Jun.16

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Dem 47

   

GOP 53

The Art of the Pseudo-Deal

We had an item yesterday about the "deal"—actually a memorandum of understanding (MOU)—that the Trump administration is spinning as an "end" to the Iran War. However, the story continues to dominate the news. So, let's do a list of ten reasons to be very skeptical that this deal is, well, the real deal:

1. He Said, They Said: It continues to be the case that Donald Trump is describing the agreement in one way, and the regime in Iran is describing it in another. Sometimes, neither description appears to be a reflection of what is actually happening.
   
   
2. Strait Talk: One main area of disagreement is the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides agree that it will be reopened. However, Trump says it will be fully re-opened, without tolls, thus returning us to the status quo ante bellum. The folks leading Iran say that there will not going to be tolls going forward. However, there will be "fees." This is similar to a mafia boss saying that there will be an ongoing fee to protect your house.
   
   
3. Going Nuclear: Another area in which there is much mumbling and hand-waving is the future of Iran's nuclear program. One side (guess which?) says that the nuclear program will be shut down for a long, long time. The other side (guess which?) says that's not happening, at least not without substantial additional concessions.
   
   
4. Israel: As we have noted many times, Iran sees the fighting between Israel and Lebanon/Hezbollah as part of the same conflict, and so insists on an end to that part of the fighting. Trump, or at least the people negotiating on his behalf, said "Done!" It would seem they did not check with, you know, Israel. In the 24 hours after the MOU was announced, Israel once again attacked Lebanon, said that it would be permanently occupying parts of southern Lebanon, made clear that it is not bound by whatever terms the Trump administration negotiates, and said that if Iran objects then the Israeli missile attacks on that nation will continue.
   
   
5. Text? What Text?: The careful reader will notice that the governments of the United States and Iran do not appear to have reached clear agreement on... any of the three major issues that have been preventing an agreement from being reached. There might be more clarity if the text of the proposed agreement were made public, but thus far, that has not happened. Some members of the administration said it might happen today or tomorrow. Trump has said that it will maybe be released on Friday. That would certainly be par for the course for him (e.g., trying to bury adverse news during the slowest part of the news cycle). On the other hand, we're still waiting for him to release his tax returns, his plan for an Obamacare replacement, his plan to overhaul America's infrastructure, etc., so we would not be terribly surprised if some last-minute "emergency" somehow prevents the text from being released on the schedule Trump promised. Or prevents the text from being released at all. Ever.
   
   
6. The Right-Wingers Hate It: There are some people in the right-wing media who will, of course, fall in line no matter what Donald Trump does or says. But sometimes, some of them rebel. And the proposed Iran deal, though still fuzzy, has already engendered the largest rebellion of Trump v2.0. Some right-wing media types are hawks who love power and hate weakness. Some right-wing media types are Neocons and/or Christian Nationalists who hate Muslim countries in general, Iran in particular, and who don't want to see the Iranians gain ANY concessions. Some right-wing media types check more than one of the above boxes. And the folks in these various camps are screaming bloody murder.
   
   
7. Trump's Underlings Hate It: It is not too common for Trump's underlings in the executive branch to come out and pooh-pooh his deal-making, but it's happening here. CIA Director John Ratcliffe has spoken out publicly, and there is ample reporting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are also in his camp. Their basic point, which is ostensibly a critique of Iran, is that the Iranians can't be trusted to live up to their parts of the deal, particularly as regards nuclear weapons development. But another way of saying that is, "Mr. President, stop being so go**amn naive." It really is remarkable that a person whose entire life has been about guile and duplicity is so unable to detect guile and duplicity on the other side of the negotiating table.
   
   It hardly takes deep national security expertise, or a top-level security clearance, to know that the Iranians are not likely to honor any commitments they make on the nuclear front. The only hope is an extremely complicated, carefully crafted agreement that closes as many loopholes as is possible and establishes as much oversight as possible. It took the Obama administration, and a large and talented group of diplomats, nearly 2 years to hammer out such an agreement. There is zero chance that anything remotely similar is going to be hammered out over a weekend by the Kushner & Witkoff show.
   
   
8. Congressional Republicans Hate It: Congressional Republicans, particularly those in the Senate, don't like what they are hearing. Again, some of them always fall in line no matter what, but an unusually high number of them are carping right now That includes folks who have been sent into retirement by Trump, like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), but also some of the hawks, like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), James Lankford (R-OK) and John Kennedy (R-LA). They say that they want to see the text of the agreement, and they won't back the deal unless it is satisfactory.
   
   That said, isn't that something of an empty threat? Congress didn't give permission for the war in the first place. If Trump declares that he is satisfied and the war is over, what are they going to do? Order him to start shooting at Iran again?
   
   
9. $300 Billion: A particular source of future trouble is a claim being bandied about that the administration has offered to make $300 billion available to the Iranians to clean up the damage that was done by U.S. attacks against that nation. J.D. Vance sat for an interview with CBS News' Ed O'Keefe yesterday, and was asked about this money. The VP said: "Well, Ed, that's the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast Coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation."
   
   What that is, is some carefully crafted verbiage meant to make it look like the U.S. isn't giving Iran $300 billion. What that is not, is the Full Sherman. We do not care how things are structured; if $300 billion is lavished on the folks who run Iran, that will be politically disastrous, and will enrage virtually everyone. Keep in mind how furious many people were when the Obama administration transferred $1.7 billion to Iran. And that was money that already belonged to them. Last we checked, $300 billion is more than 176 times $1.7 billion. Do you know how many Trump slush funds you could fund with that kind of cash? Well, actually, about 176 of them.
   
   
10. Signing Ceremony: This is trivial, and yet may be the single best sign that the agreement is void of substance. Yesterday, Trump said that he would probably forego the formal signing ceremony on Friday, and let Vance handle it.
    
    We can think of only two ways to interpret this, and they could both be correct. The first is that Trump knows this is not a glorious moment, to the point that there's no positive publicity to be squeezed out of it, not even a photo-op. The second is that Trump knows or suspects this is going to blow up eventually, and he wants to put as much distance between himself and the deal as is possible.

Because things are still so vague, we can only hazard guesses as to where this is headed. We'd say the best-case scenario for Trump (and for the U.S., and the world) is that the haziness of this agreement allows both his administration and the current regime in Iran to do some hand-waving and for each to pretend that the both got what they want. That would allow both sides to save face, and might be the only way that the three seemingly unresolvable issues can be "resolved."

The worst case scenario for Trump is that the details of the deal are released (and they might be even if Trump tries to keep them secret), and it tears the GOP apart while driving his approval rating even lower. Then, keeping in mind that the MOU is only a 60-day ceasefire, the war heats up again, while the Strait of Hormuz is shut down again. That would put us at about August 15, potentially wrecking gas prices as the U.S. heads into the midterms.

We'll see what happens, starting this week, when we learn if the White House will actually make the text of the deal public. (Z)