching uranium to higher levels than ever before. They got closer to a weapon, not further away.
>> And then came February 28th, 2026. The United States and Israel launched nearly 900 strikes against Iran in 12 hours. They killed the Supreme Leader. They hit military infrastructure across the country. But they also hit a girl school near a naval base in Manab and killed about 170 civilians. And Iran responded exactly the way anyone who has studied that region would have predicted.
They closed the straight of Hormuz and launched retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. Now, I want you to hold that sequence in your mind because that is how we got to this deal. Not through diplomacy, through war. So, let’s talk about what’s actually in this agreement because that’s where things start to get complicated. The deal, as it’s been reported, includes an immediate ceasefire and the termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon.
It reopens the Straight of Hormuz. It lifts the American naval blockade that’s been strangling Iran’s economy since April. and it reportedly includes the release of roughly $ 24 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Now, on the surface, that sounds like a comprehensive settlement. But here’s what’s not in it.
The nuclear question. The very issue that supposedly justified this entire war has been deferred, pushed to a second phase. 60 days of future negotiations that haven’t started yet. Let me put that in perspective for you. The JCPOA, the deal that was already in place before all of this, had verified enrichment limits, centuge caps, and IAEA inspectors with access on the ground.
What we have now is a promise to talk about it later. Senator Jack Reid, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said it plainly. We’re getting less than what the JCPOA gave us. Congressman Seth Molton called it a surrender document. Now, I don’t love that language because I think diplomacy deserves more nuance than that, but I understand the frustration when you spend over 29 billion dollars, lose 14 American service members, disrupt the global economy, and end up with a framework that doesn’t even
address the core issue. You have to ask what exactly we purchased here. Now, I want to talk about something that really concerns me, and it goes beyond the terms of the deal itself. It’s about how this was done. Because process matters. I know that sounds like something only a former president would say, but hear me out.
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When I was negotiating at Camp David or when we were working through the Dayton Accords to end the war in Bosnia, there was a structure. There were career diplomats in the room. There were intelligence briefings. There was coordination with Congress, with our allies, with the military chain of command.
And most importantly, there was discipline. You didn’t announce outcomes before they were finalized. You didn’t negotiate on television. You certainly didn’t call your negotiating partners dishonorable in the middle of the process. But that is exactly what happened here. President Trump has been conducting this entire negotiation through truth social posts.
One day he’s threatening to hit Iran very hard tonight. The next day he’s announcing a great settlement. He declared signing dates that shifted three or four times. He called Iran dishonorable people to deal with while the talks were still ongoing. And here’s what really gets me. The United States House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution 215 to 208 with four Republicans crossing over directing the president to end hostilities.
That is a rare bipartisan rebuke and it was essentially ignored. When the people’s representatives say stop and the president keeps going, that’s not strong leadership. That’s a breakdown in the system our founders designed. Let me tell you something about alliances that I learned the hard way during my years in office.
They are the most valuable currency a president has, and they are the hardest thing to rebuild once you’ve spent them. And what I see happening right now is deeply worrying. Israel, our closest partner in the Middle East for decades, was sidelined in these negotiations. Pakistan served as the primary mediator.
Now, think about that for a moment. There’s nothing wrong with Pakistan playing a constructive role, and Prime Minister Shariff deserves credit for his efforts. But when your closest ally in the region learns about the deal’s progress from social media posts, and when that ally is so frustrated that they’re launching strikes on Beirut while you’re trying to finalize the agreement, something has gone fundamentally wrong with your alliance management.
Netanyahu says the deal is a deep disappointment to Israel. And yet he also claims full agreement with Trump that Iran must never get nuclear weapons. Those two things cannot both be true and everyone in the region knows it. Meanwhile, Trump publicly condemned Israel strikes on Lebanon on social media, telling his own ally the attack should not have happened.
