Trump Surrenders: The president turns on his ally to attain a false peace.

Trump himself announced the betrayal on Monday:

I had a conversation with Bibi Netanyahu today, asking him not to go into a major raid of Beirut, Lebanon. He turned his Troops around. Thank you Bibi! I also had a conversation with Representatives of the Leaders of Hezbollah, and they agreed to stop shooting at Israel, and its soldiers. Likewise, Israel agreed to stop shooting at them. Let’s see how long that lasts — Hopefully it will be for ETERNITY! President DONALD J. TRUMP

ADVERTISEMENT

This followed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s insistence that the ceasefire include Israel’s defensive actions against Hizballah. When Hizballah fired rockets into Israel anyway, which it almost certainly did upon orders from Tehran, since the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps created Hizballah and still operates it today, the Iranians broke off the negotiations that Trump wants so desperately.

In response, the president should have told the world that the Iranian government was not operating in good faith, and resumed military operations (no, not American boots on the ground) with the intention of weakening the Islamic Republic so that the long-suffering people of Iran can finally overthrow it. Instead, he turned against his own ally, Israel, ordering it to stop actions against Hizballah (which did not,  by the way, include a raid against Beirut) and, by his own account, having a “conversation” with a jihad terror group, in which they agreed, by what inducement he does not say, to stop doing what they were created to do, and which is their sole purpose in existing. (read the rest….)

It’s rare I cite National Review on the pages of Geller Report, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Dan McLaughlin is pessimistic about Trump’s ability to get a good deal from Iran’s regime, and suggests a better alternative in his view: no deal at all.

We Don’t Need a Deal with Iran

Much of the Iran war discourse of the past several weeks has been about whether or not we are close to a deal with Iran and what that deal might or should look like. But that’s the wrong question. What we should be asking is whether we get more out of having an agreement than not having one. There are good reasons to doubt that we would.

ADVERTISEMENT

To start with, of course, it would help if we had a clear idea of what we’re fighting for in the first place. As I’ve argued from the outset, given that we already bombed Iran in mid-2025, a significant escalation to target the regime itself made sense only if we actually aimed to bring the regime down. Which is something we should want. The regime, not its armaments, is the real weapon of mass destruction, and it always was. It will be at war with us as long as it exists, no matter what tools it has to pursue that war. It will be a weapon in the hands of China and Russia, too. By contrast, while we prefer to avoid nuclear proliferation, a less radically anti-American regime would be far less of a threat even with more weapons. It’s now clear that we are not removing the Iranian regime — at least, not directly or before we have ended the war. If the regime is overthrown, it might be due in part to this war, but it will have to be done from within, and it could be months or years before that happens…. none of this is going to look much like a win for Donald Trump in domestic politics. But inking an agreement that reeks of the Obama JCPOA would be especially humiliating. Deciding to end the war entirely on our own terms, having done extensive damage to the Iranian regime’s armaments and senior leadership, may not be a very satisfying ending, but at least it is a power move that would not show us meekly submitting to terms.

These are harder war aims to resolve. Regime change is a visible and undeniable victory. It doesn’t depend on promises of future Iranian behavior, which can be compelled only by continuing threats of force — by a forever-war commitment to national probation — and can be judged only by classified intelligence estimates that have to be filtered through agencies the president may not trust, using evidence the public cannot see or evaluate.

There’s a fundamental difference in any negotiated agreement between what you get now, when you have the leverage to strike a deal, and what you get in future promises, when your leverage is only as good as the credible threat that you can both prove breach of the agreement and enforce consequences for that breach. The dissipation of leverage in the future is most acute in this kind of situation, when Trump faces opposition to his policy from Democrats and even, it seems, from his own vice president, and when his current bargaining position is assisted by an ad hoc coalition of regional allies that may not be that easy to assemble again.

(read the rest at National Review.)