The Best Deal With Iran Is No Deal At All

It’s rare I cite National Review on the pages of Geller Report, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Dan McLaughlin is pessimistic about Trump’s ability to get a good deal from Iran’s regime, and suggests a better alternative in his view: no deal at all.

We Don’t Need a Deal with Iran

Walking away from the war with Iran may be the lesser evil compared with accepting a bad deal.

Much of the Iran war discourse of the past several weeks has been about whether or not we are close to a deal with Iran and what that deal might or should look like. But that’s the wrong question. What we should be asking is whether we get more out of having an agreement than not having one. There are good reasons to doubt that we would.

To start with, of course, it would help if we had a clear idea of what we’re fighting for in the first place. As I’ve argued from the outset, given that we already bombed Iran in mid-2025, a significant escalation to target the regime itself made sense only if we actually aimed to bring the regime down. Which is something we should want. The regime, not its armaments, is the real weapon of mass destruction, and it always was. It will be at war with us as long as it exists, no matter what tools it has to pursue that war. It will be a weapon in the hands of China and Russia, too. By contrast, while we prefer to avoid nuclear proliferation, a less radically anti-American regime would be far less of a threat even with more weapons. It’s now clear that we are not removing the Iranian regime — at least, not directly or before we have ended the war. If the regime is overthrown, it might be due in part to this war, but it will have to be done from within, and it could be months or years before that happens…. none of this is going to look much like a win for Donald Trump in domestic politics. But inking an agreement that reeks of the Obama JCPOA would be especially humiliating. Deciding to end the war entirely on our own terms, having done extensive damage to the Iranian regime’s armaments and senior leadership, may not be a very satisfying ending, but at least it is a power move that would not show us meekly submitting to terms.

These are harder war aims to resolve. Regime change is a visible and undeniable victory. It doesn’t depend on promises of future Iranian behavior, which can be compelled only by continuing threats of force — by a forever-war commitment to national probation — and can be judged only by classified intelligence estimates that have to be filtered through agencies the president may not trust, using evidence the public cannot see or evaluate.

There’s a fundamental difference in any negotiated agreement between what you get now, when you have the leverage to strike a deal, and what you get in future promises, when your leverage is only as good as the credible threat that you can both prove breach of the agreement and enforce consequences for that breach. The dissipation of leverage in the future is most acute in this kind of situation, when Trump faces opposition to his policy from Democrats and even, it seems, from his own vice president, and when his current bargaining position is assisted by an ad hoc coalition of regional allies that may not be that easy to assemble again.

(read the rest at National Review.)