Peter Meijer: Relax, Trump is Handling Iran

Yesterday, the Republican-majority Senate joined the Republican-majority House in passing a symbolic rebuke of Republican President Trump’s Iran War. This rebuke was not spurred by the launching of a war without congressional authorization (the first bombs dropped almost four months ago). It was not spurred by President Trump threatening to escalate the conflict dramatically by putting American boots on the ground in Iran.

No, the catalyst that pushed congressional anger over the top appears to be the diplomatic breakthrough of the signing of a recent Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran. Which begs the question — has everyone lost their damn minds?

A sane soul would greet news of an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with guarded optimism, but sane souls are in short supply. In their place, a cavalcade of Cassandras pounced with delight, reading their darkest fears into 14 bullet points. Iran War supporters screeched that Trump snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Opponents seized upon the agreement as further proof that the war was misbegotten from the jump. In confusing a narrow interim agreement with an ultimate settlement, both groups committed the same category error.

For what it’s worth, I was hardly eager to go to war with Iran. Had President Trump asked my thoughts, I would have urged restraint out of fear that the risks of war outweighed potential gains. I don’t feel that way anymore: the potential upside remains immensely consequential, and the downside has been milder than any analyst anticipated. But I also won’t pretend a positive outcome is guaranteed. The enemy gets a vote, and the Iranian regime has ably leveraged its relative strengths. What I am confident of is narrower and more durable: that the unrelenting gloom is wholly unwarranted.

I offer no promise that my read will be borne out, but it is considerably more presumptuous to insist that the future will be a straight-line continuation of the present. This has been, and remains, a multi-turn process; conflict resolution is achieved by building trust in small increments, under the credible threat of a return to violence. What the MOU laid out is about the smallest increment possible to remove the most pressing constraint on the West, while surrendering none of our optionality.

Remember, a memorandum of understanding is an opening position, not a last will and testament. Substantively, the MOU amounts to little more than “Hormuz-for-Hormuz”: Iran ceases its attacks on commercial shipping in the strait, and the United States lifts its naval blockade. Considering that closing the Strait — and the resulting roiling of global energy markets — was the strongest arrow in Tehran’s quiver, this is an Iranian concession hiding under a triumphant cloak. The false triumph is both useful and telling — the more regime thugs beat their chests and proclaim victory, the more convinced I become that they’re steeling for the bitter pills hardliners must swallow on the way to a productive peace.

The reality is that a window of relief is a net loss for Iran. Every day that passes is a day where global crude and LNG reserves recover and storage gets topped up, a day of progress on pipelines bypassing Hormuz, a day that lowers prices at the pump and relieves domestic political pressures — in short, a day where Iran’s ability to slam the strait shut loses its menace. In exchange, a reprieve or relief of sanctions at this stage will give Iran, at best, a penny on the dollar for what they’ve lost in this war.

As we go forward, could the Iranian regime violate, renege, or backslide on commitments? Absolutely. In fact, assume it as your base case; the critics are absolutely right to distrust the Iranian side. Where those parsing the verbiage of the MOU go wrong is in their second, unstated assumption: that Donald Trump, of all people, will cling to the letter of any agreement the moment it stops suiting him.

That blind spot about Trump’s nature sits atop a deeper one about the war itself. The frustration among the war’s supporters rests on a flattering fiction: that the Revolutionary Guard was moments away from collapse, and simply doing more of the same would produce total victory. (This was a plausible scenario at the outset, but not proven out.) The mirror-image conviction animating the war’s opponents — that we’ve merely clawed our way back to a worse version of the prewar status quo — is no better supported. Categorical claims rooted in a single moment frozen in time are almost always wrong, and they are especially wrong with a president whose only constants are Diet Coke and long red ties.

That’s the part the doomsayers keep tripping over: they’ve misread the main actor. Trump is a fluid operator with a pragmatic, iterative style. He has no compunction about turning on a dime when a tactic isn’t working, and that very habit is what fuels critics’ suspicion that he pivoted to peace because the war was failing. That reading misses the whole trick: on a core conviction, Trump keeps the destination fixed even as he swaps his vehicle. He didn’t abandon tariffs when the Supreme Court struck down one of his tools for imposing them; he believes in tariffs, so he simply found another route. Mistaking a change of tactics for a change of strategy is the original sin of nearly every pundit predicting what Trump will do next.

Which brings us to the actual strategy. Some behavior can be coerced, and at the outset there was a Venezuela-like possibility that just sticks would do the trick. Yet the first months of the conflict made clear that reaching an acceptable end state cannot be achieved by coercion alone. The next logical turn is to the carrots, while keeping the sticks close at hand — silver, in other words, with the lead never far from reach. Critics are right that this is where Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) comparisons are most apt: both the MOU and the JCPOA contained sanctions relief and a firm commitment by Iran to neither procure nor pursue nuclear weapons. The JCPOA also held an implicit wager that drawing Iran into deeper economic integration would moderate the regime over time. October 7th showed the failure of that approach.

What’s different now is the destruction of Iran’s economy and evisceration of its industrial base to the tune of anywhere from $500 billion to $1 trillion in losses. Combining this damage with the magnitude of the potential upside, alongside a motivated Gulf committed to seeing it through, and a real change in regime direction is not just possible but a logical path for Iran to pursue.

Paradoxically, the extent to which the Iranians have removed all doubt as to their willingness to burn the region down has heightened the incentive of their neighbors to do everything possible to forestall such a future. The potential $300 billion pot of reconstruction gold at the end of the rainbow is burden-sharing by those most at risk if the strategy fails. At the risk of mixing metallurgical metaphors, that’s a hell of a lot of silver for the Iranians to consider — enough to drive a durable wedge between the true believers and those responsive to earthly incentives.

The MOU may be a narrow solution to a narrow problem, but it is a narrow solution that pries open a far wider, far grander, and strategically seismic possibility: turning Iran off its present course and speed as the foremost multiplier of malevolence in a region that remains vital to the global economy. The ultimate consequence of a malign Iran extends far beyond chaos in the Middle East: with Venezuela out and Cuba teetering, Iran is the last misfit state outside the Pacific that China could use to horizontally escalate a violent great-power conflict with the U.S. Trump and his team understand this; Iran was never just about Iran, but the axis Tehran anchors in the Gulf.

The severe domestic political consequences of this war are self-evident in polling and approval ratings; Trump acknowledged not only knowing the risks but also expecting far worse when he made the decision to go to war. There was always going to be a maturity mismatch between the short-term political cost to the Trump administration and the long-term potential strategic reward of knocking Iran off a violent course and forestalling a Great Power catastrophe. In normal times, a leader who sets out on a path he believes is right, fully aware of the electoral backlash it will bring, would be admired for their political courage.

But we don’t live in normal times, and none of this guarantees the ending. Tehran may renege; the talks may collapse; the doomsayers may yet be vindicated. But that is precisely the point — it is an ending no one has reached. Politicians bowing to cynical interests to call the war a defeat is forcing a conclusion we have yet to reach, a bewildering move while our adversary is lowering their only weapon of consequence.

***

Peter Meijer served as the U.S. representative for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district from 2021 to 2023.