Trump's Iran Deal: A Victory Before the Real Win

A deal can feel like a win on signing day yet cause lasting damage. The 14-point memorandum of understanding (MoU) the Trump administration reached with Iran this week is such a deal — the kind that deserves quick applause, before anyone fully grasps the consequences.

First, credit is due for the president's drive to end an ongoing war rather than manage it indefinitely. Securing a negotiated ceasefire — reopening the Strait of Hormuz, lifting the naval blockade, and halting bombing on all sides — is no small feat. Wars that end from exhaustion rather than victory still end, and the alternative to this deal is not a better one waiting in the wings but a protracted military commitment with no clear exit. It is worth acknowledging that this administration was willing to use force when diplomacy failed, and to negotiate once force achieved its aim. That sequence — military pressure first, diplomacy second — is the theory Trump articulated, and by that logic, it is not unreasonable.

Yet this victory has an obvious flaw. The ceasefire was negotiated without the ally that bore the highest cost in confronting Iran over two decades: Israel. The talks traveled through Washington, through Pakistani mediators, through Geneva and Versailles — seemingly everywhere but Israel, America's foremost regional ally, which endured years of Hezbollah rockets, Houthi missiles, and the slow attrition from Iran's proxy networks built to destroy it. An ally that provided intelligence, targets, and a significant part of the military rationale for the strikes on Iran in February 2025 is now asked to treat a text it had no hand in drafting as a settled agreement. That is not how one treats a partner. It is how one treats a complication.

Consider the sequence the MoU actually establishes: asset unfreezing occurs "on the basis of progress in negotiations" — flexible enough to mean anything — while verification is pushed to a "final agreement" 60 days away, extendable by mutual consent. Leverage moves first; evidence follows, if at all. Any negotiator who has dealt with Tehran over the past four decades can tell you which half of that sequence Iran will treat as binding and which it will treat as aspirational.

Then there is the $300 billion reconstruction fund — an unimaginable sum from this administration in any other context, defended by the technicality that Washington will not write the check itself. That distinction will not survive contact with reality, and it will survive least of all with an Israeli government watching billions flow into a regime that arms Hezbollah on its northern border and the Houthis to its south. The administration that built its critique of the Obama deal around the danger of flushing cash to Tehran is now the architect of a much larger flow — one whose consequences Israel will absorb, without a seat at the table that decided it.

The nuclear element of the deal adds further injury. Iran commits not to "procure or develop" nuclear weapons — a promise it has made and broken before. The handling of enriched uranium stockpiles is ambiguous: dilution "in place" rather than removal, while the harder issue of enrichment rights is deferred to the future. Israel has spent decades treating an Iranian nuclear weapon as an outcome it cannot survive and will not negotiate; now it watches its closest ally accept, in its name, a framework no clearer than the one Trump himself denounced as appeasement.

Lebanon is folded into the same text as if it were a footnote, where the agreement to end hostilities "on all fronts" sits uneasily with an Israeli government that has made clear it will not withdraw from border areas it deems essential to its security. An American president can sign for America, but he cannot sign for Israel; to ask Israel to treat a deal reached around it as binding on it is not diplomacy, it is hubris.

None of this means the alternative — indefinite war — is preferable, or that Trump lacks further leverage. He has shown Iran that American patience is finite and American power real. Yet a serious Iran policy treats Israel as an ally that carries the load, not a stakeholder to be informed after the fact. The fairest reading is not that the administration deliberately sidelined its key ally, but that it allowed haste — a faster deal, a cleaner signing photo — to override the harder work of negotiating in tandem with a partner that will live with the consequences longest. There is an argument for buying time and using the next 60 days to bring Israel's red lines back into the process before a final agreement is locked. There is no argument for treating this temporary pause as job done, while the ally most vulnerable to Iranian retaliation reads the terms in the same news cycle as everyone else.

The administration should recall its own most powerful argument against its predecessor: that vague commitments backed by upfront sanctions relief are a gift to the Iranian regime — and a deal that sidelines Israel is not Middle East peace, but a postponement of a confrontation Israel cannot alone avoid. That critique was right in 2015. It does not become wrong just because the signature belongs to a different president. Trump's supporters, including this article's author, owe him candor rather than cover: A deal that leaves America's most reliable ally standing outside looking in is not strength. It is exactly the kind of deal Trump was elected to refuse to make.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.