Perhaps most dangerous of all, Trump doesn’t see it. He’s reduced to favoring more money — and more missiles! — for Iran
As the deal that President Trump struck with Iran’s new “rational” leadership becomes clear, it gives Iran everything and gains nothing for the US, for Israel or for Lebanon.
It gives Iran:
• the right to retain, produce and use as many ballistic missiles as it can.
• an end to the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
• promises of hundreds of billions of dollars.
• free reign to Hezbollah to keep attacking Israel, killing Israel soldiers and rendering life in northern Israel all but uninhabitable, with condemnation of Israel for defending itself.
• retention of whatever nuclear materiel and production facilities it still possesses, pending only “negotiations” to end Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon — i.e., the same futile “negotiations” that have stymied the UN and the previous administrations of Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush.
Sen. Bill Cassidy called the “Memorandum of Understanding” between the US and Iran “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” That’s a Republican speaking.
To add insult to injury, Trump lashes out at Israel, his loyal fighting partner only months ago, now taken to task — cursed, actually — for refusing to let Hezbollah kill Israeli citizens. It is worth repeating: On March 2, 2026, Hezbollah launched a war against Israel, not the other way around.
And more than cursed: threatened with the withholding of weapons. Vice President J. D. Vance put it plain: “Over the last three months, two thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.”
Leave aside the contributions of Israel to American military intelligence; leave aside the blood of Israeli soldiers and civilians sacrificed to sustain the only democracy in the Middle East. Vance’s “two-thirds” calculation means this:
One-thirdof the defensive weapons have been built by Israel hands and paid for by Israeli tax dollars. Which means: Threats like Vance’s have one direct consequence: an intensely focused Israeli effort to build more of its own weapons, not only for self-defense, but for freedom from those who would dictate to Israel the limits of its right to self-defense.
Vance and those who talk like him will one day find themselves empty of influence on Israel.
Curses.
Threats.
And absurdities. This, from President Trump: “If Israel can’t do the job [against Hezbollah] without killing everyone else, he [Syria’s head Ahmed al-Sharaa] will do the job, Syria will do the job.
“There are a lot of people in those apartment houses [attacked by Israel], and too many people are being killed, and you do not have to knock down an apartment house every time you are looking for someone.”
We say “absurdities” in the plural. Among them:
• Syria cannot even stop the flow of Iranian weapons over Syria territory to Hezbollah in Lebanon. A regime that cannot even intercept weapons can hardly win a war against those wielding them — and that’s if Syria even wanted to fight Hezbollah, which it doesn’t.
• Those apartment houses that are knocked down are warned in advance of an incoming IDF hit. Incidentally, did you ever wonder how all those videos of an Israeli attack on Hezbollah come to be? It’s because Israel announces its targets in advance to give civilians the opportunity to get out of the way. No other army does this. Trump feeds the lie that Israel is trying to kill as many people as possible, when the reality is the opposite.
• If Syria fought Hezbollah, Syria would face the exact same dilemma that Israel faces: terrorist fighters purposely working within civilian locations. Syria has no more magic wand than does Israel to attack terrorists without attacking the places they fight from.
Trump said that Israel should have been “able to do the job faster [against Hezbollah]. It just goes on and on.” This is an absurdity wrapped in an absurdity. The larger wrapping is the American failure to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah — an indictment justified by Trump’s ending the US-Israel war on Iran before destroying all of its weaponry and weapons-producing factories. Then, with the supply of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah sustained — within that wrapping — is the absurdity of Israel needing to “to do the job faster.”As Hezbollah keeps rearming — overland via Syria — there is no “faster.”
Trump’s absurdities are not limited to Syria. The man who, with Israel, set out to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, now says:
“They [Iranians] have to have some [ballistic missiles], because other people have some. Am I going to let Saudia Arabia have missiles but they [the Iranians] can’t have them? It doesn’t work that way.”
The absurdity is this: Iran does not use ballistic missiles for defense. It attacked Israel, unprovoked, on April 13, 2024, with 120 ballistic missiles. Iran followed up on Oct. 1, 2024, with 200 more ballistic missiles fired on Israel. Iran wants missiles for offense, not defense, the same way Iran wants a nuclear weapon, for offense, not for deterrence. Iran’s desire for missiles is no more a defensive move than its pursuit of nuclear weapons is a defensive or a civilian move.
A complementary absurdity from Vice President Vance:
“We do expect that as part of the final deal, they [Iran] are not gonna be able to build the kind of missiles that can broadly threaten the entire world.”
Vance, like Trump, has been brainwashed into thinking that Iran’s current leadership is “rational.” In fact, since 1979 and continuing today, Iran places its ideological pursuit of offensive weaponry — to kill the “Big Satan” and the “Little Satan” — above the welfare of its own people. Iran will find the money to try to rebuild its ballistic missile system, even if sanctions end up not being lifted. If they are lifted, Iran will not adhere to any condition limiting the new cash to civilian purposes.
Ironically, the rescue from this tangle of absurdities, about-faces and naivete that Trump’s Iran deal reflects and creates might come from Iran itself. In effect, Trump has told Iran: “You are in the driver’s seat. I have given you some of what you want and promised you the rest.” But since Iran defines “the rest” as Israel’s surrender in Lebanon, and since Israel cannot surrender and survive, Iran will sustain its war against the US, against Israel and against the West to such an extent that a reversal or a freeze of all or part of this deal may ensue — and possibly further military action against Iran.
© IJN 2026
