Iran Deal, the reset..... and the art of the deal

mickeyrat

HCR LFAA

June 17, 2026 (Wednesday)

A senior U.S. official read the text of the fourteen-point memorandum of understanding with Iran over the phone to reporters today, and there’s a reason it has ignited a firestorm.

A memorandum of understanding is usually a nonbinding agreement outlining shared goals and intentions, but in this case, although there is much vague or confusing language in the text, what the White House says is an MOU actually has firm language in it. 

First of all, after months of the White House insisting Trump does not need congressional approval for his strikes against Iran because they did not constitute a war, the MOU straight up calls the conflict “the current war.” 

The MOU commits the U.S. and Iran “and their allies” to stop military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” a reference to Israel’s bombing of what it says are Hezbollah camps there. Israel has suggested it will not consider itself bound by any such agreement, but as Anton Troianvoski points out in the New York Times, the language will enable Iran to pressure the U.S. over Israeli attacks in Lebanon or Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in what Israel calls a “security zone.” 

The MOU says the U.S. will “terminate all types of sanctions” against Iran, and it lifts the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, giving Iran the access to world trade the U.S. previously prevented in order to pressure the regime. It also permits Iran to begin selling oil immediately on the world market. 

The MOU says Iran will use “its best efforts”—not a guarantee— “for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz “with no charge for 60 days only.” It continues: Iran and Oman will decide how to “define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz,” an indication that Iran intends to charge fees for transit of the strait. 

The MOU says the U.S. will thaw frozen Iranian assets immediately and also “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran to repair the damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes. It says the U.S. will grant “[a]ll required licenses, waivers, and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions,” apparently readmitting Iran to full participation in world financial markets.

In exchange for these concessions, Iran “reaffirms” in the MOU that it will not try to develop or procure a nuclear weapon. That word “reaffirms” is important: it signals that Iran is simply reiterating what it said in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Trump tore up in 2018. 

But, unlike the JCPOA, the MOU contains no language about a process to guarantee Iran’s promise not to pursue a nuclear weapon. When a reporter asked Trump about that absence, he said that what would guarantee Iran's compliance is fear of renewed U.S. bombing. But Iran has shown it can withstand such attacks, and in any case, the U.S. has no stomach for them.

It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing. 

The costs to the world have been significantly higher in terms both of lives—beginning with more than 175 Iranian schoolchildren and their teachers—and of economies. 

Journalist David Shuster reported that the Iranian government is declaring “total victory.” 

Former secretary of state Antony Blinken posted: “By President Trump’s own terms, the war is a failure. The Iranian regime is intact and its military wing more empowered, while the Iranian people are more impoverished, repressed and desperate…. The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening [of] the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before the war started. And we will apparently pay Iran to do so…. Don’t expect a return to normal any time soon, if at all,” he warned.

In a press opportunity today in France, where he was attending the Group of Seven (G7) conference, an informal forum of industrialized democracies, Trump twice told reporters that he didn’t want to be like President Herbert Hoover. Although he got the history of Hoover’s role in the Great Depression wrong, Trump’s point seemed clear: he didn’t want to be the person to trigger an “economic catastrophe.”

And therein lay the rub for Trump in his war on Iran: so long as Iranian leaders could credibly threaten the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, they could throttle about a fifth of the world’s oil supply and much of its fertilizer, plunging the globe into crisis. The terms of the MOU heavily favor Iran, but the strait gives its leaders leverage over Trump and the U.S. This was precisely the scenario that past U.S. presidents sought to avoid by negotiating with Iran rather than bombing it.  

Selling the MOU in the U.S. is going to be rough. When a reporter asked Trump today why he didn’t “stick around for the signing ceremony with this Iran peace deal,” the famously camera-courting president answered: “I might, but I’d rather, this is a memorandum of understanding. It’s very important, but it might not be the kind of a document that I should be signing.” The reporter responded: “There is some element to this where you send the vice president. If it works out, great. You look like a genius for sending him. If it doesn’t work out, it’s the vice president’s fault.”

Trump responded: “I like that idea…. This way, if it works out, I’m gonna take the credit; if it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D. You better be careful, J.D. He’s gonna turn his plane around and get the hell outta here. Yeah, I like that idea. I think that’s a good idea.”

MAGA lawmakers like Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) seemed willing to go along with the measure, saying: "I trust President Trump. I trust Vice President Vance. We don't need to listen to anybody up here on Capitol Hill. Let's trust these two.” But John Knefel of Media Matters reported that MAGA figures who have been all-in on the war on Iran are revolting against the MOU. “Trump’s Iran deal gives the Islamic Republic big wins upfront—and America nothing,” wrote the New York Post. 

Journalist David Shuster reported that Republican senators are furious with Trump. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger a month ago, posted: “Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal.

“Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” 

By tonight, Trump loyalist Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) was defending the idea of Iran having missiles, despite the fact that ending Iran’s missile program was one of Trump’s stated reasons for starting the war in the first place. Marshall told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he preferred that they not have missiles, but that “the key issue” is that “they have to be able to defend themselves.” 

National security scholar Joseph Stieb posted: “It’s like the last 40 years of the Republican Party’s foreign policy didn’t happen.” 

After setting Vance up to take the fall for the deal, tonight at a dinner with French president Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles, Trump signed the MOU himself. It was a moment when a knowledge of history would have been useful. As MeidasTouch noted, it was at Versailles after World War I that the Allied powers forced Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, “one of the most famous surrender documents in modern history.” 

Earlier in the day, asked by a MeidasTouch reporter about Trump’s cognitive decline at the G7, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said: “The president has been humiliated on the world stage, and many Americans are increasingly concerned about his stability and his capacity in the office. It’s deeply distressing to Americans across the political spectrum to see a president so incompetent and so incapable attempting and failing to represent the nation internationally.” 

Over a GIF of James Bond saying, “He’s quite mad, you know,” national security scholar Tom Nichols called today “the weirdest and most astonishing day in US foreign policy in decades.”

Bentleyspop

josevolution

It’s great knowing that fuckface got spanked on the world stage! Only his ball licking minions think he came out on top 

Halifax2TheMax

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

What did one expect of brilliant brilliance in all its brilliancy? Imagine still having faith in CCOOTWH to get anything right?

gimmesometruth27

as long as trump is making money and getting daily media attention, he is winning, and that is all he cares about.

maybe if people stop fucking talking about him it will make him sad and he can be the sad, lonely person that he really is.

Gern Blansten

It really is interesting how Vance is taking ownership of this. And have we heard anything from little Marco? Where the fuck has that asshole been? You know he's losing his mind over this behind the scenes. I wonder if he refused to deal with it which resulted in Vance being front and center.

gimmesometruth27

Gern Blansten said:

It really is interesting how Vance is taking ownership of this. And have we heard anything from little Marco? Where the fuck has that asshole been? You know he's losing his mind over this behind the scenes. I wonder if he refused to deal with it which resulted in Vance being front and center.

rubio fell into his abnormally large shoe and is unable to get out.

Halifax2TheMax

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Thanks CCOOTWH. So much winning. Stupid.

The war against Iran lasted just over 15 weeks before a preliminary U.S.-Iranian peace deal was reached this week. But the human and economic toll mounted rapidly, with consequences far beyond the region.

Facing pressure at home and abroad, President Trump announced on Monday that he and Vice President JD Vance had electronically signed a document the previous day with the Iranians formally ending the war. The conflict began on Feb. 28 when the United States and Israel attacked Iran.

On Wednesday, the president signed the agreement again in France at the Palace of Versailles, where an ill-fated treaty was concluded to end World War I more than a century ago.

The costs of the war to the United States, estimated at $132 billion overall, are still being tallied as a 60-day period for further negotiations begins. Here is what we know.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/us/politics/iran-war-costs-deaths.html

mickeyrat

Tim Simmons

Hopefully no one gives them billions of dollars. Could you imagine the uproar? 

Halifax2TheMax

Tim Simmons said:

Hopefully no one gives them billions of dollars. Could you imagine the uproar? 

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Nearly as bad as wearing a tan suit. 

josevolution

mickeyrat said:

Was there a follow up question? I mean the reporter could of brought up the fact that they will get billions from the genius president 

mickeyrat

gimmesometruth27

mickeyrat said:

kinda the opposite of italy begging for a photo, right donnie?

mickeyrat

Lim Tean adbook post 

The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know

 

I will be honest about why I wrote this article.
Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason. And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.

This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.

Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations. And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Let me show you why.

The Original Theft

To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.

In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.

The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply. Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.

For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries. The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.

A man arose who decided to say: enough.

Mosaddegh and the Crime of Democracy

Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel. He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration. For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.

Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history. They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation. 

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.

In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.

This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.

The Shah’s Gilded Cage

The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.

Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — twenty-six years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image. When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.

But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.

To mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of fifty lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital. 

The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France. Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation. The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.

The estimated cost was anywhere between $100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.
The Iranian people drew their conclusions.

Khomeini’s Rational Revolution

When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity. He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together. They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.

When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution. The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.

When America Armed the Man Who Gassed Iranian Children

If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited. The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.

What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.

As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win. 

And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew. American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.

The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day. It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.

Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.

And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.
Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging. It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.

If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian irrationality. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.

47 Years of Punishment

Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.

And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.

Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.

Justice Delayed

When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.

For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.

The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine. It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.

It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.

Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.

 

Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs. They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.