Now, I’ve had tough conversations with allies. every president does. But you have those conversations privately in a secure call with your secretary of state in the room. You don’t broadcast your disagreements to the world while your adversary is watching. And the deeper question is this. If the United States tears up one deal, starts a war, and then signs a weaker deal, why would anyone trust us the next time? That credibility gap is going to haunt American diplomacy for years to come.
Now, look, I want to be honest with you about what I think is really driving the timing of all this, because I think you deserve that honesty. This war is unpopular. The polls show it. The House vote showed it. And Americans are feeling it every single day at the gas pump. When Iran closed the Straight of Hormuz, it disrupted roughly 20% of the world’s energy supply.
Prices spiked, inflation climbed, and the American people, who were never consulted about starting this war in the first place, started paying for it with their wallets. The conflict has cost taxpayers at least $29 billion. Some estimates run well over a hundred billion when you factor in the economic disruption. 14 American service members have come home in flag drape coffins and midterm elections are on the horizon.
So when the president posts quote ships of the world start your engines unquote, I have to ask is that state craft or is that stage craft? Because it sure feels like a message designed for a news cycle, not for a generation. And here’s what’s interesting. Almost nobody is satisfied. Democrats say this deal delivers less than the JCPOA that was already working.
Republican hawks say it doesn’t dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. The only people celebrating are the ones who benefit politically from the appearance of resolution regardless of whether the underlying problems have actually been solved. And I’ve been around long enough to know that when a deal is designed primarily to generate a headline, the problems it was supposed to fix have a way of coming back.
And that brings me to where this goes from here because that’s the part that keeps me up at night. The formal signing ceremony is planned for June 19th in Switzerland, but as we speak, Israel is still striking targets in Lebanon. Iran’s military has already warned that those strikes will not go unanswered. The deal says hostilities will end on all fronts, including Lebanon.
But Hezbollah and Israel are still trading fire right now. So the agreement could be in trouble before the ink is dry. Even if the signing happens, the real test begins with those 60 days of nuclear negotiations. And let me tell you why I’m skeptical about that timeline. President Trump has never demonstrated sustained follow-through on complex multilateral negotiations.
He walked away from the JCPOA. He walked away from the Paris Climate Agreement. He walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And Iran, for its part, has every incentive to run out the clock. They’ve survived the worst of the military campaign. Their new supreme leader is consolidating power and they know that every day that passes without a nuclear framework is a day their leverage grows.
I’ve seen this pattern before where the declaration of peace creates a sense of resolution that doesn’t match the reality on the ground. And when that gap between perception and reality gets too wide, the consequences can be devastating. The Lebanon situation alone could unravel everything. One serious exchange between Hezbollah and Israel.
One Iranian retaliatory strike that crosses a line and we’re right back where we started. except now we’ve used up our leverage and our credibility. So, here’s where I want to leave you, and I hope you’ll sit with this for a while. I am grateful, genuinely grateful that the shooting has stopped, at least for now.
I think about the families of those 14 service members who won’t get to welcome their loved ones home. I think about the thousands of civilians killed in Iran, the hundreds killed in Lebanon, the millions of people displaced across the region. I think about the seafares who died in the straight of Hormuz just trying to do their jobs.
Every one of those lives matters and any agreement that prevents more loss of life has value. I want to be clear about that. But the American people deserve more than a ceasefire purchased at extraordinary cost that leaves the hardest problems unresolved. We deserve a foreign policy built on institutional discipline, on genuine partnership with Congress, on honest communication with the public, and on respect for our alliances.
We had a framework, the JCPOA, that addressed Iran’s nuclear program through verified multilateral diplomacy without a single casualty. It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. What we have now was purchased with American blood, American treasure, and American credibility, and it may ultimately deliver less. Now, I still believe in this country’s ability to course correct.
That’s what democracy is. It’s self-correcting by design. But it only works if the people demand better. Not just better outcomes, but better process, better transparency, better respect for the institutions that hold this republic together. Because at the end of the day, a deal is only as strong as a system that produced it.
And right now, that system needs our attention more than ever.
