President Donald Trump started a war with Iran, and now he is ending it on terms worse than the status quo he inherited. That is the plain shape of what happened, however the White House dresses it up.

The war came at a price — lost lives, oil markets convulsing, allies rattled and an economic shock that rippled from Tehran to global commodity prices. Now, we are giving up.

The ending arrives as a memorandum of understanding, signed on Sunday, whose full text the administration was conspicuously slow to publish. When a deal is good, you release the text. When you guard it, you are managing a story rather than reporting a victory. Sen. Lindsey Graham, no dove, asked for the document and admitted he is concerned Iran reads the agreement differently than our own negotiators claim.

Secretary of State Rubio and Secretary of Defense Hegseth both raised concerns about the deal in internal discussions, while Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner pushed it through. Most damning, CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly told the president the intelligence raises serious doubts Iran will ever take the nuclear steps we are demanding — because the way Iranian officials discuss the deal privately is inconsistent with what they tell the mediators. The president’s own intelligence chief is warning him that the other side is lying. The deal proceeds anyway.

The framework reopens the Strait of Hormuz, but it hands Tehran a seat — alongside Oman — to define the strait’s future administration and maritime services, and Iranian state media is already floating transit fees for ships, something that did not exist before the war. We fought a war partly over Iran’s chokehold on the world’s energy artery, and the settlement positions Iran to collect tolls on it, but called fees because Trump insisted they would not collect tolls. That is not deterrence. That is a protection racket.

Then there is the money. Any final deal contemplates a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction, and in the meantime, the United States may release frozen Iranian assets as gestures of good faith under a pay-for-performance model. Set aside whether that performance ever materializes. Money is fungible. Every dollar that underwrites Iranian reconstruction frees a dollar the regime can funnel to the IRGC, the Quds Force and the proxy archipelago — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the militias of Iraq and Syria. You cannot earmark your way out of arithmetic when one regime controls the entire ledger.

We have run this experiment before. Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 and the JCPOA under former President Barack Obama in 2015. Across both, it built secret enrichment plants exposed by outsiders rather than declared, i.e., Natanz in 2002 and Fordow in 2009, preserved a hidden archive of its weapons program, stonewalled inspectors, sanitized sites and was found by the IAEA last year to be in non-compliance with its safeguards, enriching uranium to near-weapons grade. Iranian signatures have never once constrained Iranian concealment. Ratcliffe is simply describing, in 2026, the same pattern we should have learned to expect.

And here is the failure that unites Obama and Trump, the blind spot neither administration will name: Mahdism, a religious belief that Iran must set the stage for the return of the Twelfth Imam, who disappeared from the planet as a child, but will return. The Revolutionary Guard promotes ideological zeal over competence. Devout believers in a militaristic Mahdism control Iran’s three pillars of power — its militias, its missiles and its nuclear program. These are men for whom the destruction of Israel is not policy but a prerequisite, a barrier to be removed so the Twelfth Imam may return. This is not opinion. It is the presuppositional foundation on which the regime operates.

You cannot deter an actor who may welcome the fire he is supposed to fear. Restraint-for-incentives assumes a rational regime weighing costs and benefits like the rest of us. The men running Iran believe their task is to hasten the apocalypse.

So we began a war we did not have to begin, and we are ending it by funding and legitimizing the one regime whose theology makes deterrence a fantasy. We are now worse than where we started — and still blind to why.

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