Trump demanded Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’. He got a surprise instead

It was less than 15 weeks ago when President Trump, at the height of his bravado about how the war with Iran would end, declared, “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

When the text of the deal intended to wind down the conflict was finally released on Wednesday, read aloud paragraph by paragraph by a senior administration official who stopped to defend each section, it read nothing like a surrender document. Instead, the Iranians emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military having not only survived but also having much to celebrate.

It starts with the resumption of Tehran’s ability to reap billions of dollars in oil sales, lifting pressure on the struggling regime even as negotiators prepare to begin haggling over a far more lengthy and critical document: the one Mr Trump insisted in an interview on Sunday will arrest Iran’s nuclear programme for the next 15 or 20 years.

For a president who prizes leverage above all else, that decision is just another mystery of the war. But the wording of the “Memorandum of Understanding” also suggests that, over time, Iran may negotiate some permanent way to exercise sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. That seems in contradiction to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s declarations just a few weeks ago that anything other than the kind of free passage through the strait that the world knew before the war was “not acceptable” and “cannot happen”.

And the memorandum, signed on Wednesday evening by Iran’s president and Mr Trump, describes a pathway in which Iran could begin receiving billions of dollars in assets that have been frozen for years. Mr Trump insists the money will only be released in return for “good behaviour”. But it is essentially the same concession that Barack Obama made 11 years ago and that Mr Trump has savaged ever since.

As Mr Trump reminds reporters – often angrily – the United States did have many accomplishments on the battlefield: it sank Iran’s less-than-impressive navy, wiped out its small air force, destroyed much of Iran’s defence industrial base and demolished some of its missile emplacements and mobile launchers. But that was not Mr Trump’s goal. As he said at the opening of the campaign, he sought the total destruction of the nuclear and missile programmes, the fall of the regime and, as he suggested later on, American control of the country’s oil industry.

In the next few days, the details of this agreement will be picked apart. Hard-liners in Mr Trump’s party have already been expressing objections. So have the Israelis, frozen out of the negotiations and fearful they are being forced by Mr Trump into a ceasefire with Hezbollah that will interfere with their ability to rip apart the terror group. Historians will grapple for years about the lessons of a conflict in which the United States spent tens of billions of dollars, with 13 Americans and more than 3,000 Iranians reported to have been killed.

But it was Mr Trump himself who offered what may be the most clear-eyed answer about why he needed to end this war so fast. He didn’t want comparisons to Herbert Hoover, he told reporters at the Hotel Royal in Évian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on Wednesday.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Mr Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe.” Later he noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.

That combination – economic chaos and disrupted oil markets – was exactly what the Iranians viewed from the opening days of the war as their most potent weapon. They executed on that vision with precision, closing the strait and blowing up petrochemical facilities, desalination plants, hotels and air bases across the Gulf. And by the president’s own testimony, it worked.

If that was Phase 1 of Iran’s strategy, history suggests Phase 2 may be one of delay and more delay. In past negotiations, the Iranians refined the art of arguing over every paragraph, throwing in new obstacles to inspections or reinterpreting the meaning of “nuclear research” to embrace continued uranium enrichment. Few were more skilled at this process, former American negotiators say, than Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and a veteran of past talks.

And Mr Trump, eager to move on, seems to be paving the way for a long, slow process. On Tuesday, he said he wasn’t especially concerned with getting Iran’s nuclear fuel — now buried under the rubble of last year’s American air attacks — out of the country. On Wednesday, he acknowledged the talks would probably go beyond 60 days.

It is too early to say whether Mr Trump will ultimately be able to claim more accomplishments. If, in the next stage of negotiations, he manages to get the Iranians to ship their stockpiles of nuclear fuel out of the country (as President Obama did in 2015) and cease all enrichment activity for nearly two decades (which Mr Obama failed to accomplish), then he may be able to claim some long-term victory.

If the war turns out to have destabilised the Iranian leadership and triggered protests and an uprising, as Mr Trump called for at the beginning of the conflict, he could well claim credit.

But for now it looks like the opposite is taking place. If anything, Mr Trump has propped up the new leadership, ostensibly run by the new supreme leader, the injured and out-of-sight Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening strike of the war.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which has overseen the nuclear programme for years, seems firmly in control, though a senior administration official argued to reporters several days ago that by bringing about a peace, Mr Trump is now forcing the elite military unit to face the travails of governing.

Senior members of the Obama administration, having absorbed years of criticism from Mr Trump about the shortcomings and loopholes in the agreement struck in 2015, saw their moment to exact a measure of retribution.

“The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war started,” former Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken wrote online on Wednesday. “And we will apparently pay Iran to do so, in the form of waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil. Iran has now demonstrated the capacity to stop or slow the passage of oil, natural gas, fertiliser and other critical products upon which so much of the world depends.”

Mr Blinken, an architect of the 2015 accord, concluded: “Going forward, it will almost certainly find ways to collect ‘fees’ for safe passage that will help entrench the regime.”