{"id":48,"date":"2026-05-26T23:11:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T23:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=48"},"modified":"2026-05-26T23:11:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T23:11:51","slug":"trumps-war-is-staggering-to-an-incoherent-defeat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=48","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Read more What Happened to Rudy Giuliani?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

No one yet knows the details of the Iran deal that President Trump has been teasing on social media for the past day or so. The president himself has admonished his followers not to \u201clisten to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.\u201d But as this war stumbles to a close, it is clear that the president, too, is lost: He didn\u2019t know what he was doing when he began it, and now he doesn\u2019t know how to get out of it.<\/p>\n

Only a day ago, Trump was trying to project confidence. Yesterday, he hailed an agreement with Iran as mostly done; it was, he said on his Truth Social site, \u201clargely negotiated\u201d and close to \u201cfinalization.\u201d The Iranians, of course, immediately disputed this characterization, and by the next day, Trump was backpedaling. \u201cIf I make a deal with Iran,\u201d he posted this afternoon, \u201cit will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon.\u201d The agreement that was only a day earlier \u201clargely negotiated\u201d was now only a notional memorandum, and Trump griped that it was unfair to criticize it because \u201cnobody has seen it, or knows what it is,\u201d and it \u201cisn\u2019t even fully negotiated yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

By this afternoon, Trump was reduced to posting a meme of a jet carrying a bomb under its wing with Thank you for your attention to this matter<\/span> written on it.<\/p>\n

Many of those most alarmed about what Trump might end up accepting to get out of this dead-end conflict in Iran are not his critics, but his supporters. Trump\u2019s enablers may not have access to the details of an agreement, but they\u2019re clearly worried: Senators Lindsey Graham, Roger Wicker, and Ted Cruz were all posting expressions of shock and dismay on social media. Graham said that any deal that caves to Iran \u201cmakes one wonder why the war started to begin with\u201d; Wicker said that a possible 60-day cease-fire would be a \u201cdisaster.\u201d Cruz gently suggested that the tsar does not know what his devious boyars are up to, describing the deal as \u201cbeing pushed by some voices in the administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, posted a long screed warning Trump not to make a deal. \u201cI know you want to get out of this mess,\u201d he said. He then counseled the president to \u201cgive it some thought.\u201d Trump\u2019s former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo weighed in as well, comparing the possible outline of a deal to the kind of thing Barack Obama\u2019s team might have come up when designing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and warning that it could mean that America would end up paying \u201cthe IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.\u201d Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, during his first term, and he regularly speaks of the JCPOA (and Obama) with contempt; Pompeo\u2019s comparison was sure to infuriate the Trump team.<\/p>\n

And sure enough, Trump\u2019s communications director, Steven Cheung, responded almost immediately to Pompeo\u2014and gave the world a glimpse of what appears to be some sweaty panic building inside the White House. \u201cMike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he\u2019s talking about,\u201d Cheung posted on X. \u201cHe should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He\u2019s not read into anything that\u2019s happening, so how would he know.\u201d (Cheung also kept posting updates about Trump working in the Oval Office on a Saturday, as if this were an amazing illustration of the president\u2019s work ethic.)<\/p>\n

Read more Does Donald Trump Know Men Are Also Allowed to Leave His Cabinet?<\/a><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s worried sycophants probably know that the details of an eventual agreement likely do not matter very much at this point. As my colleague David Frum noted earlier today, the war has already ended with America\u2019s strategic defeat by the Islamic Republic of Iran, an outcome for which Trump is directly responsible. How much Iran will get away with, and how much humiliation the United States will endure, has yet to be ironed out by the negotiators, but the war is now almost certain to end with Tehran\u2019s theocrats firmly in power, and with a stronger chokehold both on their own people and on the international economy than they had three months ago.<\/p>\n

Not only is Trump incoherently staggering to defeat, he now risks signing on to an agreement that could be far worse than anything Obama negotiated with Iran a decade ago. I was a critic of the JCPOA back then because I believed that it contravened some basic diplomatic logic by front-loading concessions to the Iranians while hoping they would later abide by its terms. Obama, too, knew the risk he was taking, as he admitted at the time to The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. \u201cLook, 20 years from now, I\u2019m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it\u2019s my name on this,\u201d he told Goldberg in 2015. \u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.\u201d<\/p>\n

The JCPOA was not perfect, but it was the product of the efforts of professional diplomats, scientists, and other experts, and once it was in place, it was really the only game in town. Obama gambled that Iran would feel pressure to observe the JCPOA once it went into effect, and he was right. Three years later, few argued that Iran was in violation of the agreement; Trump trashed it anyway, without any thought or preparation, much as he has done with other arms agreements.<\/p>\n

Trump could have adhered to the JCPOA, and had Iran tried to sprint to a bomb\u2014and no evidence exists that Tehran was doing so in 2026\u2014he could have blamed Obama, made the case to Congress for war, and launched military action. Faced with the ticking clock of an imminent Iranian nuclear test, even Trump\u2019s most dedicated opponents at home and abroad would likely have lent their support. Instead (presumably while still savoring the sugar high of a quick win in Venezuela) he decided that he would seek glory as the liberator of Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told Trump that the mullahs would fall; CIA Director John Ratcliffe, however, told him that such a prediction was \u201cfarcical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now the president will end up having to sign off on a set of terms that will likely make the JCPOA look demanding by comparison. Trump began this war assuming that all other issues\u2014nuclear weapons, terrorism, Iran\u2019s regional adventurism\u2014would vanish when the regime was toppled. When that didn\u2019t happen, he had no plan for what to do next, and he seems to have settled on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the central explanation, not only for why he went to war, but for why Americans must now suffer the economic effects of the conflict. The Iranians may well promise to forswear a nuclear program\u2014as they did to Obama a decade ago\u2014but for now, they are not only presenting themselves as the aggrieved party, they\u2019re behaving like the victors: setting demands, making the Americans negotiate the status of the Strait of Hormuz, and kicking the nuclear question down the road.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, the president told Axios<\/em> that the chance of reaching an agreement with the Iranians was a \u201csolid 50\/50,\u201d and that he either would accept a \u201cgood\u201d deal or \u201cblow them to kingdom come.\u201d Neither of these things is going to happen. Instead, a piece of paper will, at some point, come out of a meeting room in Pakistan. It will certify that the United States must accept a major strategic defeat in the Middle East. And Donald Trump, who brought America to this point because of his ego and his incompetence, will sign it.<\/p>\n

Read more The National Debt\u2019s Unforgiving Math<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even the president\u2019s supporters are alarmed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=48\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump\u2019s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Even the president\u2019s supporters are alarmed.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=48\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-26T23:11:51+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=48#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=48\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Trump\u2019s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-26T23:11:51+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=48\"},\"wordCount\":1399,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=48#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/f67d9245970dcf027c8d76b772adaee0.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=48#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=48\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=48\",\"name\":\"Trump\u2019s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat - 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