The picture below is of Mohammed Mosaddegh, August 1953- at the moment of his arrest in a coup plotted by MI6 and the CIA

Halifax2TheMax

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

I don’t agree with everything that Tom says here but I’ve been following him and reading his reporting and books for decades so I respect his opinion. Worth a read for some perspective.

Thomas L. Friedman on the Clash at the Core of the Iran Deal

How the world views of Jared Kushner and the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran can help explain the issue at the heart of the negotiations.

Now, Dan, one of the rules I developed as a reporter in the Middle East is that in the Middle East, what people say to you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they’ll say in public in their own language.

The Middle East is a funny place. It’s kind of the opposite of Washington. In the Middle East, people lie to you in private and tell the truth in public in their own language. In Washington, people tell the truth in private and lie in public.

We already saw a demonstration of this rule just in the last 48 hours. Vice President Vance came out and said: Hey, the Iranians have promised to let in nuclear observers from the International Atomic Energy Commission. And the Iranians said: No, we’ve offered no such thing. So, I think this is going to be an ongoing problem for the administration. Whether the Iranians did say it in private in English, they’re clearly contradicting it in public in their language.

And there is a bit of divine justice here. I’m thinking about Vance. This is a man who sold his soul, his every principle, to be vice president to Donald Trump, and it’s like the Greek gods have punished him by making him responsible for ending a war that he opposed, started by Donald Trump. That said, Iran needs to be careful not to overplay its hand.

Wakin: Would you extend Kushnerism to President Trump himself?

Friedman: Oh, I think Trump is a variant of Kushner. I see Trump as a different kind of character in this play. Trump One was, we know, surrounded by buffers, and Trump Two is surrounded by amplifiers. What we’ve been seeing in Trump Two is that everything he does is a no-bid contract.

To me, Dan, there is a parallel between Trump’s failure to clean up the Persian Gulf and his failure to clean up the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. Both, to me, are failures of a commander in chief, because both were done, in their own way, through no-bid contracts — and no-bid contracts, which don’t allow any other bidders than the one the president anoints, always get you in trouble.

In the case of the Reflecting Pool, we know that the National Park Service bypassed competitive bidding and gave the $1.7 million contract to a firm called Greenwater Services, which happened to be run — shock, are you sitting down, Dan? — by a Trump campaign donor. But not any Trump campaign donor, one who had been convicted twice — once for bribery and once for some other campaign donation shenanigans.

What happened? Instead of turning the Reflecting Pool blue the way Trump wanted for the Fourth of July, it’s turned into an algae of green blooms that have basically wrecked the whole scene.

Now, why do I compare that no-bid contract with the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran?

Because in a way, Trump approached it, too, in a no-bid fashion. Let’s go back to the reporting of our colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan from the key decision making meeting in the Situation Room at the White House.

Trump invited in Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. He was in the Situation Room. It was a no-bid moment where Netanyahu then brings onto the screen the head of the Mossad, and the Mossad tells Trump that through aerial bombing, they can decapitate the regime and trigger a popular uprising in Iran.

And, of course, none of that happened.

Trump didn’t even have in the room his energy secretary or his Treasury secretary. And his own experts, the director of the C.I.A., called the Israeli idea farcical, and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, reportedly called it bullshit.

But Trump went with his gut, with his no-bid contract with Bibi Netanyahu, and the result has been the Strait of Hormuz has been turned from blue into green, red and white — the colors of the Iranian flag.

No-bid contracts get you in trouble, whether they’re in the Mall or in the Gulf.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/opinion/thomas-friedman-iran-deal.html

Halifax2TheMax

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

And way back in 1979 as a teenager getting interested in history and politics, watching the nightly news, reading my city’s daily, the Sunday NYT and Time and Newsweek, I knew then that what had happened to Iran and the Shah being installed and overthrown was wrong and that the western powers were fucking with everyone. Vietnam ended a mere 4 years prior. And that was before the Iraq/Iran war, use of gas in warfare and Iran-Contra was well known. And Darth Cheney was central. Go figure.

mickeyrat

I want to to find this exchange on video because the tweet says "he said essentially...." but here you go....

Gern Blansten

gimmesometruth27 said:

Gern Blansten said:

It really is interesting how Vance is taking ownership of this. And have we heard anything from little Marco? Where the fuck has that asshole been? You know he's losing his mind over this behind the scenes. I wonder if he refused to deal with it which resulted in Vance being front and center.

rubio fell into his abnormally large shoe and is unable to get out.

it just seems like they are shielding Marco...

I had seen some talk that Vance wasn't likely to enter the ring for 2028 but then he released that book which made me think the opposite. Now I'm wondering if he really is planning on sitting out and deferring to Marco. Maybe trump already told him he would be giving Marco the nod?

cincybearcat

josevolution said:

It’s great knowing that fuckface got spanked on the world stage! Only his ball licking minions think he came out on top 

It is not great.